Like so many things, the study of fallacies can be traced back to Aristotle. What he did was he identified some tactics that appear to effectively argue a point but don't actually do that. And, as it turns out, that's pretty important to thinkers and philosophers, and that's probably why people like John Locke and Richard Whately and John Stuart Mill, they all devoted some time and attention to fallacies. So, that raises the question, what exactly are fallacies? I actually like the Encyclopedia of Rhetoric's definition. They say that fallacies are deficient moves in argumentative discourse, meaning they don't accomplish what they probably should accomplish. Now, as writers, we want to avoid fallacies, we don't want to put them onto the page, we want to make sure that we build our case soundly. But, I would say that as speakers, we have an extra duty. We want to make sure that our audience knows that we're not making a fallacy. As a speaker, we've got the burden of clarity. Obviously, you want your thinking clear on an issue, but the situations that I'm most worried about as a coach, as a teacher is where your thinking is clear to you, but not to your audience. OK, that's what I'm concerned with. I actually got an example of this. So years ago, I was coaching someone on a speech about differential tuition. So, differential tuition is when you charge students different tuition rates based on their major. Why would you do this, you ask? Because science students are like really expensive to educate. They need tons of equipment, lab equipment, so on so forth. In comparison, a literature student's pretty cheap. Anyways, this guy was arguing for differential tuition, and he had the section of the speech where he made a point about differential tuition not actually costing that much more per student. Now to show this, he did a short mock-up of a sample college tuition bill. But, as I'm listening to this, I'm thinking, boy, this really isn't a convincing argument at all. It sounded like he was making a bunch of bad assumptions, as you bringing in all sorts of irrelevant details. So, after the speech, we sat down, we started working on it, and I pressed him on this point. We worked our way through it and as it turns out, he was actually making a very good argument. Everything he was saying there was backed up by facts and figures and testimony and cases from other universities, but he didn't talk about any of that. He just kind of summarized it in a poor way. So, his arguments were fallacies because, to me, the listener, they sounded like fallacies. We need sound arguments and arguments that sound good. And so what we're gonna do over the next few videos is we're gonna walk through a couple of common fallacies, talk about how to avoid them, and how to avoid the perception of them.