Saturday, April 25, 2009
The Snuggie...fallacies!
This infomercial is full of fallacies! First it presents a hasty generalization when it says, "You want to keep warm when you are feeling chilled, but you don't want to raise your heating bill." It is not safe to assume that everyone wants to "keep warm" when they feel "chilled." Some people might like feeling chilled, especially if they have been burning up in the hot outside temperatures. Also, they might not care about raising the heating bill if they are not the ones responsible for paying it. The infomercial goes on to make another hasty generalization by saying that when "you" use a blanket and "need to reach for something, your hands are trapped inside." One cannot assume that all people would have their hands "trapped inside" or, for that matter, that all people even have hands. Therefore using a blanket would not necessarily serve as an inconvenience and that is not proper grounds to sell the Snuggie on. Another fallacy is committed when the announcer says, "The Snuggie is machine washable so you will get years of warmth and comfort." Does anyone know what fallacy category that would fall under? I'm not sure, but I'm sure it is a fallacy.
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Commercials like this make me laugh. This is quite similar to the ShamWow ad I wrote about. As for that last logical fallacy, maybe Non Sequitur? Just because something can be washed, does not mean it is durable! That just doesn't even make sense.
ReplyDeletewhile yes the snuggie makes bold claims. its claims are not as unfounded as you make them seem. while yes saying everyone wants to get warmer when they are chilled is a generalization, its not a bad one and its not hard to see what its saying. the vast majority of people if they are cold will want to be warmer, clearly though hot and sweaty people who just enter a cold room will enjoy the feeling of coldness. but its nitpicky to call it a fallacy. you then call the snuggie out for assuming everyone has hands, if assuming people have hands is truly a fallacy that is worthy of being pointed out then no commercial would ever be aired because all of them assume we have hands. while yes the snuggy does make very bold claims about just how much it will improve life, your calling its assumption that people have hands is also a bit bold.
ReplyDeleteThis is exactly the point with fallacies--they sound pretty good until you think about them. Sometimes they still sound pretty good after, but both of the things I mentioned earlier were still fallacies. Think about it this way, according to http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/a/amputation/intro.htm, "approx 1 in 142 or 0.70% or 1.9 million people in USA [have something amputated]." Now I know this is not soley talking about hands, but hands are among the more common and that is a quite large statistic. The snuggie hand thing is a fallacy.
ReplyDeletehmmm--some of this does sound more like overstatement. But an unstated assumption can be fallacious.
ReplyDelete