Fallacies 39relationship which is not necessarily the case. To assume that
since day follows night, night causes day, is an example of this
fallacy. Also, this fallacy often gives rise to superstitions: find
a four leaf clover, have good luck; or knock on wood, ward off
bad luck.
A variation of this fallacy is called the inductive fallacy. In this
instance we actually create in our mind the causal relationship.
Most of us have probably had an experience with the inductive
fallacy, or one similar to the following scenario. You are sitting
in a room alone, reading. A young man enters the room, sits
down, quietly begins to read. You finish your reading, get up,
leave the room, and begin to walk out of the building. You notice
you don’t have your pocketbook with you. You run back to the
room. It’s empty, and there is no pocketbook in sight. So you say
to yourself, “Son of a gun, that guy took my pocketbook.” You
call for help, help arrives, and as you search the room you find
that the pocketbook had slipped behind the chair where you were
sitting. The feeling of embarrassment that comes over you is the
penalty you pay for committing the inductive fallacy.FALLACY OF THE CONSEQUENT This fallacy occurs
when one assumes that, because one thing necessarily follows
another, the reverse must also be true. If a person reasons that in
order to have a baby one must be a woman, then concludes that
to be a woman one must have a baby, that person has just
committed this fallacy. Also, although we may have observed an
authentic cause/effect relationship, we may not assume, when
we see a similar effect, that the cause was the same. Earlier in this
chapter an example of the fallacy of the consequent was used to
show how some errors of logic occur. To conclude, because
when it rains the grass gets wet, that it must be so that if the grass
is wet it must have rained, is to be guilty of this fallacy, for in fact
the grass may be wet for one of several other reasons.
COMPLEX QUESTION This fallacy puts questions into a
complex form which precludes all possible answers, either by
asking more than one question in a sentence, or by phrasing the
question in such a way that the answer must incriminate the
respondent. The classic example is, “When did you stop beating
your wife?” Or, “Do you always cheat on your tests?” Probably