Traditions and common practices can be persuasive, but popularity of a given practice or view simply doesn’t prove it to be correct.
Tag: fallacy
Logical Fallacies In The Addiction Debate: #5 Appeal To The Masses and #6 The Bandwagon Fallacy
Argumentum Ad Populum An Appeal To The Masses is one of the laziest, weak minded, and philosophically revealing fallacies one can engage in. In short, this is the form of such an argument: Conclusion X is true because everyone (or a majority of people) believes it. That’s all there is to it. It simply… Continue reading Logical Fallacies In The Addiction Debate: #5 Appeal To The Masses and #6 The Bandwagon Fallacy
Logical Fallacies In The Addiction Debate: #4 Appeal To Authority
Certainly, authority figures have been wrong about many important matters throughout the ages. For each controversial claim, we can find experts who offer vastly different conclusions. Therefore, a mere Appeal To Authority shouldn’t be enough to prove or disprove a claim – if you really care about the truth of a matter you need more than that. This fact doesn’t stop people from shouting down others in the addiction debate with nothing more than an Appeal To Authority though!
Logical Fallacies In The Addiction Debate: #3 Appeal To The Consequences Of A Belief
An Appeal To Consequences is often the first and last fallacious argument uttered in any debate about the disease model of addiction. This tactic may be persuasive, but it doesn’t prove anything.
Logical Fallacies In The Addiction Debate: #1 Ad Hominem and #2 Ad Hominem Tu Quoque
It seems impossible to have an honest debate about the nature of addiction and methods for overcoming it. Ad Hominem attacks run rampant in this game. Here we examine this fallacy in action in the great addiction debate.
Public Shaming In The Irish Times
An idiot alleged that an article in which I was quoted was guilty of shaming people with addiction. Then went on to shame the author and myself. I reply to it here, and show you how to see through the game played by such mental midgets.
Everyone Has A Disorder!
The psychiatric world is full of absurdity, like this gem. Neuroskeptic reports on a recent British Journal of Psychiatry article in which a new and less stringent category of Personality Disorder, called Personality Difficulties, is recommended as an addition to DSM-V (Diagnostic & Statistical Manual vol 5, to be published by the American Psychological Association,… Continue reading Everyone Has A Disorder!
Addiction Experts Keep Shaming Us Into Believing The Disease Theory
A few hours after making this post about the Argument From Intimidation, I found this story, A New Treatment For Narcotic Addiction by Lloyd I. Sederer MD, which was published the same day, on the Huffington Post, and served as a near perfect example of the fallacy in action. The article was pushing for public acceptance of buprenorphine as a treatment for opioid… Continue reading Addiction Experts Keep Shaming Us Into Believing The Disease Theory
The Disease Theory Argument From Intimidation
In “The Virtue of Selfishness” Ayn Rand brilliantly identified a logical fallacy in wide use today, which she called “The Argument from Intimidation”. If you don’t wholly support and endorse the disease theory of addiction, then you will undoubtedly be countered often with the Argument from Intimidation. If you’re aware that the argument isn’t really… Continue reading The Disease Theory Argument From Intimidation
The False Dichotomy of "Treat em or Jail em"
Stanton Peele wrote about the treatment or jail dichotomy almost 10 years ago, and what he had to say was brilliant (click the heading of this post to link to it). Almost a decade later, the same argument is presented again and again. The argument goes like this: Drug addicts are breaking the law by… Continue reading The False Dichotomy of "Treat em or Jail em"