The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [104]
• Non sequitur - Latin for ‘it doesn’t follow’ (e.g., our nation will prevail because God is great. But nearly every nation pretends this to be true; the German formulation was ‘Gott mil uns’). Often those falling into the non sequitur fallacy have simply failed to recognize alternative possibilities.
• Post hoc, ergo propter hoc - Latin for ‘it happened after, so it was caused by’ (e.g., Jamie Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila: 7 know of... a 26-year-old who looks 60 because she takes [contraceptive]pills.’ Or: before women got the vote, there were no nuclear weapons).
• Meaningless question (e.g., What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? But if there is such a thing as an irresistible force there can be no immovable objects, and vice versa).
• Excluded middle, or false dichotomy - considering only the two extremes in a continuum of intermediate possibilities (e.g., ‘sure, take his side; my husband’s perfect; I’m always wrong.’ Or: ‘either you love your country or you hate it.’ Or: ‘if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem’).
• Short-term v. long-term - a subset of the excluded middle, but so important I’ve pulled it out for special attention (e.g., we can’t afford programmes to feed malnourished children and educate pre-school kids. We need to urgently deal with crime on the streets. Or: why explore space or pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?). Slippery slope, related to excluded middle (e.g., if we allow abortion in the first weeks of pregnancy, it will be impossible to prevent the killing of a full-term infant. Or, conversely: if the state prohibits abortion even in the ninth month, it will soon be telling us what to do with our bodies around the time of conception).
• Confusion of correlation and causation (e.g., a survey shows that more college graduates are homosexual than those with lesser education; therefore education makes people gay. Or: Andean earthquakes are correlated with closest approaches of the planet Uranus; therefore – despite the absence of any such correlation for the nearer, more massive planet Jupiter – the latter causes the former.*
[* Or: children who watch violent TV programmes tend to be more violent when they grow up. But did the TV cause the violence, or do violent children preferentially enjoy watching violent programmes? Very likely both are true. Commercial defenders of TV violence argue that anyone can distinguish between television and reality. But Saturday morning children’s programmes now average 25 acts of violence per hour. At the very least this desensitizes young children to aggression and random cruelty. And if impressionable adults can have false memories implanted in their brains, what are we implanting in our children when we expose them to some 100,000 acts of violence before they graduate from elementary school?]
• Straw man – caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack (e.g., scientists suppose that living things simply fell together by chance – a formulation that wilfully ignores the central Darwinian insight, that Nature ratchets up by saving what works and discarding what doesn’t. Or – this is also a short-term/long-term fallacy – environmentalists care more for snail darters and spotted owls than they do for people).
• Suppressed evidence, or half-truths (e.g., an amazingly accurate and widely quoted ‘prophecy’ of the assassination attempt on President Reagan is shown on television; but – an important detail – was it recorded