Critical Thinking Reflection Paper

According to the text, The Power of Critical Thinking, by Louis Vaughn, a fallacy is defined as, “An argument form that is both common and defective; a recurring mistake in reasoning (Vaughn, 561). Fallacies can be found in many places whether it is in the media, the workplace, or around your peers. Some fallacies contain the truth while others at a time can be false or misleading. It is essential to be able to identify fallacies because they can be used in many ways, some good some bad. Fallacies are used every day, whether it is to influence someone's opinion to agree with one side of an argument rather than the other or to draw in others by appealing to their emotions or authority. Today, I will be discussing three important fallacies and give examples of each. These fallacies include Genetic Fallacy, Ad Hominem, and Appeal to Tradition.

As indicated by Chitty & Black, there are many things involved with thinking critically. It isn’t an easy process that can be learned

Within The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt, he mentions that there are two ancient truths concerning how the mind works. The first truth is the foundational idea of the book: the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict with each other. The second truth is Shakespeare’s idea about how “thinking makes it so.” (or, as Buddha said, “Our life is the creation of our mind.”) Like a rider, on the back of an elephant, the conscious, reasoning part of the mind has only limited control of what the elephant does. Nowadays, we know the cause of these divisions, and a few ways to help the rider and the elephant work as a better team. We can improve this ancient idea today by explaining why most people’s minds have a bias toward seeing threats and engaging in useless worry. To change this bias, we can use three techniques to increase happiness, one ancient, and two very new.

As Paul and Elder point out, critical thinking is self-guided and self-disciplined thinking that assists us in reasoning in a fairminded way (FOCT, 2017). It allows us as humans to live a conscious and consistent life where rationality, reasonability and empathy and present when faced with problems. While I am actively learning how to become a better critical thinker, I have learned that the first step to successfully think critically, I needed to diminish my power to think egocentric. In my professional life, I find myself evaluating situations with more clarity and looking more closely for factual content in order to base my decisions with more

Logical Fallacies can be found in many forms of persuasions, in infomercials, political debates, common discussion, everywhere. Although Logical Fallacies are very common, they mar our arguments and should be avoided. In order to avoid them we must first learn to recognize them. To fully understand Logical Fallacies, we will look at the definition of Logical Fallacies, some examples of Logical Fallacies, classifications of Logical Fallacies, and finally why we should, and how we can, avoid them.

* Identify the informal fallacies, assumptions, and biases involved in manipulative appeals and abuses of language.

The three logical fallacies I chose to discuss are ad hominem, bandwagon, and stacking the deck. I chose these three based off examples I could think of that have been placed boldly in my face.

In The Happiness Hypothesis Jonathan Haidt talks about how our brains work and how best to find happiness with the different ways it works. Haidt describes the different ways a positive and negative person’s brain works and how each can find happiness through various and different methods. He also discusses different aspects of society that can affect our level of happiness. All of these things can be considered to find the best way to raise your level of happiness.

A fallacy occurs in an argument when the premises do not provide the necessary support to derive the conclusion. Three common types of fallacies are fallacies of vagueness, fallacies of ambiguity, and fallacies of equivocation. In fallacies of vagueness, such as slippery slope fallacies, occur when the argument exploits borderline cases caused by vague language. Fallacies of ambiguity occurs when a word or phrase with multiple definitions is used within an argument. Arguments with fallacies of relevance occur when the premises persuade through emotion rather than logic.

Fallacies can be either illegitimate arguments or irrelevant points, and are often identified because they lack evidence that supports their claims. However, based on the argument presented no fallacies were detected as the arguments had evidence to support its claim. The argument presented was introduced using a claim of value. According to Rottenberg and Winchell (2012) claims of value attempt to prove that some things are more or less desirable than others. They express approval or disapproval of standards of taste and morality. Advertisements and reviews of cultural events are one common source of value claims, but such claims emerge whenever people argue about what is good or bad, beautiful or

I admired how you integrated examples, or experiences to support the definition of the outlined fallacies. Meanwhile, the perspectives for the outlined fallacies are very insightful. You brought out some interesting concepts regarding Attacking the person, and Red Herring. I believe your perspective concerning why people attack, and change a subject is accurate for some individuals. I also imagine that the bandwagon theory is common for children, however, this may be displayed by people age 50 and above, since they may want to avoid conflict, and or have lack of interest in a subject matter.

After learning about the logical fallacies, I began to notice that people use them quite a lot. This weekend I tried being on the lookout for when someone used them, but now that I reflect back I realize that I have used some too. I realized that I used the post hoc, ergom pro pter hoc, and that people around me used the appeal to tradition.

Have you ever wondered if something is actually making you genuinely laugh or if it is just always laughed at so you feel like you must laugh at at? Sometimes people are so accustomed to the things around them that they are just going through the motions. Now fallacies are common errors within reasoning that will ruin the logic of your argument. They can be either illegitimate arguments or irrelevant points, and are often identified because they lack evidence that supports their claim. Have you ever jumped on the band wagon about something? Whether it be sports, an argument, or even bickering with a loved one. You side with someone even though you may not have all of the knowledge you should have befor putting up a fight.

Critical thinking means accurate thinking in the search of appropriate and dependable knowledge about the world. Another way to describe it is sensible, insightful, responsible, and skillful thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do. Critical thinking is not being able to process information well enough to know to stop for red lights or whether you established the right change at the supermarket.

Fallacies are an error in reasoning, a fault in one’s argument that does not have the correct evidence or facts. Fallacies are something that we commit since we were young kids, arguing with your brothers or sisters and into our adulthood arguing with our spouse or trying to make a point in our career fields. Many of us even commit these fallacies without realizing what we are doing, it is a learning progress for many to realize and understand when we are using fallacy and trigger our brain to think in a different way to avoid the trickiness of fallacies. One fallacy that could be tricky and easy to use daily would be Hasty Generalizations, which is a fallacy that is based on assumption, which we all know we have done at some point in our lives and can see how easy it could be to use as an automatic reaction.