Abstract
With so many informal fallacies characterized as facilitative heuristics during public health reasoning, it may appear to the reader that this book is adopting an essentially sceptical stance towards the existence of fallacies. However, fallacies do exist in public health and elsewhere. Moreover, they are a source of some notable public health failures. It is the aim of this chapter to address some of the many and varied ways in which fallacies can arise in public health. The chapter begins by considering several reasons why fallacies occur in public health. These reasons include media amplification of health risks to the public, an overwhelming concern on the part of public health officials and politicians to avoid causing public alarm and the failure of public health agencies and other parties to represent accurately the uncertain nature of many scientific issues which fall within the public health domain. The chapter examines a number of fallacious arguments in public health. One of these arguments is a new logical fallacy, while other arguments are included in standard lists of fallacies. Finally, the implications of these arguments for the theory of public health reasoning developed in the book are considered. It is contended that this theory needs no special or additional normative mechanism in order to provide an account of these arguments.
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Cummings, L. (2015). Fallacies in Public Health. In: Reasoning and Public Health: New Ways of Coping with Uncertainty. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15013-0_7
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