EXERCISE G: Mixed Retroductive Fallacies
Identify the fallacy that occurs in each passage.
These will be mixed Retroductive fallacies.
1. The reason Jeffrey Daumer killed all those people is because he's crazy.
2. Since I have been busy with the school play my grades have gone down hill. My teachers are obviously just jealous that I may some day be a famous actress.
3. The Mars Lander failed to phone home. It must have been abducted by little green men.
4. Democritus conceived of the atom in 300 B.C.E., but his works were lost when the great library of Alexandria was burned by the Romans. If the works of Democritus had survived, we would have discovered atomic energy hundreds of years sooner, and probably blown ourselves up by now.
5. John Kerry actually got more votes than Bush in the 2004 election, which explains why early exit polls suggested he would win. But we'll never be able to prove it because the Diebold Company's touch-screen voting machines don't issue a paper receipt and no one but Diebold executives (who are hard-line Republicans) know how the machines are programmed.
6. Our Volcano God does not approve of your god-who-dies. After you built a church here Volcano God destroyed whole village.
7. Only a few people survived the crash, but I was one of them. God must have plans for me.
8. Why is there life on Earth, but no life on Mars? I guess some things just can't be explained.
9. The fact that a little boy can bend spoons with his mind might be explained if we assume that what we call reality isn't really real, but some form of illusion created by our own minds.
10. Gravity can be explained as the warping of space by mass. Put a bowling ball on a trampoline, and the weight of the ball on the two-dimensional surface will cause the trampoline to warp inward (into the third dimension). Well, placing a sun or planet in three dimensional space also causes three-dimensional space to warp (into a fourth dimension).
WELCOME EXPLANATION OF PRINCIPLES TABLE OF FALLACIES EXERCISES INDEX