Critical Thinking: Just What Is a Fallacy? 

Critical Thinking, Logic, and Argumentation (ReasonIO)

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Well, classical Latin has the hard "c" -- like "k". Ecclesiastical Latin has the soft "c" -- the "ch" sound. I learned classical Latin when I was a kid, and when I went on with Latin in grad school, eve though I was mainly working with medieval thinkers, I could never get the church Latin pronunciation to stick. . . .

Ellethekitty.ca Michelle No, nothing that funny, unfortunately! It's related to the verb, fallere, meaning "to make a mistake," "to deceive," among other things

No - there's no one single approach that handles every kind of fallacy

You can easily make an inductive version of the argument that would be fallacious

Ashley Mtsac a premise is your stated assertion.

+Jo van de Kragt They certainly engage in some, much like many others. Perhaps down the line, I'll do a series like that

+Critical Thinking, Logic, and Argumentation (ReasonIO) That would be wonderful, because it seems to me that the critically thinking followers of these political actvists immediately loose their critical abilities when listening to these great minds when they act as political activists... The most common fallacies Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss produce are the "Appeal to Ridicule", the "Broad Brush", the "Strawman", the "Appeal to Emotion", "False Dichotomy", "Negative Labeling" ... and last but not least "Appeal to Authority" .. .... and what about equating a "quantum field" with "nothing" by these eminent scientists, including Stephen Hawking of all people ... Educated philosophers like you must shiver when they hear such philosophical statements in proving how the universe came from "nothing".

+Jo van de Kragt when krauss makes a statement like "the universe came from nothing," he's very careful to define "nothing" and provide evidential support. after all, even a sound argument is only as good as its premises, and premises rely on evidence. i'd be curious to know what type of fallacy you've detected (though that may be off-topic in this thread).

+DJcrazyguy .. The problem is that Krauss does not use the definition which describes "nothing" as the "absence of everything". Instead he uses the term "nothing" meaning a "quantum field in its lowest energy state", which is clearly "something" in my view. ( .. Where did this quantum field come from ? How did this come into being ? What was there before this quantum field was there ? You see that Krauss's definition of "Nothing" reintroduces the questions of "When and how did the universe ( this quantum field is the earliest fase of the universe) come into being ? Has this quantum field always been there or did it have a beginning ? How did this quantum field come into being ? What was there before this quantum field existed ? etc )The problem here is redefining a term to suit your own ( scientific or ideological ?) interests. +++++++ The fallacies in reasoning usually occur when Dawkins and Krauss are engaging in their work as political activists promoting their form of scientism. I mentioned these fallacies in my previous post.

interesting, i seem to remember that in "a universe from nothing," he explicitly mentions that "nothing" also means no fields. as i recall, it was no time/space/matter/energy/fields. perhaps i need to go back and watch that lecture again.

Only post things that are relevant to the topic -- not loosely so, but actually so

Critical Thinking, Logic, and Argumentation definitely ;)