Common Mistakes in Evaluating Premises

In reading the last section in chapter 5 of the text, I became interested in the bad appeals to authority and common beliefs. I realized that having read the chapter prior, discussing Content Fallacies, my knowledge of the conjunction between bad appeals to common beliefs and authorities has accelerated. I believe these two fallacies go hand in hand because they are always present in advertisements on television and the internet. An example of this accord can be seen in my previous posts, the one about Ronnie and HydroxyCut. If you notice, they use a celebrity personality to tell potentially overweight and desperate consumers that all they have to do is take those pills and get results like his. The mistake is made when the consumer accepts this claim to be true just because of the catch phrase, “try it and be like the other millions of people who lost XX lbs.” Another issue is the segment where the “doctor” speaks. We don’t know for sure if he is a real doctor; he may be one really great actor that can play a good doctor, but there is clearly a motive to mislead consumers which is why this segment of the commercial is a bad appeal to authority.