In debate or rhetoric, the slippery slope is an argument for the likelihood of one event or trend given another. It suggests that an action will initiate a chain of events culminating in an undesirable event later. The argument is sometimes referred to as the thin end of the wedge or the camel's nose. The slippery slope can be valid or fallacious. Debate (North American English) or debating (British English) is a formal method of interactive and position representational argument. ... Rhetoric (from Greek , rhêtôr, orator, teacher) is generally understood to be the art or technique of persuasion through the use of spoken language; however, this definition of rhetoric has expanded greatly since rhetoric emerged as a field of study in universities. ... In logic, an argument is a set of statements, consisting of a number of premises, a number of inferences, and a conclusion, which is said to have the following property: if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true or highly likely to be true. ... The camels nose is a metaphor for a situation where the permitting of some small act will lead consequently to a larger undesirable act or circumstance. ... In logic, the form of an argument is valid precisely if it cannot lead from true premises to a false conclusion. ... Look up fallacy in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

The slippery slope as argument

The slippery slope argument occurs in the following context: A, B denote events, situations, policies, actions, etc. Within this context, the proposer posits the following inferential scheme:

If A occurs

then the chances increase that B will occur.

The argument takes on one of various semantical forms:

• In one form, the proposer suggests that by making a move in a particular direction, we start down a "slippery slope". Having started down the metaphorical slope, it appears likely that we will continue in the same direction (the arguer usually sees the direction as a negative direction; hence the "sliding downwards" metaphor).
• Another form appears more static, arguing that admitting or permitting A creates a precedent that leads to admitting or permitting B, by following a long chain of logical relationships.

Look up metaphor in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... In law, a precedent or authority is a legal case establishing a principle or rule that a court may need to adopt when deciding subsequent cases with similar issues or facts. ...

Examples

For example, many civil libertarians argue that even minor increases in government authority, by making them seem less noteworthy, make future increases in that authority more likely: what would once have seemed a huge power grab, the argument goes, now becomes seen as just another incremental increase, and thus appears more palatable (this is also an example of the "boiling frog" allegory). In this way, it is very similar to the foot in the door technique of persuasion. A civil libertarian is one who is actively concerned with the protection of individual civil liberties and civil rights. ... The boiling frog story states that a frog can be boiled alive if the water is heated slowly enough — it is said that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will never... Foot-in-the-door technique is a persuasion method. ... Persuasion is a form of influence. ...

Eugene Volokh's Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope (PDF version) analyzes various types of such slippage. Volokh uses the example "gun registration may lead to gun confiscation" to describe six types of slippage: Eugene Volokh Eugene Volokh (born February 29, 1968) is an American legal commentator and law professor at the UCLA School of Law (located on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles). ...

1. Cost-lowering: Once all gun-owners have registered their firearms, the government will know exactly from whom to confiscate them.
2. Legal rule combination: Previously the government might need to search every house to confiscate guns, and such a search would violate the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. Registration would eliminate that problem.
3. Attitude altering: People may begin to think of gun ownership as a privilege rather than a right, and thus regard gun confiscation less seriously.
4. Small change tolerance: People may ignore gun registration because it constitutes just a small change, but when combined with other small changes, it could lead to the equivalent of confiscation.
5. Political power: The hassle of registration may reduce the number of gun owners, and thus the political power of the gun-ownership bloc.
6. Political momentum: Once the government has passed this gun law it becomes easier to pass other gun laws, including laws like confiscation.

Slippery slope can also be used as a retort to the establishment of arbitrary boundaries or limitations. For example, one might argue that rent prices must be kept to $1,000 or less a month to be affordable to tenants in an area of a city. A retort invoking the slippery slope could go in two different directions: The Bill of Rights in the National Archives. ...

• Once such price ceilings become accepted, they could be slowly lowered, eventually driving out the landlords and worsening the problem.
• If a $1,000 monthly rent is affordable, why isn't $1,025 or $1,050? By lumping the tenants into one abstract entity, the argument renders itself vulnerable to a slippery slope argument. A more careful argument in favor of price ceilings would statistically characterize the number of tenants who can afford housing at various levels based on income and choose a ceiling that achieves a specific goal, such as housing 80% of the working families in the area.

A very common political "slippery slope" is negotiating with terrorists. The argument is that if governments negotiate with terrorists, then the government acknowledges that terrorist groups have power, terrorism will be seen as a method that produces results and therefore terrorism will become more prevalent as a means to gain power and force governments to concede to demands. This argument is reasonable, but to be valid it must be backed up with supporting evidence relating to the premises made. Non-binding price ceiling Pricing, quantity, and welfare effects of a binding price ceiling A price ceiling is a government-imposed limit on how high a price can be charged on a product. ...

The slippery slope as fallacy

The slippery slope argument may or may not involve a fallacy (see the discussion on the two interpretative paradigms below: the momentum paradigm and the inductive paradigm). However, the slippery slope claim requires independent justification to connect the inevitability of B to an occurrence of A. Otherwise the slippery slope scheme merely serves as a device of sophistry. Look up fallacy in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Sophism (gr. ...

