My notes on logical fallacies: perhaps they are not as bad as you think. People can make what are clearly errors in logic, and sometimes such fallacies are used as decision-making heuristics or cultural blends. This helps us make difficult decisions in the absence of information, or make sense of situations with little precedent.
This is like the 12-step program for skeptics and humanists (or those who aspire to these values). Much like 12-step programs, they leave a lot to be desired. These rules are largely naive of propagandist techniques, and the innate cognitive and cultural biases of their readers. The rhetoric argument does not fare with respect to this list. Fallacies on this list that I have an issue with:
1) Special pleading (and appeal to emotion): in cases where people fail to understand the context of a decision, special pleading might help to offset the damage done by a purely logical decision. Legal decisions that do not take in special cases (e.g. Grandfather clauses) are particularly of note.
2) Black-or-white: if decision-making were entirely deliberative (e.g. purely logical), we would never arrive at a decision. In this sense, decision-making must include a impulsive (or emotional) component.
3) Ad hominem: while attacking the person rather than the argument is a convenient way to win an argument, this idea also assumes that people always argue in good faith and from a position of pure objectivity. This leaves no room for a theory of motivation, particularly when an argument has a thinly-veiled ulterior motive.
4) Slippery Slope: in cases of ambiguous moral or logical clarity, the slippery slope might actually help us clarify boundaries between one state and another. Without this boundary, human cognition is left without a reference point, which does not allow for clear (and culturally-relevant) decisions to be made.
5) Ambiguity: ambiguity is a necessary condition of a living argument. In cases where ambiguity is resolved, argument or belief/rule system becomes constricted. Allegorical arguments depend on ambiguity to remain relevant -- perhaps this is simply support for the ambiguity fallacy, but allegories are important devices in abducing (e.g. logical abduction) new logical relationships.
6) Strawman: "misrepresentation" of an argument is often in the eye of the beholder. People tend to extract heuristics in dealing with complex arguments, so it is hard to not construct a strawman (unless it is exceedingly flimsy, as with most intelligent design endeavors).
Unless an argument is painstakingly recapitulated, any "elevator talk" length summary is bound to fail. And sometimes arguments are inherent to one's belief system -- in fact any criticism in this case could be viewed as a misrepresentation. In any case, strawman-type approaches can be used to set up improvements to an argument.
