Just some musings today – I am trying to hold off my attacks on the insane (Creationists, Alternative Medicine supporters etc.) which doesnt leave me much else 🙂

This led me on to wondering about quite a few things, one of which was the “Slippery Slope” logical fallacy. Now, I am often accused of being guilty of this – I frequently make doom and gloom predictions along the lines of if we dont prevent x then at some point in the future y will be terrible.

I am not sure that my useage is always a fallacy though.

There always will be times when allowing something to happen does actually mean that things will become worse and in an effort to silence any of my potential detractors I looked into the form of the fallacy some more.

The accepted form of the Slippery Slope goes:

1. Event x has taken place or is going to take place
2. As a result event y will happen.

Now as far as I can gather, this is only fallacious reasoning if it can not be demonstrated that y will follow x. Some farcial examples are, if I hit you in the head with a baseball bat unconsiousness will occur.

Surely that can not be a logical fallacy? Can anyone give me better examples of the fallacy in action and why it should be avoided?