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Logical Fallacies to Look Out For This Election Season

We’re already being forced to deal with election season nonsense. Instead of catching up on the latest Donald Trump fluff in the news, we’re going to look at some common logical fallacies used and abused by politicians.

Causal Flaws

Causal flaws abound in political reasoning. For example, a state will pass some expensive piece of tough-on-crime legislation, and then point to the fact that crime rates went down in the following years as justification.

However, just because Thing One happened before Thing Two, it doesn’t mean that Thing One caused Thing Two. Thing Two might have happened anyway. Crime rates may be plummeting in many similar states that have no analogous tough-on-crime legislation. That’s an instance of the effect without the purported cause.

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fallacies / logic flaws / LSAT / LSAT blog / lsat flaws / lsat in real life

LSAT in Real Life: Finding Flaws in the Affluenza Defense

If you’ve been living under a rock (or studiously avoiding news articles on this story, as I had been unti I sat down to write this LSAT blog post), you might not have heard about the “affluenza” hoopla that hit the news last week.

Here’s the quick rundown of the story: A 16-year-old boy in Texas was driving with a BAC level three times the legal limit when he lost control of his truck and killed four nearby pedestrians. When he was on trial for manslaughter, the defense attorneys argued that he needed rehabilitation, not jail time, because his wealthy parents hadn’t taught him a sense of personal responsibility. A witness for the defense said the kid had “affluenza” – he’d been taught that money could solve any and all problems.

logic flaws / lsat in real life

Finding Flaws Away From the LSAT

Perhaps the best thing about the LSAT (besides, of course, for the fact that a good score can redeem four years of drunken revelry in college, never once stepping foot in a library, and attending more football games and frat parties in a semester than actual classes) is that studying for it (properly, that is) will transform you from a gullible believer of all manner of fanciful claims, into a fallacy-finding machine. Once you learn what makes an argument valid (remember the force, Luke) and the common ways an argument can go wrong (you have reviewed lesson 6 right? Good. Now do it again. Yes, it’s that important), you start finding flaws everywhere – much to your friends’ dismay. Don’t think of the logical skills you acquire in LSAT study as applying solely to the narrow realm of the LSAT; you encounter countless arguments in everyday life, many of which are horribly flawed. You just don’t realize it yet.

logic flaws / logical fallacies

The LSAT and Project Runway: A Match Made in Heaven

I’ve admitted it in the past and I’ll say it again. I, Jodi Triplett, love Project Runway. Possibly more than brownies. Certainly more than the caramel apple I consumed at the LA Country Fair, which I found to be woefully inadequate in the treat department. Get the funnel cake, people.

At any rate, in this stage of your LSAT development, you’ll have noticed a propensity to spot fallacies in many of the ads you see and in the television shows you watch. For me, this surfaced while watching the latest episodes of my beloved PR. So for your enjoyment, here are the biggest Project Runway fallacies I’ve spotted that also appear quite frequently on the LSAT.