A Review of Informal Fallacies

In order to determine whether a fallacy can be justified in using or is ethically wrong, one must examine the specific situation they are in and must study the consequences which they might face. Informal fallacies are not mistakes in the formal structure of an argument, but are based either in the failure of the evidence to be relevant or in some linguistic ambiguity. Informal fallacies include defending a statement by appealing to force, pity, authority, or popular belief. In other words, informal fallacies are alterations of the truth, therefore they are not the complete truth, therefore are lies, which is why the Czech Proverb is accurate:

This is because a lie is an assertion of something which is inaccurate and untrue with an intent to mislead and deceive. For example, an informal fallacy would be: a doctor discovers that his patient is dying of a fatal disease, but, due to his pity for him and not to take away the patients hopes, he tells the patient that he has a harmful disease but he should not worry because everything is going to be alright, even though, the patient is going to die at the end.

A perfect world is usually imagined as a world with no lies, but to many peoples disappointment, the world can never be perfect. This is because the majority of the people in the world have lied or will lie at one point in their life, even though they can just be white lies. The main reason why people usually lie is for protection. They lie to avoid punishment or protect themselves, or people who they care for, from punishment of some sort (all types of punishment; from a convict sentenced to death to a child getting sent to his room). Also, to avoid embarrassment (for example, a student lies and says that he is passing because he is embarrassed to tell truth which is that he is failing. He lies because he does not want people to think that he is of inferior intelligence). Another reason can be because of selfishness.

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Someone can lie and possibly harm others, just to gain attention or to gain a possession (for example, from personal experience, a child will lie and say that his friends toy is his so he can take it home with him.) People also use informal fallacies because, as the English labour party leader James Callaghan once said,

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation. This quotation means that telling a little lie saves the person who tells it a lot of time and explaining. An example of this could be a teenager telling his parents that he went to his friends house to study while he actually went to his friends house to party. This little white lie saved the teenager a lot of time of explaining and also the risk of not being permitted to attend this party.

Lying can be divided into three main parts: deception, an exaggerated truth and a white lie. Deception is misleading others by deliberate misrepresentation. It is often used for the protection of ones self or those who he or she care for. An exaggeration of the truth is when someone bends the truth, or in other words, changes the facts slightly to make the thing they are saying more exciting or to emphasize something. This is why an English novelist and critic Aldous Huxley said,

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie. This man suggested that exaggeration makes a dull story become exciting, even though it is not completely true. The lie told in the example of the doctor and his patient is a white lie. These are harmless variations of the truth mainly used for protection or to keep others from harm (not just physical harm, but emotional harm). In the situation of the doctor, what he did was, despite the reality of the patients terminal illness, he lied to make the patient feel at ease and also because he felt pity for him.

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