Frivolous literary note

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

Just to make things more slippery:

I was taught that a slippery slope argument is one that tries to fix a point on a continuum 
where no clear lines of demarcartion exist.  For example, the concept of *life* is a slippery
 slope argument because no one can say where *life* begins.  The Catholic church holds 
that at the moment of conception a fetus is a moral being.  Most scientists would reject
 this claim.  There's no objective authority to determine where on the continuum cell 
duplication turns into a human being.  *Race* is a similar slippery slope according to this 
way of thinking--there's no objective measurement that can determine a person's *race* 
because all *races* shade into each other w/ no boundaries. The last effort to find such an 
objective criterion for race was I think an anthropologist named Carlton Coon at U. of 
Pennsylvania in the 1920s.  Coon argued that certain *mongoloid races* possessed a fifth
 cusp on a molar.  His data were rejected and he censured by the rest of the 
anthropological community.

These examples don't seem to fit your definition though, jimmy.  What would you call
 them?  I make no claim to authority here; just some background in rhetoric andf years of
 dealing w/ faulty reasoning in student (and professional) writing.

Some of your examples, onthe other hand, seem to fit other fallacies much more clearly.

>1."We have to stop the tuition increase! The next thing you know, they'll
>be charging $40,000 a semester!"

Isn't that just a non sequitur?
>
>4."We've got to stop them from banning pornography. Once they start banning
>one form of literature, they will never stop. Next thing you know, they
>will be burning all the books!"
Usn't that just a faulty generalization?  In fact, most of your definition seems to  fall 
under faulty generaliztion.  How is it different?

So, I liked your post a lot, but I'm still muddled.  See? (5) You can never read a post on a 
difficult topic without becoming hopelessly lost.

john m