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21.2.2.4 Poisoning the Well Poisoning the well is a fallacious argument that attempts to discredit a person or a source in advance of their argument. “Dr. Summers is a Republican. We can only expect her to be against affirmative action.”
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21.2.2.5 Guilt by Association Guilt by association is a fallacious attempt to attack a person’s argument not on the issues pertinent to the argument, but on the basis of groups and people with whom the person is associated. “How can we possibly support Ms. Cooper’s views on the economy? After all, she married a capitalist.”
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21.2.2.6 An Appeal to Fear It involves an attempt to invoke fear to take the focus off the argument. An appeal to fear is only fallacious when fear is used solely to shift the focus from the issue. For example, “If we elect my opponent, we should all build bomb shelters for our families immediately and prepare to be attacked because my opponent has very little foreign policy experience.”
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21.2.2.7 An Appeal to Popularity It uses the popularity of a person, product, or belief to justify a favorable conclusion about that person, product or belief. For example, “Most Serbs support President Boris Tadic. So should you.”
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21.2.2.8 An Appeal to Tradition It attempts to argue in favor of a particular action on the grounds of tradition rather than on the basis of the merits of that action. For example, “The US Constitution has allowed citizens to possess guns for the past 200 years, so we should continue to do so for the next 200 years.”
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The previous fallacies include arguments that fail to meet the conditions of relevance. The fallacies in the next section include those that fail to meet the conditions of sufficiency.
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思辨精英：英语辩论-构筑全球视角 [:1705132538]
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21.2.3 Hasty Conclusions
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The general fallacy category of hasty conclusions is sometimes called “jumping to a conclusion.” This general category of fallacies is one wherein all of the evidence and arguments that the debater offers, taken in combination with one another, do not meet the test of sufficiency.
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Those arguments may not meet the test of sufficiency because the evidence was not systematically gathered, because the sampling of evidence was not systematic, or the debater ignored the presence of contrary evidence (Johnson and Blair, 2006: 70-72). The following examples are ones where an argument is relevant to the claim that the debater is making, but the evidence supporting the claim is relevant, but not sufficient. As a result, they are classified under the general category of hasty conclusion. Two common examples and a few other less common examples will be discussed.
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21.2.3.1 Hasty Generalization The first example, is a fallacy of reasoning by example. Arguments commit that fallacy when the examples selected to support the claim are insufficient either in number or in their representativeness.
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Earlier, a sample argument about genetically engineered foods (GEF) was discussed. In that case, the claim made was that GEF are dangerous to human health. Five examples of GEF were presented as evidence. But, the selection of only five examples from the hundreds of available examples of GEF is not enough to prove the link between the evidence and the general claim of the danger of GEF. Thus, this example is a hasty generalization.
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21.2.3.2 Slippery Slope Arguments Slippery Slope arguments sometimes are fallacious. Using such arguments, debaters try to connect a series of events in a causal chain that ultimately “culminate[s] in calamity” (Govier, 2009: 439).
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Contrary to popular opinion, slippery slope arguments are not necessarily fallacies (Volokh and Newman 2003: 21-23). They only are fallacies when all of the connections in the causal chain are not properly made. Even though the connections are relevant to the claim, they may be fallacious because the connections are insufficiently documented.
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Americans who oppose restrictions on gun ownership commonly argue that one form of control will lead to another, which will eventually lead to the prohibition of all guns, including hunting rifles. The argument is that, “If we allow restrictions on the ownership of semiautomatic firearms, then anti-gun politicians feeling their political muscles will see handgun ownership as their next target. If they succeed in banning the ownership of handguns, it will be a short time until they are able to build political momentum to outlaw all kinds of firearms including hunting rifles as well as gun collections.” The argument as presented above is a slippery slope fallacy because the causal connections between each of the steps are not well documented.
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The arguments described above are fallacious because, even though they may be relevant to the claims they are making, their premises or evidence are insufficient to establish the claims. A large number of other fallacies also can be included in the category of hasty conclusions. Some of those are briefly described below.
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21.2.3.3 Two Wrongs Two wrongs is a label used for a fallacy commonly called “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” As “a misplaced appeal to consistency. A person is urged to accept or condone one thing that is wrong because another similar thing, also wrong, has occurred or has been accepted and condoned” (Govier, 2009: 444).
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21.2.3.4 Improper Appeal to Practice It is a fallacy that assumes that a person is justified in doing things that are common practice, even if that practice is clearly wrong. “Why should I pay the women in my business wages equal to men? Other businesses pay men more, so I should be able to do the same.”
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21.2.3.5 Fallacy of Composition It is a fallacy in which the evidence is drawn from some part of a whole, but the conclusion is about the whole (Govier, 2009: 439). “He Jingkai, a debater from China, is a superb debater. Therefore, China has some of the best debaters in the world.” China may well have excellent debaters, but this argument, nevertheless, makes a fallacious statement about the relationship of the part (He Jingkai) to the whole (Chinese debaters).
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21.2.3.6 Fallacy of Division It involves a fallacious argument in which the evidence is drawn from the whole, but the conclusion is about a part of the whole. The argument assumes that what is true of the whole must be true of its constituent parts. “Harvard is an excellent university, therefore Lawrence Tribe, who is a law professor at Harvard, must be an excellent professor.” Like the above example, the claim may be correct, but the reasoning is fallacious because it makes an improper statement about the relationship between the whole (Harvard) and its constituent parts (Professor Tribe).
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21.2.3.7 Post Hoc Fallacy It is also called by its Latin name post hoc, ergo propter hoc, which means “after this, therefore before this.” This fallacious argument assumes that, because one thing predates another, the first must have caused the second. A person may argue that “After Barak Obama took office, the US economy went into a recession; thus, Obama’s policies were the cause of the recession.” Whether Obama’s policies contributed to the recession has not been argued well here. The debater has simply assumed a cause-and-effect relationship.