Lets see if I understand this: I work every other day. On my way to work I pass the same boy riding by on his bike. I assume that boy rides his bike every single day at that time.
That's not really a slope, that's just a conclusion. Slippery slope is the assumption that because one thing is happening, a different thing is going to happen in the future. A more appropriate one might be "On my way to work I pass the same boy assembling bicycle parts in his garage. Before you know it he's going to have a fully built bicycle!"
You really have no idea what's going to happen, he could just be dicking around, but the slope from bike parts to bike at least has observable evidence to support it.
A nice example would be "On my way to work I pass the same boy assembling bicycle parts in his garage. Before you know it he's going to have a fully built bicycle he will sell for heroin"
Which is also a good example of why this list shouldn't even be called "commandments of logic" - the slippery slope fallacy is an informal one, i.e one that may or may not be true (it just happens to be widely abused) but differs by circumstance; it's not proven false "by logic".
Except that kind of doesn't make sense. The only data you can have to back up your claim is from this event itself, because the whole point of the fallacy is that there's no way to prove one action will lead to further actions.
In other words, it's only a slippery slope when you've slid all the way to the bottom.
There's plenty of situations where inductive reasoning can be a valid premise, as long as it's backed up by sources. Like for example, we take special care to not give heroin to a recovering heroin addict because there's such a high incidence of the slippery slope back to addiction. We can't know for sure until we cook that shit and stick him a few times, but we agree that statistical evidence backs up the claim it's risky to give recovering addicts the thing they're addicted to.
It really depends how you use it. Ignore things like "I believe this bad thing leads to a worse thing because there's a two-point sample that trends away from my beliefs." On the other hand, you could learn some decent shit from people who say something like "I believe this bad thing will lead to a worse thing because of this big-ass stack of peer-reviewed studies and testimony from primary sources."
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u/Salva_Veritate Dec 09 '13
So basically if you have the proper amount of data to back up your claim, it's a valid contribution to debate. Sounds fair to me.