Slippery Slope Fallacy

article written by TW.

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?

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One Response to “Slippery Slope Fallacy”

  1. Why Dont You…Blog? » Blog Archive » Guns and Crime WordPress 2.0.7 wrote:

    [...] There are a multitude of arguments for, and against, gun ownership. My personal thoughts about the escalation of violence may well suffer from the slippery slope fallacy but I doubt it. When one person is armed and the other isn’t deaths may occur. If both are armed deaths may still occur and may well be more likely. Is the belief the death may not be the victim sufficient grounds for people to carry guns? Would you rather be punched or shot as the result of an argument with another car driver? Would you carry a gun in case the other driver came up to you and started shouting? At what point would you draw the gun? [...]

    This comment was written at January 17th, 2007 at 14:27,