ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors analyses three fallacies defined in books by leading authorities. They give two examples from everyday life and present a set of four dialogues in which Pat states a fallacious argument, Chris provides feedback, and Pat replies with differing levels of grey behavior. In a Formal Fallacy, the form of the argument itself is invalid. For example, the following argument contains a formal fallacy: “Some high school dropouts are men. No doctors are high school dropouts. This fallacy results from a failure of form – which refers to the way the argument is set up. According to Moore and Parker, three formal fallacies are: Affirming the consequent, Denying the antecedent and Undistributed middle. “Arguments that have ambiguous words or phrases, sloppy grammatical structure, or confusion between two closely related concepts can lead to Fallacies of Ambiguity. People with poor language and communication skills are more likely to use or fall for these fallacies”.
