I grew up arguing … er, discussing … politics (and history, and all sorts of things, really) at the dinner table. And both my parents had gone to big-city high schools in the era when courses like Latin and (more importantly for this discussion) philosophy (logic, critical thinking) were taught* as a matter of course—were required—so these discussions, as you might imagine, were some doozies.
Given the contentiousness (and general stupidity) we see in public discourse these days, I think the teaching of critical thinking must have gone the way of the dodo bird. And since we’ve just been talking about errors in logic, I thought you’d enjoy this. Open Culture has pulled together several videos that discuss common logical fallacies:
Moving the Goal Posts Fallacy
The Fallacy Fallacy
Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
Strawman Fallacy
Ad Hominem Fallacy
Black and White Fallacy
The Authority Fallacy
“No True Scotsman” Fallacy
Each video is a little over two minutes long and presented as something you can send to a fallacy offender. I’ll leave that up to you. 🙂
*Home ec was a requirement back then as well. It could stand to come back around too.
Tweet: I was taught logical thinking in grammar school. Were you?
Tweet: Strawman? Ad Hominem? Texas Sharpshooter? A primer on logical fallacies.
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