SAINT BENILDE INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL

Crossing, Calamba City Laguna

Lecture for English for Academic and Professional Purposes

WEEK 4

 FACTS, OPINIONS AND INCORRECT INFORMATION

 An opinion is subjective. It is based on or influenced by personal beliefs or feelings.

 An opinion is not the opposite of a fact. The opposite of a fact is incorrect information.
 A fact is objective. It is not influenced by personal feelings or judgment.
 An opinion contains words of judgment that reflects one’s feelings.

 FALLACY

Fallacy - defects that weakens arguments. By learning to look for them in your own and others’
writing, you can strengthen your ability to evaluate the arguments you make, read, or hear.

There are many possible sources of fallacy – a mistake of reasoning or belief – in academic writing.
Often people talk about various kinds of rhetorical fallacies, sometimes called informal fallacies.

Rhetorical fallacies include various kinds of writing or speech that may appear to make an argument,
but don't actually use premises that support their conclusion. Research writing can also be prone
to statistical fallacy: mistaken use of statistics, or conclusions based on misunderstanding statistics. Often
the phrase logical fallacy refers to a formal fallacy; that is, an invalid argument that is mistakenly thought
to be valid. Below I discuss a few common fallacies in academic writing.

1. RHETORICAL (INFORMAL) FALLACIES

Writers sometimes argue, meaning they try to convince the reader that what they say is right,
without a logical argument in the sense of "a set of premises that imply the truth of, or support the
likelihood of their conclusion". Here are some examples of rhetorical fallacy.

Appeal to authority
Writers may imply, or readers may assume, that something is true because a famous, smart, or
respected person said it. There is, however, no necessary link between the speakers' authority the truth of
what they say. Similarly a bandwagon argument suggests that if many people believe the same thing, that
belief must be true. Again, there is no necessary link between popularity or fame and truth.

Ad Hominem
When two people or groups disagree, an ad hominem argument may appear: arguing that the
person saying something is a bad person, so what s/he says must be wrong. Just as the goodness of a
speaker does not entail the truth of what s/he says, the badness of a speaker does not entail badness of
what they say.

Hasty Generalization
Making assumptions about a whole group or range of cases based on a sample that is inadequate.
Ex. My roommate said her philosophy class was hard, and the one I’m in is hard too. All philosophy
classes must be hard!

Post Hoc
Post Hoc or also known as False Cause, it comes from the Latin word Post Hoc, Ergo Propter
Hoc meaning “After this, Therefore Because of This.” Correlation isn’t the same thing as Causation.
Ex. Assuming that because B comes after A, A caused B. Another one is, If I register for a class, and my
name later appears in a roll, its true that the first event caused the one that came later.

Appeal to Pity
The appeal to pity takes place when an arguer tries to get people to accept a conclusion by
making them feel sorry for someone.

Appeal to Ignorance
Refers to the assumption that something not proved to be true must be false, or that something not
proved to be false must be true. Neither of these is a valid assumption; something not proved might be
true or false, but it’s currently unknown. For example, there is no clear evidence that life exists on other
planets, but that is not proof that no such life exists. It might not exist, or it might exist but be unknown to
humans. (Note, however, that some kinds of absence can be used to support some kinds of inferences. For
example if a doctor tests me for cancer cells and doesn’t find any then it seems likely, though it is not
certain, that I do not have cancer.)

Straw Man
One way of making our own arguments stronger is to anticipate and respond in advance to the
arguments that an opponent might make. Ex. Feminists want to ban all pornography and punish everyone
who looks at it.

2. STATISTICAL FALLACIES

Readers and writers sometimes get confused about the meaning of statistical analyses. This can lead
scholars to claim things that are not supported by the analysis. Here are some statistical fallacies.

Correlation is not causation.

Correlation means that two values vary together. Causation means that a change in one variable
causes a change in another. For example, an increase in demand for sugar can cause the price of sugar to
increase.
This is an example of a common informal logic fallacy called cum hoc ergo propter hoc "with
this therefore because of this". Correlation does not necessarily imply causation. On the other hand, it
often suggests that a phenomenon might be worth investigating further to see if there is some hidden
meaning behind the correlation.

