The Crucible Fallacies

Gracie Shaikh

Mrs. Evans

AP Lang

3/22/2023

The Dangers of Logical Fallacies Throughout History Throughout history, moments of crisis have proven to leave the general public vulnerable, causing them to turn to irrational thoughts or convictions out of fear. Error-stricken reasoning—logical fallacies—become more prominent during times of mass hysteria. The Crucible by Arthur Miller depicts the dangers of logical fallacies in a society during the 1962 Salem Witch Trials, a period of religious extremism and paranoia about anti-Christianity. In response to this paranoia, the public turned against one another, and hundreds of fabricated accusations of Satanic affiliation emerged; those unjustly accused were imprisoned, charged, and in some cases

Communism—culminated in public hysteria over internal communist threats, efforts to contain communism, brinkmanship, advancement races, and other issues. Anything remotely socialist was marked as suspicious, and the public began to suspect not only one another but the government. Author Miller illustrates how logical fallacies create mass hysteria and cloud a society’s judgment; this is seen throughout the Salem Witch Trials in The Crucible and in times of history, such as the Red Scare. The logical fallacy called faulty causality—falsely assuming the correlation between two events—creates baseless accusations and paranoia within the public during times of crisis. In The Crucible, Abigail uses the dangers of faulty causality to deceive the public. When Abigail sees Mary Warren put a needle in a poppet, she harms herself in order to accuse Elizabeth of witchcraft: “Like a struck beast, he says, and screamed a scream that a bull would weep to hear. And he goes to save her, and, stuck two inches in the flesh of her belly, he draw a needle out. And demandin’ of her how she come to be so stabbed, she—to Proctor now—testify it were your wife’s familiar spirit pushed it in” (Miller 74). Abigail stabs

History reveals how logical fallacies are able to prosper through a vulnerable public, instilling mass hysteria and paranoia. As a result, the public succumbs to irrational decisions or beliefs. The dangers of logical fallacies are displayed throughout history, such as during the baseless witchcraft accusations in the Salem Witch Trials and the communist suspicions during the Red Scare. The logical fallacies of faulty causality, false dichotomy, and hasty generalization create mass hysteria and cloud a society’s judgment; however, there are other logical fallacies that can also have this