Often proponents of a "slippery slope" contention propose a long series of intermediate events as the mechanism of connection leading from A to B. The "camel's nose" provides one example of this: once a camel has managed to place its nose within a tent, the rest of the camel will inevitably follow. In this sense the slippery slope resembles the genetic fallacy, but in reverse. It also fails to assess ideas on their merits. ...

As an example of how an appealing slippery slope argument can be unsound, suppose that whenever a tree falls down, it has a 95% chance of knocking over another tree. We might conclude that soon a great many trees would fall, but this is not the case. There is a 5% chance that no more trees will fall, a 4.75% chance that exactly one more tree will fall, and so on. There is a 92.3% chance that 50 or fewer additional trees will fall. On average, another 14 trees will fall. In the absence of some momentum factor that makes later trees more likely to fall than earlier ones, this "domino effect" approaches zero probability.

Arguers also often link the slippery slope fallacy to the straw man fallacy in order to attack the initial position: A straw man argument is a logical fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponents position. ...

1. A has occurred (or will or might occur); therefore
2. B will inevitably happen. (slippery slope)
3. B is wrong; therefore
4. A is wrong. (straw man)

This form of argument often provides evaluative judgments on social change: once an exception is made to some rule, nothing will hold back further, more egregious exceptions to that rule. It has been suggested that Social development be merged into this article or section. ...

Note that these arguments may indeed have validity, but they require some independent justification of the connection between their terms: otherwise the argument (as a logical tool) remains fallacious. In logic, the form of an argument is valid precisely if it cannot lead from true premises to a false conclusion. ...

The "slippery slope" approach may also relate to the conjunction fallacy: with a long string of steps leading to an undesirable conclusion, the chance of all the steps actually occurring is actually less than the chance of any one of the individual steps occurring alone. The conjunction fallacy is a logical fallacy that occurs when it is assumed that specific conditions are more probable than general ones. ...

Supporting analogies

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Several common analogies support slippery slope arguments. Among these are analogies to physical momentum, to frictional forces and to mathematical induction. Image File history File links Circle-question. ...

Momentum or frictional analogies

In the momentum analogy, the occurrence of event A will initiate a process which will lead inevitably to occurrence of event B. The process may involve causal relationships between intermediate events, but in any case the slippery slope schema depends for its soundness on the validity of some analogue for the physical principle of momentum. This may take the form of a domino theory or contagion formulation. The domino theory principle may indeed explain why a chain of dominos collapses, but an independent argument is necessary to explain why a similar principle would hold in other circumstances. (This article discusses the soundess notion of informal logic. ... In classical mechanics, momentum (pl. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ...

An analogy similar to the momentum analogy is based on friction. In physics, there is always more frictional force against a nonmoving object (static friction) than against an already moving object (kinetic friction). Arguments that use this analogy assume that people's habits or inhibitions act in the same way. If a particular rule A is considered inviolable, some force akin to static friction is regarded as maintaining the status quo, preventing movement in the direction of abrogating A. If, on the other hand, an exception is made to A, the countervailing resistive force is akin to the weaker kinetic frictional force. Validity of this analogy requires an argument showing that the initial changes actually make further change in the direction of abrogating A easier. This article needs additional references or sources for verification. ... Determining the Coefficient of Friction. ... Kinetic friction is the type of friction that an object is subject to after it is in motion. ...

Induction analogy

Another analogy resembles mathematical induction. Consider the context of evaluating each one of a class of events A₁, A₂, A₃,..., A_n (for example, is the occurrence of the event harmful or not?). We assume that for each k, the event A_k is similar to A_k+1, so that A_k has the same evaluation as A_k+1. Mathematical induction is a method of mathematical proof typically used to establish that a given statement is true of all natural numbers. ...

We deduce that for k = 1, 2, 3, ...,n the event A_k has the same evaluation as A₁.

Therefore A_n has the same evaluation as A_'1.

For example, the following arguments fit the slippery slope scheme with the inductive interpretation

• If we grant a building permit to build a Mosque (Pentecostal Church, Temple) in our community, then there will be no bound on the number of building permits we will have to grant for Mosques (Pentecostal Churches, Temples) and the nature of this city will change. This argument instantiates the slippery slope scheme as follows: A_k is the situation in which k building permits are issued. One first argues that the situation of k permits is not significantly different from the one with k + 1 permits. Moreover, issuing permits to build 1000 Mosques (Pentecostal Churches, Temples) in a city of 300,000 will clearly change the nature of the community.

In most real-world applications such as the one above, the naïve inductive analogy is flawed because mathematical induction cannot be applied to imprecisely defined predicates. The term Real World or real world may mean: the stage of life that one enters after completing ones schooling, as in the sentence, After students enter the real world, they may not be able to sleep late as often as they did while in school. ...

