Fallacy Gloss

Appeal to Bandwagon	This fallacy seeks to persuade by appealing to the wisdom of the momentum of a popular opinion.
Appeal to False Authority	This fallacy seeks to persuade by citing fake, questionable, or inappropriate authority.
Appeal to Fear	This fallacy seeks to persuade by arousing fear that clouds rationality.
Appeal to Pity	This fallacy seeks to persuade by arousing pity.
Circular Reasoning	This fallacy assumes what it is supposed to prove by reasserting the conclusion, sometimes in different words, as though this conclusion needed no supporting reasons.
Fallacy	A fallacy is an invalid, argument that can be deceptive or misleading.
Fallacy of Word Ambiguity	This fallacy seeks to gain an advantage in an argument by using vague undefined words that can be interpreted in more than one way.
Infer	To use imagination and reasoning to fill in missing facts. To connect the dots.
Misleading Euphemisms	This fallacy hides meaning by creating words that make a less acceptable idea seem positive or unrecognizable.
Opinion	Opinion is a word used to include an unsupported belief, a supported argument, an expert’s judgment, prevailing public sentiment, and a formal statement by a court.
Personal Attack	This fallacy attacks a person’s character without addressing the issue.
Pointing to Another Wrong	This fallacy distracts attention from an admitted wrongdoing by claiming that similar actions went unnoticed and unpunished.
Poisoning the Well	This fallacy seeks to prejudice others against a person, group or idea so that their arguments cannot be heard on their own merits.
Prejudicial Language	This fallacy attempts to persuade through the use of loaded words that convey a bias.
Principal claim and reasons	These are the two parts of an argument. The principal claim is the thesis or conclusion. The reasons support this claim through evidence or other claims. A claim is an assertion about something.
Red Herring	This fallacy distracts attention away from the lack of proof for a claim by raising irrelevant issues.
Straw man	This fallacy misrepresents or caricatures an opponent’s position, then refutes the false replica created.
Thinking	Purposeful mental activity such as reasoning, deciding, judging, believing, supposing, expecting, intending, recalling, remembering, visualizing, imagining, devising, inventing, concentrating, conceiving, considering.