The web has never suffered from a shortage of bad arguments. One old university page tried to name as many of them as possible. Owen M. Williamson’s Master List of Logical Fallacies at the University of Texas at El Paso became the sort of reference page that escaped its course and started circulating everywhere.
Read the Master List of Logical Fallacies.
The page treats fallacies as deceptive or defective arguments that can sound persuasive while proving little. Its catalog extends well beyond the handful everybody remembers from school. Alongside ad hominem, circular reasoning and bandwagon arguments are contemporary rhetorical habits, overlapping categories and named patterns useful for asking what an argument is actually doing.
Williamson’s list has been cited by university teaching resources, critical-thinking courses and later reference works. Copies and mirrors also survive around the web, which is usually what happens when a useful university page becomes unofficial infrastructure.
The page is valuable precisely because it is not a magic argument-winning machine. Naming a fallacy does not automatically refute somebody. Two categories can overlap. Context matters. A claim that resembles a fallacy may still have relevant evidence behind it. And accusing another person of “a fallacy” can itself become a cheap substitute for addressing the substance.
Used properly, the list is a diagnostic vocabulary.
That makes it particularly suited to the web, where argument arrives detached from tone, context and sometimes even authorship. Being able to identify when somebody attacks a speaker instead of the claim, appeals to popularity as evidence, changes the subject or builds a circular justification is basic information hygiene.
The old university-page format helps too. It is one long reference object rather than a slideshow that gives every fallacy its own ad impression. Search the page, compare definitions, follow related concepts, leave.
Its continued citation years after the original course context is a small example of why publicly accessible academic pages mattered. A professor’s teaching handout could become a resource for the whole Internet without anybody turning it into a product.
Keep the Master List of Logical Fallacies handy. The page cannot stop people from arguing badly, but at least it gives the bad behavior names.