Thursday, February 17, 2011
Content Fallacies
On page 201 of the text, Content Fallacies are the topic. I chose to describe the fallacy “Bad appeal to common belief (or practice)”. In my opinion an argument that is a bad appeal to common belief is one that falsely justifies a claim by generalizing the amount of it participants (if it worked for them, it can work for you). An example of this fallacy would be the Hydroxy Cut commercials, especially the newer one with Ronnie from ‘Jersey Shore’. In this commercial he says that by taking Hydroxy Cut he lost a tremendous amount of weight and got the sculpted body he always wanted. He finishes by adding, “if you want results like these you need to pick up your bottle of Hydroxy Cut today!” This argument can be considered a bad appeal to common belief because ironically, Ronnie is a TV personality and guys who aren’t so attractive would love to duplicate his physique. The viewers will believe since Ronnie obtained the body he has from Hydroxy Cut, them taking Hydroxy Cut will produce the same result.
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I like how you had to mention Jersey Shore somewhere in your blog. I guess you really do enjoy Jersey Shore. Anyway, those commercials you are blogging about I have seen. It tries to appeal to our deep desires and want to be like certain celebrities. And because of this, we would go and out and buy stupid products. The fallacy is that these commercials do not tell consumers that the results vary greatly. The commercials create the fallacy like you said that the results will be the same for everyone. People should recognize that most commercials are fallacy and appeal to our misguided beliefs.
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