1) Argument – A set of reasons given in support of a conclusion.
2) Validity – The conclusion necessarily follows from the premises. If the premises are true, the conclusion must also be true.
3) Equivocation – using the same word two different ways.
4) Soundness – valid with true premises.
5) Utilitarianism – The ethical doctrine that virtue is based on utility, and that conduct should be directed toward promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number of persons.
6) Utility – the state or quality of being useful.
7) Begging the question – A form of circular reasoning in which a conclusion is derived from premises that presuppose the conclusion.
8) Ad Hominem – Your reasoning contains this fallacy if you make an irrelevant attack on the arguer and suggest that this attack undermines the argument itself.
9) False Dichotomy – A reasoner who unfairly presents too few choices and then implies that a choice must be made among this short menu of choices.
10) Ethics – a system of moral principles/ that branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions.
11) Existentialism – stresses the individuals unique position as a self-determining agent responsible for the authenticity of his or her choices.
12) Determinism – the doctrine that all facts and events exemplify natural law.
13) Fallacy – a misleading or unsound argument.
14) Allegory – a representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning through concrete or material forms; figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another.
15) Philosophy – the rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge, or conduct.
16) Straw Man – when a person simply ignores a person’s actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position.
17) Red Herring – fallacy that is an irrelevant topic introduced in an argument to divert the attention of listeners or readers from the original issue.
18) To Quoque – appeal to hypocrisy is an informal logical fallacy that intends to discredit the validity of the opponent’s logical argument by asserting the opponent’s failure to act consistently in accordance with its conclusion.
19) Non Sequitur – a conclusion or statement that does not logically follow from the previous argument or statement.
20) Slippery Slope – a person asserts that some event must inevitably follow from another without any argument for the inevitability of the event in question.
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