Critical Thinking: Relevance Relevance-Related Logical Fallacies, and Sufficiency

IntroductionLast week we revisited premise acceptability and looked at rules of thumb for acceptance, rejection, or “questionable” status.   This week we’re going to continue our happy reinvestigation of foundational principles by reexamining premise relevance and sufficiency.  Recall from previous discussions that relevance and sufficiency are measures of logical force; that is, the degree to which a conclusion follows from premises.  In […]

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Critical Thinking: Informal Fallacies Part 1: Red Herring and Straw Man

IntroductionIn the last post we looked at the properties of a strong argument: (a) premise acceptability and (b) logical force (i.e., validity).  The concept of validity can be further sub-divided into two components:  (i) premise relevance and (ii) premise sufficiency.  Now we’re going to look at the dark side of arguments:  fallacies.   Fallacies are […]

Read More Critical Thinking: Informal Fallacies Part 1: Red Herring and Straw Man