You are the noble kind of perfectionist. Teaching the class twice, once to people, and again to empty desks. Your effort is appreciated. You could have just scrapped Fallacies 5 for the only course but you didn't.. thanks!!
Well, if there is a genuine slippery slope, then something WILL happen. The fallacy would be better off being called "false slippery slope" -- it's asserting there to be a slippery slope where there isn't one
They (and their advisors) tended to see it as just another requirement to get out of the way -- which is not surprising. Hopefully, by the end of the semester, some of them saw its value and carried it forward into their other classes and later careers
In your opinion (speaking to GBI here) is "gateway drug" slippery slope? One interpretation of GWD might be to suggest the possibility--the opening up of a door-- to greater drug use rather than to imply that it will necessarily lead to harder drug use. Or have I slipped into some Sophism here? Perhaps this is what nietzchescode had in mind.
Slippery slope is a fallacy, if it connects some series of consequences to the initial activity and if that connection is not valid. The cigarette example is interesting but is not Slippery Slope--as marijuanna is as connected to harder drug use is. The numbers of people who have tried marijuanna is disproportionally large to those who have tried harder drugs. The person who smokes even one cigarette is already a smoker--the risk is that he will smoke more and become addicted.
Well, if the argument is leaving both of those possibilities open to the interpreter -- by not making what the conclusion is meant to be explicit -- then you've got what Aristotle called an "enthymeme". You leave it up to the interpreter/hearer to draw the conclusion which they find more plausible -- either greater drug use or harder drug use.
@zukunft2024 Thanks very much -- sorry to be responding so tardily, but these are in the FSU channel, rather than my own personal channel, where my more recent course videos reside
Well, you can look at as telling a kind of (likely) story, and that would then make it the kind of storytelling inductive appeal that Aristotle actually discusses in his Rhetoric. You can also see it as making a kind of deductive argument as well. I suppose it depends somewhat on just how one frames it
Had to Google "enthymeme". I can see how this concept might help to make light of the distinction between these positions, especially if it pushes us into a dichotomy--if a self-imposed one. I'm going to think on whether the possibility of not smoking becomes an implicit third category to challenge the potential dichotomy. Is it lazy if I always presume such possibility obvious and implied? Does slippery slope include the possibility that nothing happens in your opinion?
@JRJ0283 Thanks very much! If you like these, check out my channel. I've got two more class sequences -- Intro to Philosophy and Ethics -- from where I'm now teaching (Marist College)
can we say slippery slope is really a fallacy? to me it is more a moral story, a parabel. i think it is implicity saying (you put at risk to x). for exemple not all the persons who smoke a cigarette become compulsive smokers but for a compulsive smoker his first mistake was to smoke the first one, you cannot become a compulsive smoker if you had never smoked.so it is a story that warn people that "if you smoke a cigarette, you put yourself at risk to become achainsmoker then put you at risk to..
