Component Fallacies

Pipe Dreams


IN a time when we endlessly scrutinize the ingredients of our food and insist on pesticide-free peaches, why are we still mixing carcinogens into our children’s lemonade? From herbicides to arsenic, the Environmental Protection Agency has set standards for 80 different chemicals, specifying how much of each should be allowed in our drinking water. Yet no regulations exist for thousands of other contaminants that make their way into our drinking water.

I think that the first sentence is a straw man argument because it overstates and exaggerates. I´m not sure, but the question in in the same sentence might begin a circular reason. The last fallacy is in the final sentence, which commits a hasty generalization because the writer already jumps into a conclusion.


These unregulated contaminants include industrial byproducts, agricultural chemicals, drugs and even most of the toxic compounds that are formed when we add chlorine for disinfection. The combined effect of these contaminants has never been evaluated.


Again, the author exaggerates and makes a straw man argument. He ends the paragraph with a false cause, showing a cause and effect relationship.

There is nothing we ingest in greater quantities than water. In light of this, here’s a radical concept. Our drinking water should be water. Nothing more. Paradoxically, the best way to make that happen is to purify less of it. Here’s why. The technology exists to remove all of these chemicals from our water. But the E.P.A. balks at insisting on the elimination of all hazardous chemicals and microbes from the 10 trillion gallons of water we use every year because the cost would be so great.


In this paragraph, they answer the question asking why we should we purify less water while the real question is why do we keep mixing pesticides into the water we drink. This fallacy is called an irrelevant conclusion. Lastly, and for the third time, the author used straw man arguments. Maybe, we can conclude that this is simply the style that the writer always uses in his work. Instead of a fallacy, it could also be considered a style.






http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/03/opinion/03morris.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin