Paul A. Kirschner & Mirjam Neelen

Sometimes people use bogus arguments in the form of logical fallacies (arguments where the conclusion does not follow from the premises) to oppose facts or viewpoints and, ultimately to bamboozle a discussion. Below you’ll find a nice overview of twenty most often used type of ‘luring’ fallacies. We’re writing this blog hoping that you’ll learn to spot them and kick ’m in the butt instead of letting them fool you (or worse, using them yourselves)!

Let’s look at some examples.

Basically, the strawman is an intentionally misrepresented response that’s set up as an easy way to defeat the opponent’s true argument. In other words, the person throwing in the strawman doesn’t respond to the actual point that an opponent makes but to a caricatural version of it.

In the learning space, there are some common strawmen. For example, in response to the argument that…