Discuss how "Love is a Fallacy" uses logical fallacies to make its point.  Consider, the title and Polly's decision to go steady with Petey Bellows.

Use this blog to answer the questions about Max Schulman's Love is a Fallacy.  Be sure to answer all parts of the prompt and comment on the previous post. To encourage replies to your post, try concluding with a question.

Use this format to post your response: 

1.  Respond to question posed by previous post (uness you are first to post);

2. Respond to prompt;

3. Pose a question for the next classmate to consider.

her name is Christiana VanderZyl 

Hypothesis contrary to fact is defined by Bo Bennett on his website "Logically Fallacious" as offering a poorly supported claim about what might have happened in the past or future, if circumstances or conditions were different.  The fallacy also entails treating future hypothetical situations as if they are fact. An example of this from the video is when Max claims that Polly would have never learned her fallacies if he had never come along. Max's claim is poorly supported because it is very possible that Polly could have learned fallacies from someone else if Max had never come along. Different circumstances would have had different outcomes.

"Love is a Fallacy" uses logical and real-life scenarios to make its point. Often times we under estimate other people and in this video we see that Max under estimates Polly. Polly, though her mannerisms come off very unintelligent, is in fact smarter than she portrays. This video puts the viewer in a very common situation for our age. The strategies and assumptions that Max uses such as saying they are a good match, that he loves her and that she owes him, are common relationship strategies among today's youth.  The fact that Max teaches Polly the fallacies and then uses them also proves that even though we may have the understanding of fallacies, we are still capable of using them in an argument.

The title "Love is a Fallacy" is bias and is not so black and white. It is simply an outlook or opinion stated to sway the viewers position. We can not conclude that this statement is either reliable or true. Polly's decision to go steady with Petey Bellows is very ionic. Max puts much effort into getting Polly as his girlfriend and it ends up working against him. We see in this situation that often times fallacies are used in a relationship but that does not necessarily get the relationship to move forward. While Petey and Polly may have started dating because Polly made a promise to Petey, their relationship was not based on any fallacies. Instead it was based on his raccoon coat and the mutual decision between the two. Max's effort to train Polly to be intelligent so he could have an intelligent beautiful wife as a lawyer failed.

After watching the video and hearing the fallacies that Polly was calling out on Max, it made wonder how many times people actually believe fallacies like that. The things Max was saying were things that we hear in society all the time. Do you think that if more people saw this video or understood fallacies better that they would have a different reaction to the relationship fallacies that they encountered?