Conspiracy Theory, Questionnaire Example

Identify a place where the text makes a claim, but does not provide evidence to support it.

Since the famous image of the first man landing on the moon appears to have no stars, many people believe that our ability to land on the moon has been a hoax and the pictures have been made up. However, there is no logic that can prove this because since we had never been to the moon before this moment, we wouldn’t know whether or not we would be able to see stars from it either through our eyes or through pictures. Therefore, there is no real evidence to say that because we don’t see stars in the moon landing pictures that it also must be fake.

Identify a place where the text makes a claim and gives evidence, but uses evidence that may be untrue.

Other people who believe that the moon landing was fake have this opinion because they believe that the radioactivity from space would have killed the astronauts. Despite this scientists have proven this untrue because they measured the radioactivity from space and compared it to the amount that is capable of killing someone. They found that the radioactivity in space isn’t close to the amount that can kill someone.

Identify a place where the text uses an Ad Hominem attack or Guilt by Association to attack a person rather than prove their central argument.

An Ad Hominem fallacy is made when the article talks about mistakes that scientists have made before and when they have been wrong. Despite the fact that scientists have been wrong about some things, the same scientists that made these mistakes were not involved in the interpretation of the evidence we have from people landing on the moon.

Identify a place where the text commits a slippery slope fallacy, a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, or has some other problem with applying the idea of cause and effect.

People believe that since there was no wind blowing on the moon in the video, we didn’t land on the moon. However, they fail to explain why there could be no wind blowing on the moon, so this argument commits the slippery slope fallacy.

Identify a place where the text uses the fallacy of equivocation or uses tricky language or deliberately misleading language.

People who argue against the moon landing use a lot of tricky wording to confuse readers due to the scientific nature of the moon discovery. Things that may throw off readers include the discussion of the lack of an impact crater, radiation, other scientific terminology that an average person will likely be unfamiliar with.

Identify a place where the text provides evidence that is true, but which does not prove the claim they are using it to prove.

A poll shows that 6% of Americans think that we didn’t land on the moon. While this is useful information, it doesn’t show us that the moon landing is necessarily false. In fact, it is likely to prove the opposite point that it did happen.

Provide a counter-argument that suggests an alternate explanation for the primary claim of the text or any of the sub-claims of the text.

The primary counterargument that contradicts the belief that we didn’t land on the moon depends on the specific evidence that critics of the moon landing use to argue their opinion. For example, there is no crater impact when the spaceship landed on the moon because the moon has a lack of gravity. On earth, we could expect a crater impact but this is not true on the moon. In addition, the American flag in the video recording is not waving because there is no wind on the moon. We can’t apply our understanding of physics on earth to the physics of a different planet.

Provide a counter-argument that makes the central claim or any sub-claim in the text less likely to be true.

As mentioned above, a secondary argument is that there are no stars in the pictures of the moon landing so it must have been fake. However, many pictures we take on earth don’t have stars in the background even though they were there when the picture was taken. Therefore, this happened just because a photograph was taken and the stars were really there.