Language and Informal Fallacies Overview

Natural languages such as English are disorderly. They grow and develop and change over time, often in unpredictable ways, at the whim of the people using them. Although the primary business of this unit is Informal Fallacies, it is important to take a very quick look at some ways in which natural language creates fertile ground for fallacious communications.

So before even explaining what fallacies are all about, we will begin with a brief look at some attributes of natural (aka ordinary) language. An understanding of certain language features will be helpful for recognizing good arguments and fallacious ones. Next, we consider fallacies in general, both formal and informal. And finally, we reach the meat of this unit where we examine four families of informal fallacies up close.