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Logical Fallacies Summary and Application Essay

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Logical Fallacies Summary and Application

What do you see when you look at Begging the Question, Hasty Generalization, and Appealing to Emotion? When you initially look at these three categories they may not seem to have too much in common. However, when you look deeper you will see that in fact, they are all different types of logical fallacies. Logical fallacies are errors of reasoning, errors that may be recognized and corrected by prudent thinkers (Downes, 1995). The following quote helps explain why logic is important to us in today’s society. “Logic is not everything. But it is something—something which can be taught, something which can be learned, something which can help us in some degree to think more sensibly about the …show more content…

Small samples will tend to be unrepresentative. The general idea is that small samples are less likely to contain numbers proportional to the whole population.

Since Hasty Generalization is committed when the sample is too small, it is important to have samples that are large enough when making a generalization. The most reliable way to do this is to take as large a sample as is practical. If the population in question were not very diverse then a very small sample would suffice. If the population were very diverse then a fairly large sample would be needed. The size of the sample also depends on the size of the population. A Hasty Generalization, like any fallacy, might have a true conclusion. However, as long as the reasoning is fallacious there is no reason to accept the conclusion based on that People often commit Hasty Generalizations because of bias or prejudice. People also commonly commit Hasty Generalizations because of laziness or sloppiness. It is very easy to simply leap to a conclusion and much harder to gather an adequate sample and draw a justified conclusion. Therefore, avoiding this fallacy requires minimizing the influence of bias and taking care to select a sample that is large enough.

A great example of this fallacy that everyone has probably experienced is when a teenager is talking to their parent and says, “But why can’t

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