Wordy title, huh?There are 42 logical fallacies, give or take, and each of them holds a special place in my heart. A fallacious argument is an argument in which the conclusion is not supported adequately by the premises. So, when Emperor Bush says, "Do we stay the course or do we cut and run," he's using employing a false dilemma. After all, there other choices to be made -- a slow withdrawal, for instance. Obviously Bush is an idiot (personal attack).
Here's the thing, though: logicians want us to rely purely on logical arguments. Ask any logician and s/he'll tell you logical fallacies will carry the day for a while, but once people have a chance to think about the argument, they'll realize they've been had (so to speak) and disbelieve the argument until it's merits are proven logically(hasty generalization). It always seemed to me that this was something of an appeal to authority, but I'll be the first to admit I don't always get logic.
Honestly, I neither entirely agree, nor entirely disagree, with this belief. I've always held that if you want to win a war, you use every weapon in your arsenal; the same holds true for an argument. Fallacies, according to one of my logic professors, have short term affects; logical arguments have long-lasting affects. At the risk of making a fallacious argument myself, it seems that the best arguments are those that attack multiple points simultaneously rather than relying merely on long-term "feel-goods" (appeal to ridicule).
Case in point: politics. Politicians rely, in large part, on fallacies when they're running for government. A particular example from the news I heard yesterday was an argument between presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Obama appealed to spite (keeping in mind that Democrats tend to frown on Big Business) during the Democratic caucus in South Carolina, stating that she had been a lawyer for Wal-Mart while he was defending the poor (or some rubbish of that sort); she returned with Obama's guilt by association, pointing out that when she had been working to help people, he had been defending criminals in Chicago. Whatever the fallacy used, they were both attacking using illogical arguments.
But is that wrong? Ignoring my own predilection for moral relativism for the time being, I don't think so. The problem with politicians isn't that they use fallacious arguments. It's not that they don't use logical arguments -- sometimes they manage, quite by mistake I'm sure, to do so. I am of the opinion that there is a middle ground between the logicians' "use no fallacy" and the politicians' "use no logic."
At this point is seems appropriate to point out that everyone uses fallacies (appeal to popularity), even logicians (ad hominem tu quoque). Fallacies are a political tool used since before the dawn of time, in all probability, and certainly since the Roman Republic (appeal to tradition). More importantly, they work. People don't like to think; they like to be told what to do -- it's easier (hasty generalization). Even if that wasn't true, however -- even if they loved to think about things without the least bit interest in following one another like so many cattle -- a person's initial reaction tends to be a knee-jerk emotional reaction. Not always, and it depends greatly on the situation in question. But in general, people react like puppets when confronted with certain types of arguments.
Is it bad to use this to one's advantage? As I've said before, if you're fighting a (conventional) war you use all the tools in your arsenal to win. Debate is a war, too -- it's a war of words, and one that should not be limited by bounds of "honor" except in certain circumstances (like in Ivory Tower classrooms and similar, structured debates in which the purpose is not really victory, but victory using logic). The political arena -- indeed no real life debate -- is bound by the rules of conduct typically found in philosophy and debate clubs; why limit one's tools?
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