Chapter 5 Answer Key to Select Chapter Exercises

Exercise 5.1
1. Those that have irrelevant premises and those that have unacceptable premises.
5. The genetic fallacy involves an attempt to discredit a claim by appealing to something that’s almost always irrelevant to it: its origin.
7. Tu quoque
9. The fallacy of using a word in two different senses in an argument.
12. One form says that a claim must be true because it hasn’t been shown to be false, and another form says that a claim must be false because it hasn’t been proved to be true.
14. Rhetoric is the use of non-argumentative, emotive words and phrases to persuade or influence an audience. It becomes problematic when there’s an attempt to support a conclusion by rhetoric alone.
17. Typically, someone using the straw man fallacy reinterprets claim X so that it becomes the weak or absurd claim Y, then attacks claim Y, concluding that X is unfounded.
18. The fallacy of attempting to draw a conclusion about a group based on an inadequate sample of the group.
20. The burden of proof typically lies with the person that makes a positive claim—an assertion that something exists or is the case rather than that something does not exist or is not the case.

Exercise 5.2
2. Appeal to popularity
3. Appeal to the person
6. Straw man
7. An appeal to popularity with a touch of appeal to tradition
11. Red herring
12. Division
15. Appeal to emotion; possibly appeal to popularity
16. Appeal to ignorance
17. Appeal to the person (both tu quoque and name-calling)

Exercise 5.3
2. Slippery slope
3. Begging the question
8. No fallacy (but perhaps a weak analogy!)
9. Hasty generalization

Exercise 5.4
1. Hard drugs should be legalized. If we prohibit hard drugs, next thing you know we’ll be making prescription drugs illegal, and eventually even aspirin will be against the law!
4. Zombies—just like in The Walking Dead—are real. And there can be no greater proof of their existence than the failure of science to prove that they physically exist. If there really were no zombies, science would have proved their nonexistence by now.
8. The Sociology department is the worst department in the entire university. I took a sociology course, and so did two of my friends. And we all concluded that the prof was absolutely useless.
9. We should reject the American suggestion that NAFTA is unfair and that Canada gains more from it than the US, because that suggestion comes primarily from writers in right-wing magazines.
12. The Canadian government should do more to support our most elderly citizens. Thinking of one of our elders living in poverty just makes me want to cry!