Which of the following pertains to fallacy of ambiguity?

Which of the following pertains to fallacy of ambiguity? Correct Answer Equivocation

The correct answer is Equivocation

Important Points

The fallacy of equivocation

• It occurs when a key term or phrase in an argument is used in an ambiguous way, with one meaning in one portion of the argument and then another meaning in another portion of the argument.
• Examples:
  • Noisy children are a real headache. Two aspirin will make a headache go away. Therefore, two aspirin will make noisy children go away.

Additional Information

A straw man fallacy

• It occurs when someone takes another person’s argument or point, distorts it or exaggerates it in some kind of extreme way, and then attacks the extreme distortion as if that is really the claim the first person is making.
• For example,
  • imagine a husband and a wife trying to decide whether they should adopt a dog or a cat.
  • Wife: I'd rather have a dog than a cat.
  • Husband: Why do you hate cats?
  • The wife never said that she hated cats, only that she preferred dogs. The husband either assumed or pretended that her argument was against cats instead of dogs.

The hasty generalization fallacy

• It is sometimes called the over-generalization fallacy.
• It is basically making a claim based on evidence that it is just too small.
• When one makes a hasty generalization, he applies a belief to a larger population than he should be based on the information that he has.
• For example:
  • ​if my brother likes to eat a lot of pizza and French fries, and he is healthy, I can say that pizza and French fries are healthy and don't really make a person fat.

The red herring fallacy:

• This fallacy consists in diverting attention from the real issue by focusing instead on an issue having only a surface relevance to the first.
• Examples:
  • Son: "Wow, Dad, it's really hard to make a living on my salary." Father: "Consider yourself lucky, son.