1. Why does the study of fallacies give us a list of categories, without more systematic organization?
2. What general characteristics underlie this chapter's categories of pseudoreasoning?

1. Why does the study of fallacies give us a list of categories, without more systematic organization?

This appearance is actually misleading (see the next question). But to the extent that it's true, there is a sound reason. We study fallacies to learn how arguments go wrong, how proposed defenses for a claim fail to defend that claim. And the study of failures takes us in more scattered directions than the study of successes.

Suppose someone asks you how a car runs, or how the human digestive system works. Without being an expert, you can give a general answer. But if someone asks how a car may fail to run, or how the digestive system may go awry, even an expert cannot give a single overarching answer. At most, experts will list the most common failings of the car or gastrointestinal tract, with tips for diagnosing them.

So, too, with reasonable argument. When it works, it follows a well-defined set of rules. When it doesn't, any number of things may have gone wrong. It happens to be the case that the fallacies covered in Chapters 5 and 6 occur more commonly than others. You might encounter more unusual false steps; some misfired supports for a position fit in more than one category; but as a rule of thumb, the categorizations here provide the best guide to diagnosing the fallacies that you will probably confront.

2. What general characteristics underlie this chapter's categories of pseudoreasoning?

Recognizing the two characteristics of the fallacies covered in this chapter will help guide your diagnoses of where these arguments go wrong--where reasoning has malfunctioned. Some sort of emotion is being appealed to, but that emotion (or comparable motivation) is irrelevant to the truth of the claim under discussion. Reason may also malfunction when nothing is happening emotionally, but reasonable thinking still makes a mistake (see Chapter 6).

In every example given in Chapter 5, some emotional factor interferes with the critical assessment of truth claims. That factor may look obviously like an emotion, as with the desire present in wishful thinking, or the fear, pity, vanity, and anger that kinds of pseudoreasoning appeal to. In other cases (bandwagon, common practice, appeal to popularity), the interfering element is the common human willingness to believe what others believe and act as they do. You may think of this as the motivation that makes us social animals.

Like fear and pity and other emotions, the impulse to agree with our neighbors offers excellent advantages to human life and good behavior. We do not need to expunge these motivations from our lives: Thinking critically certainly does not have to mean turning into unemotional creatures. It does mean recognizing when such motivations belong in an argument and when they do not, where they offer reasons for believing or acting a certain way and when they cloud the issue.

Moreover, the motivations that these fallacies appeal to are irrelevant to the truth or falsity of the claim being considered. So the most general strategy for identifying pseudoreasoning of this sort begins by identifying the motivation appealed to and asking whether it pertains to the question at hand.

A final comment about irrelevance. Because it haunts all of these bad reasons, there is a vague sense in which you may call any of them a smokescreen. When tackling the exercises in this chapter, you might find yourself frequently reaching for "smokescreen/red herring." Watch out. Although some examples do count as smokescreens, be careful not to use the label for just any case in which you're not sure what has gone wrong. The true smokescreen contains an intent to mislead, a deliberate act of changing the subject, often with the purpose of avoiding an accusation.