Friday, April 18, 2008

Fallacious D and the Future of Happiness

Hasty conclusion like toy balloon: easy blow up, easy pop.
--Charlie Chan at the Race Track  

Your homework comes in two parts. 

Part one is to make sure you have the 3 scenarios on your blog.  Sorry for any confusion before, but hopefully it is clear(er) now.  Edited instructions are below. 

Part two is to read the Future of Happiness by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on page 623 of your books.

Here are 10 logical fallacies. Research them here* and then create for your blog three short scenarios: two of which are examples that you make up of the fallacies below and one that is meant to be logically consistent. In class, we'll examine these paragraphs and see if the class can guess which is which. Make sure that it's not obvious that you're using a fallacy. Make us work; make us better.


  • Begging the Question

  • Slippery Slope

  • False Dilemma

  • Post Hoc

  • Biased Sample

  • Gambler's Fallacy

  • Hasty Generalization

  • Ad Hominem

  • Straw Man

  • Tu Quoque


Borrowed (stolen) from the wise and illustrious nstearns

* Use the handout and this Nizkor Project site to help with this task.

10 comments:

  1. Quick qustion, on the progress report it says i have a missing assignment from March 13 called "Mirrors and Window" and I cant find this assignment on the blog so I was wondering if you could tell me the assignment please?

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  2. Sure. Look at the post for March 5th (it's the half of the post labeled "homework"). I found it by using the search box and typing in "mirror".

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  3. im pretty sure i did this but i guess ill just do it again. thanks

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  4. If you'd like, we can look for it on Monday.

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  5. Haha too late. Its cool though. It only took like ten minutes.

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  6. what do you mean by an example that is logically consistent???

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  7. I mean one that doesn't have logical mistakes in it. One that doesn't have any fallacies. One that if someone tried to pick it apart, they wouldn't be able to just dismiss it for having a problem. Colloquially, we often say an argument that has a logical mistake in it is "stupid", so one that's not "stupid". I'll check back after dinner--let me know if I'm making sense to you.

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  8. ya i think so. i guess we'll see tomorrow :) thanks!

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