Amphiboly
An amphiboly fallacies occur when the construction of a sentence allows it to have two different meanings. For example:
"Last night I shot a burglar in my pajamas."
"Save soap and waste paper."
Accent
Emphasis is used to suggest a meaning different from the actual content of the proposition. For example:
"It would be illegal to give away Free Beer!"
"The first mate, seeking revenge on the captain, wrote in his journal, "The Captain was sober today!" (He suggests, by his emphasis, that the Captain is usually drunk.)
Appeals to motives in place of support
Appeals to motives in place of support are fallacies that have in common the practice of appealing to emotions or other psychological factors instead of providing reasons for belief.
Argumentum ad Baculum (Appeal to Force)
An Appeal to Force happens when someone resorts to force, or the threat of force, in an attempt to push others into accepting a conclusion. This fallacy is often used by politicians. It may be summarized as "might makes right." The threat need not come directly from the person arguing. For example:
"I know your phone number. Some people who have disagreed with me had received threatening phone calls."
"If you don't agree with the new tournament rules, you students may never win again."
Prejudicial Language
Loaded or emotive terms are used to attach value or moral goodness to believing the proposition. For example:
"Right thinking fighter will agree with me that Shotokan is the best fighting art.
"Any reasonable person would agree that our school is the best."
Argumentum ad Misericordiam
This is the Appeal to Pity, also known as Special Pleading. This fallacy is committed when someone appeals to pity for the sake of getting a conclusion accepted. The reader is told to agree to the proposition because of the pitiful state of the author. For example:
"I did not murder my mother and father with an axe! Please do not find me guilty; I am suffering enough from being an orphan."
"How can you say that's not a point? It was so close, and besides, I'm down way down in points."
"I hope you'll like my pattern. I spent the last three months working on it."
Appeal to Consequences (argumentum ad consequentiam)
The author points to the disagreeable consequences of holding a particular belief in order to show that this belief is false. For example:
"You can't believe taekwondo is any good for self-defense; those high kicks will get you killed if you use them on the street."
"You must believe in God, for otherwise life would have no meaning."
Argumentum ad Populum (Appealing to the Gallery or Appealing to the People)
This fallacy is known as You commit this fallacy if you attempt to win acceptance of an assertion by appealing to a large group of people. A proposition is held to be true because it is widely held to be true or is held to be true by some upper class sector of the population. This form of fallacy is often characterized by emotive language. It is sometimes also called the "Appeal to Emotion" because emotional appeals often sway the population as a whole. For example:
"Millions of people believe in acupuncture. Are you telling those people that they are all mistaken fools?"
"Taekwondo is the most practiced martial art in the United States so you might as well study it rather than lesser known martial arts."
