Publications

Publication details [#54052]

Magnani, Lorenzo and Emanuele Bardone. 2010. The appeal of gossiping fallacies and its eco-logical roots. Pragmatics & Cognition 18 (2) : 365–396.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/pc

Annotation

This paper shows how some reasoning, though fallacious, can appear to be attractive and useful for beings-like-us. Although they do not provide conclusive evidence to support or reject a certain claim the way scientific statements do, they tell us something interesting about how humans build up their arguments and reasons. First of all, the paper considers and investigates three main types of fallacies: argumentum ad hominem (argument against person), argumentum ad verecundiam (appeal to authority), and argumentum ad populum (appeal to popularity or bandwagon). These three fallacies are traditionally considered as examples of a broader category called ignoratio elenchi. Secondly, the paper shows how people who commit these fallacies rely on information about other human beings in their reasoning. That is, they do not follow certain logical procedures that eventually lead them to correct conclusions. But they simply make use of others as social characters. For example, being an authority, being an expert, being part of a class, etc., become the substitutes for more direct evidence to support a certain claim or to make an argument more appealing.