Syllabus 7/2 (2018) R. H. Gass and J. S. Seiter, “When Good Arguments Go Bad” 1 WHEN GOOD ARGUMENTS GO BAD: AN ACTIVITY FOR LEARNING ABOUT FALLACIES IN REASONING Robert H. Gass, California State University-Fullerton and John S. Seiter, Utah State University INTRODUCTION Not long ago, one of the authors overheard two students complaining about a long stretch of frosty weather. “So much for global warming!” one of them said, and it was hard to blame him. Indeed, for the most part, critical thinking does not come naturally. Moreover, learning to recognize hasty generalizations (like the one committed here) and other fallacies that masquerade as cogent arguments requires practice and hard work. Fortunately, an array of college courses—including public speaking, logic, debate, argumentation, critical thinking, writing, rhetoric, and others—include a unit on informal fallacies. That said, teachers have bemoaned the fact that traditional, lecture-based approaches to teaching fallacies can be boring (e.g., Mountainguy, 2010). Others have endorsed an active learning approach, which engages students through interactions with each other, addresses different learning styles, and creates a sense of community in the classroom (Seiter, Peeples, & Sanders, 2018). With that in mind, this “toolbox” entry presents an exercise that encourages active student engagement in creating and spotting informal fallacies. BACKGROUND The activity assumes that students have already been introduced to informal fallacies either through a textbook chapter or class lecture-discussion. For introductory students, it helps to explain that, practically speaking, fallacies are flawed arguments that interfere with critical thinking, often by making unwarranted inferential leaps. To avoid them, students must be able to identify them. For more advanced students, you might note that a variety of theories and models have been proposed to explain how informal fallacies operate. Most modern texts eschew what Hamblin (1970) called the “standard treatment,” which views fallacies as invalid arguments. This approach treats fallacies as deductive errors. Not all fallacies, however, involve logical errors. Instead, informal reasoning, relies on inferential leaps or probabalistic reasoning, not deductive reasoning.