Significance versus "significance".

In everyday usage the word significant means "important, noteworthy, or meaningful". But in
statistics significant means "unlikely to be a random error". The value p<0.01 calculated by a t-test
essentially means that if our numbers were completely random, the difference we found would be seen
less than one time in 100. People sometimes misunderstand, thinking that a statistically significant result
must be important or meaningful. That is not necessarily the case.

Base rate fallacy.

When doing statistical tests, people often ignore the "base rate" or underlying probability and
focus only on the probability of the test, leading them to under- or over-estimate their findings.
For example, imagine that there are 200 werewolves in Nagoya. Luckily, I have a machine that can
identify werewolves. The machine is 99% accurate, meaning it will misidentify a werewolf as human
only 1% of the time, and misidentify a human as werewolf only 1% of the time. I point the machine at my
neighbor and it says she is a werewolf. How confident can I be that she really is a werewolf? If I ignore
the base rate, I may think that there is a 99% chance that she is a werewolf. But in fact, since there are
about two million humans and only two hundred werewolves in Nagoya, the machine will wrongly
identify about 20,000 humans as werewolves while accurately identifying 198 werewolves. There is
actually less than 1% chance that the neighbor identified as a werewolf really is one.

Biased samples.
It is usually impossible or at least impractical to test every person or thing relevant to our
research. Therefore, we may select a sample of people or things to test, and then generalize the results of
the tests to a larger population. Such generalization is valid if the sample is representative of the
population. A random sample, in which participants are randomly selected from the whole population and
subjects are randomly assigned to treatment or control groups when doing an experiment, can help ensure
representative, unbiased samples. Using convenience samples, participants who are not randomly
selected, can make the results less generalizable.
For example, since many psychology studies are done by university professors, they often recruit
university students as subjects. But since university students are not representative of the whole world
(among other differences, they tend to be younger and better educated than average) the results cannot be
generalized to all people. Similarly, medical research carried out in hospitals may choose subjects from
among hospital patients and therefore ignore the large portion of the population who are not sick.

Extrapolation fallacies.
Research in many fields examines change over time (or across space, or over other variation). A
common use of such results is to extrapolate – to predict that the rate of change observed in the past will
continue into the future. This can be useful, but it can lead to wrong predictions.
For example, during the 2012 United States presidential campaign three opinion polls in September found
that candidate Mitt Romney was becoming more popular each week, while President Barrack Obama was
becoming less popular. News media predicted that this trend would continue and that Romney would win
the election in November. In fact though, the trend changed in October: Obama became more popular,
and he eventually won the election.
 "Garbage-in-garbage-out" is a phrase commonly used in computer science and information
technology; it can also apply to statistics. It means that the value of an analysis (what comes out) is only
as good as the value of the data that goes into it.

3. LOGICAL (FORMAL) FALLACIES

Affirming the consequent.

Implication is a valid form of logical argument. The truth of one idea (call it an antecedent,
meaning it comes first) may imply a consequence. If the antecedent is true then the consequent (the thing
that happens after or sometimes because of the antecedent) must be true. For example, if a person is
murdered then that person is dead. This is necessarily true because it is part of the meaning of murder. If
Taro was murdered, we can conclude that he is dead. That is a valid argument from implication.
But the opposite is not a valid argument: the truth of the consequent does not imply the truth of the
antecedent. If Taro is dead, we cannot conclude that he was murdered; he might have died from a disease
or an accident. The consequent does not imply the truth of the antecedent.

Denying the antecedent.

On the other hand, if an antecedent implies a consequent and that consequent is not true, then the
antecedent must not be true. Think about the murder example again: if Taro was murdered, he is dead. If
he is not dead, then we know that he was not murdered. But again the opposite is not a valid argument: a
false antecedent does not imply a false consequent. Even if we know that Taro was not murdered, we
don’t know whether he is dead. He may be alive, but he may have died naturally or accidentally.

http://www.ilas.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~nilep/fallacies.html