[humanrebar]

What about looking at these lists of fallacies as vocabulary building tools? Perhaps fallacies are all variations on a handful of errors, but it certainly expedites conversation to be able to say, "No, that's just begging the question." Otherwise I would have to waste my breath disagreeing in a more clumsy way.

[mbateman]

I agree, there's some value in that. But two things: (1) For begging the question, I think it's more perspicuous to go up a level of abstraction and talk about circular reasoning. And something analogous is true of most of these fallacies. (2) For any real argument you're going to have to spend some breath anyway. It's very rare when you can just stop at, "Isn't that question-begging/circular?", or, "But aren't you equivocating on the word 'freedom'?" This is part of what I mean by saying that reasoning is an art: the classification of an error in reasoning in any particular case will involve nuance and controversy.