Nyx blog

-Are you going to stop beeing so irrational?! When are you going to stop cheating?! Are you going to stop beating your wife?!"

That's one of them. One of the informal logical fallacies, the so called complex question.

With this often intimidatingly posed kinds of tricky questions, something is presumed that it's definitly establish, that your've been irrational, have been cheating...

If it in fact isn't established, to answer -Yes or -No, always makes you either a good or the bad looser of an argument, even if you're right. The piercing answer is to point out unfounded presumptions of complex questions.

By the way, if in fact it is established, then the question isn't fallacious.

The web site philosophy.lander.edu has a good tutorial online. Read it and do the twenty-five self-test questions, and become a critical thinker. Introduction to Logic Nature of Fallacies.

Fallacy is defined as a type of mistake in argumentation that might appear to be correct, but which proves upon examination not to be so!

Fallacies are subdivided into

• fallacies of relevance (Ad Ignorantiam, Ad Verecundiam, Ad Hominem, Ad Populum, Ad Misericordiam, Ad Baculum, Ignoratio Elenchi)
  
• fallacies of presumption (Complex Question, False Cause, Petitio Prinicpii, Accident, Converse Accident, Review Exercises, Fallacy Summary).
  

Sources:

• Introduction to Logic Nature of Fallacies
  
• Logical fallacy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
  
• Prosjekt Kritisk Tenkning is a norwegian site, but check out the links page. It points to a lot of excellent critical thinking sites on the net, mostly English resources.