Are you tired of going into controversial threads and having people not discuss things, circlejerking, or using emotional responses in place of logic? Us too.
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First you begin by positing that “slippery slope” isn’t a fallacy, and before you know it, the camel is in the tent and eating your grapes.
While I’m not concerned about camels eating MY grapes, it’s true that they’ll happily eat grapes if given the chance.
Which side do you think is having their valid concerns dismissed? How do you know they’re valid?
Someone's fishing for political opinions. Anyways, how I know if they're valid or not is by considering their logic and likelihood, not just dismissing an opposing view as "slippery slope" and moving on.
Ah; in that case the fallacy is reductionism. Slippery slope is the excuse.
So... it isn't ALWAYS a fallacy. In its purest, a slippery-slope argument is of the following form:
“If A, which some people want, is done or allowed, then B, which most people don’t want, will inevitably follow. Therefore, let’s not do or allow A.”
The fallacy occurs when that form is not fleshed out by sufficient reasons to believe that B will inevitably follow from A, such as in the following examples:
In these examples, the conclusion does not follow deductively from the premise. Nor is any reason given to believe that a chain of events set in motion by the act described in the premise will inevitably lead to what’s described in the conclusion. Heck, the above examples are not even good inductive logic.
So you're absolutely correct in saying that not all slippery-slope arguments are fallacies, it just takes logic in between, and that's something a lot of people struggle with.
So you’re absolutely correct in saying that not all slippery-slope arguments are fallacies, it just takes logic in between, and that’s something a lot of people struggle with.
This is the problem with the fallacy-touting crowd. They only partially understand what the fallacy actually is. Not all, as you pointed out, slippery slope arguments are fallacious, but if you make a sound slippery slope some "fallacy expert" will chime in and trumpet how bad your argument is because they only half-spotted the pattern.
In a similar vein, personal abuse is not the ad hominem fallacy. And an ad hominem argument is also not automatically fallacious. Examples:
I once thought I was clever by coining the term "fallacy fallacy" for dealing with the mouth-breathers who screech "FALLACY!!!" while flapping their arms wildly as if attempting to launch themselves to the moon. Unfortunately I was beaten to the punch by decades.