Fallacies In advertisIng

Every day, the average person watches three hours of television, reads at least one to two magazines or newspapers and listens to the radio another two hours. While doing this, a part of what heexperiences are advertisements that come on at an average of every ten minutes. These advertisements are usually used to persuade the costumer to buy something. They also might be used for the listener todo something that the advertisement is asking. Sometimes these advertisements can be hidden messages between or in television programs. This paper is a serious comparative analysis in how some ofthese companies compete on the advertising race and use fallacies to try and convey a better message. Like professor Bessham once said; a logical fallacy is “an argument that contains a mistake inreasoning”(2002). Now to further more analyze the fallacies companies use in advertisement, we first need to define some of these. There are two types of logical fallacies, fallacies of relevance, andfallacies of insufficient evidence. Fallacies of relevance happen when the premises are not logically relevant to the conclusion. Fallacies of insufficient evidence occur when the premises do not providesufficient evidence to support the conclusion. Though there are several logical fallacies, four logical fallacies commonly found in advertising are amphiboly, appeal to authority, appeal to emotion,and non sequitur. 
An amphiboly is “a fallacy of syntactical ambiguity deliberately misusing implications” (Master List, p. 1). This occurs when the arguer misinterprets a statement that isgrammatically ambiguous, and then proceeds to draw a conclusion based on this false interpretation. An example of an amphiboly is if someone said, “I shot the burglar in my pajamas.” One could interpret thissentence to mean that the burglar was wearing the pajamas when he was shot, while the real meaning is that the shooter was wearing pajamas when he shot the burglar. The commercial for the Sonicare...