Audio Transcript for “An Introduction to This Site”

0:00 [soft background music begins playing] Have you ever heard someone say something like “well, we don’t have proof that ghosts don’t exist, so then they must be real,” and it sounded a bit questionable to you, but you weren’t exactly sure why?

0:13 That’s because it’s a logical fallacy, which is usually defined generally as an error in logic. Using a fallacy is commonly said to be something that makes an argument weak, deceitful, or even invalid.

00:27 There are a ton of different types of fallacies, each with a different name, and each of which point to a different sort of error in logic. There’s Argumentum Ad Hominem, there’s Hasty Generalization, there’s Begging the Question… the list goes on.

00:42 This site, in particular, is dedicated to fallacies. I created this site as a tool for educating about fallacies, for questioning their usage and examining the ways that they can be problematic, and for showing how they’re important and relevant in our daily lives.

00:58 My hopes with this site are to pull from several ideas from the field of Feminist Rhetoric, and to honor the work of several feminist rhetorical scholars that I look up to.

1:09 One of my hopes was to make fallacy theory the least alienating it possibly could be. I tried to do this by writing the site in a language that was as easily understandable as I could make it, and I also tried to do this by applying fallacy theory to situations in daily life to make it more relevant and useful.

1:27 My second hope with the site was to combat this idea of foundational knowledge that seems to exist within fallacy theory. Foundational knowledge, as talked about in feminist rhetorical theory, is knowledge that people believe just exists and is true. Within foundational knowledge, people believe that it doesn’t matter who created the knowledge because it’s just knowledge, it’s just the facts. I wanted to show that fallacies were created by people, and that they aren’t always perfect the way we think they might be—they can be problematic, but they can also be useful in our lives!

2:00 As a whole, I hope you’ll find this site to be a useful resource for learning about fallacies, understanding where they come from, and learning how they can sometimes be problematically used. But when used correctly, they can also be very important pieces of knowledge.

[Background knowledge volume increases, and then fades away]