When I was in high school I took a course called “Theory of
Knowledge.” I may have enjoyed this course more than any other
course I had ever taken up to that point and since (right up
until I took Course 4 at the Institute of Genealogy and
Historical Research). One of the course units dealt with
classical logic, and logical fallacies. I recently found a
handout on “Logical Fallacies” that I received in the course.
Sadly I cannot produce a “full and accurate” citation to this
handout, as I can’t remember details from nearly twenty years
ago. Much of scholarly genealogical research involves the use of
logic–deductive and inductive reasoning. Many of the errors that
occur in research similarly result in fallacies of logic. I
would like to discuss the most common fallacies, as described on
this twenty-year-old high school handout, here. First the
definition of a fallacy: Fallacies are mistakes in reasoning. A
fallacy is an error in reasoning or in an argument. As such they
are not rational in the true sense of th