Summary: There are numerous speech stratagems which can be used to influence opinions and manipulate the message. Euphemisms are substitutes for potentially offensive or upsetting language. Weasel words are terms whose goal is to be ambiguous and avoid true meaning. Both euphemisms and weasel words are used to obscure reality but the speakers’ intentions are different. This series of articles […]
Summary: There are numerous logical and rhetorical fallacies which can influence public debates or private opinions. Logical fallacies are mistakes in reasoning which make arguments and opinions false. Both correlation and causation are used in research to describe the relationship between variables but can be mistaken for one another. Correlation is a connection between two things while causation is a […]
Summary: There are numerous tricks which can be used to win an argument or influence the audience. Logical fallacies are mistakes in reasoning which make arguments false. False dichotomy is a fallacy which takes into account two extremes and excludes the middle ground. Black and white thinking can be a symptom of a personality disorder. In this series of articles, […]
Summary There are numerous speech stratagems which can be used to win an argument or influence the audience. Logical fallacies are mistakes in reasoning which make arguments false. The straw man is a fallacy which aims to misrepresent the opponent’s argument in order to more easily refute it. The slippery slope is a fallacy which posits that taking one action […]
Summary: This cycle of articles aims to introduce scientists, authors or philosophers whose works promote science, rationality, and skeptical thinking. Dr. Carl Sagan was, among others, an author, an astronomer, and science communicator. In his book “The Demon-Haunted World”, Dr. Sagan introduces a dragon to exemplify a skeptical approach to unfalsifiable claims. “A skeptic’s ally” is a new series of […]
Summary: There are numerous speech stratagems which can be used to win an argument or influence the audience. Moral equivalence (or false equivalence) is a fallacy which consists in drawing false equivalence between two things based on shared characteristics. Moral equivalence arguments also take the form of whataboutism or whataboutery. The goal of using the false equivalence fallacy is to […]
Summary: There are numerous speech stratagems which can be used to gain advantage in an argument or pull the audience to one’s side. Argument from authority is one of the most common logical fallacies. The argument is often a part of authority bias, which itself is considered to be a cognitive bias. Argument from authority (a. k. a. appeal to […]
Summary: There are numerous speech stratagems which can be used to gain advantage in an argument or pull the audience to one’s side. Argumentum ad ignorantiam is an attempt to prove a claim by saying it has not yet been proven otherwise. Argumentum ad nauseam is any argument considered by the claimant to gain strength through the number of times […]
Summary: This article follows up on a previously published text about fallacious arguments used in public discourse (link). There are numerous speech stratagems that can be used to win an argument or influence the audience. Ad hominem arguments create a diversion and attack the opponent’s views or affiliations instead of discussing the issue at hand. Ad personam arguments abandon the […]
Summary: There are numerous speech stratagems which can be used to win an argument or influence the audience. The Homonymy is a rhetoric trick consisting in twisting the meaning of one of the key words of the dispute. Categorizing is a trick whose aim is to assign an unpleasant category or connotation to an assertion made by an opponent. Both […]