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Appeal to Hope (Wishful Thinking) |
| Description: | ||
| The argument attempts to persuade by invoking hopes and desires. | ||
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| Comments: | ||
| This fallacy includes appeals to sex since being more sexy, or meeting sexy people, is something that most people hope for. | ||
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| Examples: | ||
| "Using Ultra-Brite will give you sex appeal." | ||
| "These people all won a million dollars by playing the state lottery. Some day it might happen to you. Play to win!" | ||
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| Discussion: | ||
| Obviously certain actions will make a desirable outcome more
likely. You are more likely to get an A on a test if you actually study, for
example. We frequently reason (and reason well) about how to achieve
desirable results. This reasoning (when it is done well) is based on genuine
causal connections between what we desire and how we behave. Furthermore,
hope is not a bad state of mind to be in. While some recommend that it is
better to be pessimistic, and then be pleasantly surprised, it makes just as
much sense to be "cautiously optimistic," on the grounds that there is no
reason to suffer until something bad actually happens. The fallacy of Appeal to Hope imitates reasoning about achieving desirable outcomes, but it tries to get us to do something that doesn't significantly increase the likelihood of the outcome we desire. By getting us to focus on the desire itself, rather than on the genuine causal connections, the fallacy may even distract us away from performing actions that would more effectively achieve what we desire. |
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| Classification: A Fallacy of Irrelevance (a deductive fallacy of soundness with a falsehood in the major premiss) in the Emotional Appeals family. | ||
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| Source: I first became aware of this fallacy from Gerald Runkle, Good Thinking: An Introduction to Logic (1978). Although this is almost certainly not the earliest reference to this fallacy, I have not so far been able to identify an earlier source. Please contact me if you can point me to a potentially useful clue regarding the original source of this fallacy. | ||
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