Friday, February 19, 2010
Slippery Slope Fallacies
Epstein describes an argument as having a fallacy only if the premises is dubious and no other premises support the conclusion. A slippery Slope fallacy is where the reasoning in a chain of events that lead to them all crashing together down hill. The conditions where at least one of them is false or dubious. an example of a Slippery Slope Fallacy would be "If I fail this test, I'm going to fail this course, and then I will never get into my major, then I will drop out of college. Dropping out of college will lead me to never getting a job, and then I will end up homeless and out on the streets dying alone." This example although extreme shows us how one bad thing leads to another and they all go down hill in a downward spiral. Slippery slopes are something that we hear everyday in the media and in conversation out in public as well. These types of statements can lead to fales accusations. Many people get ahold of wrong information when it comes to these types of statements. When a person thinks of statements like this or they get published for the public the outcome can never be good, someone will always believe it is true when most likely they never are.
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I really like your example on slippery slope. I was actually writing my blog on slippery slope and posted it. I came over here and read that you posted almost the exact same example. I changed mine but you did a better job of explaining the slippery slope than I did. Your example and description of the example was very in depth. I like how you mentioned how it is a downward spiraling conclusion. That's an excellent use of words for this definition. The slippery slope is a good example of how some accusations could lead up to such a wrong conclusion that sometimes media and the public magnify.
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