See also

• Foot-in-the-door technique
• Reductio ad absurdum
• The camel's nose
• Domino theory

Foot-in-the-door technique is a persuasion method. ... Reductio ad absurdum (Latin: reduction to the absurd) also known as an apagogical argument, reductio ad impossibile, or proof by contradiction, is a type of logical argument where one assumes a claim for the sake of argument, derives an absurd or ridiculous outcome, and then concludes that the original assumption... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... In Philosophical logic, an informal fallacy is a pattern of reasoning which is false due to the falsity of one or more of its premises. ... Special pleading is a form of spurious argumentation where a position in a dispute introduces favorable details or excludes unfavorable details by alleging a need to apply additional considerations without proper criticism of these considerations themselves. ... Ignoratio elenchi (also known as irrelevant conclusion) is the logical fallacy of presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but which proves or supports a different proposition than the one it is purporting to prove or support. ... The gamblers fallacy is a logical fallacy which encompasses any of the following misconceptions: A random event is more likely to occur because it has not happened for a period of time; A random event is less likely to occur because it has not happened for a period of... The inverse gamblers fallacy is a tempting mistake in judgments of probability, comparable to the gamblers fallacy whence its name derives. ... A fallacy of distribution is a logical fallacy occurring when an argument assumes there is no difference between a term in the distributive (referring to every member of a class) and collective (referring to the class itself as a whole) sense. ... A fallacy of composition arises when one infers that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some (or even every) part of the whole. ... A fallacy of division occurs when someone reasons logically that something that is true of a thing must also be true of its constituents. ... This article needs additional references or sources for verification. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... In logic, correlative-based fallacies, also known as fallacies of distraction, are logical fallacies based on correlative conjunctions. ... The form of the fallacy of false dichotomy as an argument map with the conclusion at the top of the tree. ... The perfect solution fallacy is a logical fallacy that occurs when an argument assumes that a perfect solution exists and/or that a solution should be rejected because some part of the problem would still exist after it was implemented. ... The logical fallacy of denying the correlative is the opposite of the false dilemma, where an attempt is made at introducing alternatives where there are none. ... The logical fallacy of suppressed correlative is a type of argument which tries to redefine a correlative (two mutually exclusive options) so that one alternative encompasses the other, i. ... The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter. ... The logical fallacy of accident, also called destroying the exception or a dicto simpliciter ad dictum secundum quid, is a deductive fallacy occurring in statistical syllogisms (an argument based on a generalization) when an exception to the generalization is ignored. ... The logical fallacy of converse accident (also called reverse accident, destroying the exception or a dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter) is a deductive fallacy that can occur in a statistical syllogism when an exception to a generalization is wrongly called for. ... A faulty generalization, also known as an inductive fallacy, is any of several errors of inductive inference: Hasty generalization is the fallacy of examining just one or very few examples or studying a single case, and generalizing that to be representative of the whole class of objects or phenomena. ... Hasty generalization, is a logical fallacy of faulty generalization by reaching an inductive generalization based on insufficient evidence. ... A biased sample is one that is falsely taken to be typical of a population from which it is drawn. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... The logical fallacy of misleading vividness involves describing some occurrence in vivid detail, even if it is an exceptional occurrence, to convince someone that it is a problem. ... The conjunction fallacy is a logical fallacy that occurs when it is assumed that specific conditions are more probable than general ones. ... Ambiguity is one way in which the meanings of words and phrases can be unclear, but there is another way, which is different from ambiguity: vagueness. ... Look up ambiguity in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Continuum fallacy, also called fallacy of the beard is a logical fallacy which abuses the paradox of the heap. ... Equivocation, also known as amphibology, is classified as both a formal and informal fallacy. ... The fallacy of a false attribution occurs when an advocate appeals to an irrelevant, unqualified, unidentified, biased or fabricated source in support of an argument. ... It has been suggested that Contextomy be merged into this article or section. ... Lokis Wager is a form of logical fallacy. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Special Pleading . ... Fallacies of questionable cause, also known as causal fallacies, non causa pro causa (non-cause for cause in Latin) or false cause, are informal fallacies where a cause is incorrectly identified. ... Correlation does not imply causation is a phrase used in the sciences and statistics to emphasize that correlation between two variables does not imply there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the two. ... The West Wing, see Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc (The West Wing). ... The regression (or regressive) fallacy is a logical fallacy. ... The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is a logical fallacy where a cluster of statistically non-significant data is taken from its context, and therefore thought to have a common cause. ... Circular cause and consequence is a logical fallacy where the consequence of the phenomenon is claimed to be its root cause. ... Wrong direction is a logical fallacy of causation where cause and effect are reversed. ... The fallacy of the single cause, also known as joint effect or causal oversimplification, is a logical fallacy of causation that occurs when it is assumed that there is one, simple cause of an outcome when in reality it may have been caused by a number of only jointly sufficient...

References

• Mario Rizzo and Glen Whitman. "The Camel's Nose is in the Tent: Rules, Theories and Slippery Slopes", UCLA Law Review 51.2 (2003): 539-592.

External links

• Propaganda Critic: Unwarranted extrapolation
• Nizkor: Slippery slope
• Fallacy files: slippery slope
• Slippery slope in politics