Critical thinking is now needed more than ever. This accessible and engaging book provides the necessary tools to question and challenge the discourse that surrounds us—whether in the media, the classroom, or everyday conversation. Additionally, it offers readers a deeper understanding of the foundations of analytical thought. Informal Logical Fallacies: A Brief Guide is a systematic and concise introduction to more than fifty fallacies, from anthropomorphism and argumentum ad baculum, to reductionism and the slippery slope argument. This revised edition includes updated examples, exercises, and a new chapter on non-Western logical fallacies. With helpful definitions and relevant explanations, the author guides the reader through the realms of fallacious reasoning and deceptive rhetoric. This is an essential guide to philosophical reflection and clear thinking.
This book is a crash course in effective reasoning, meant to catapult you into a world where you start to see things how they really are, not how you think they are. The focus of this book is on logical fallacies, which loosely defined, are simply errors in reasoning. With the reading of each page, you can make significant improvements in the way you reason and make decisions. Logically Fallacious is one of the most comprehensive collections of logical fallacies with all original examples and easy to understand descriptions, perfect for educators, debaters, or anyone who wants to improve his or her reasoning skills. "Expose an irrational belief, keep a person rational for a day. Expose irrational thinking, keep a person rational for a lifetime." - Bo Bennett This 2021 Edition includes dozens of more logical fallacies with many updated examples.
A timely and accessible guide to 100 of the most infamous logical fallacies in Western philosophy, helping readers avoid and detect false assumptions and faulty reasoning You’ll love this book or you’ll hate it. So, you’re either with us or against us. And if you’re against us then you hate books. No true intellectual would hate this book. Ever decide to avoid a restaurant because of one bad meal? Choose a product because a celebrity endorsed it? Or ignore what a politician says because she’s not a member of your party? For as long as people have been discussing, conversing, persuading, advocating, proselytizing, pontificating, or otherwise stating their case, their arguments have been vulnerable to false assumptions and faulty reasoning. Drawing upon a long history of logical falsehoods and philosophical flubs, Bad Arguments demonstrates how misguided arguments come to be, and what we can do to detect them in the rhetoric of others and avoid using them ourselves. Fallacies—or conclusions that don’t follow from their premise—are at the root of most bad arguments, but it can be easy to stumble into a fallacy without realizing it. In this clear and concise guide to good arguments gone bad, Robert Arp, Steven Barbone, and Michael Bruce take readers through 100 of the most infamous fallacies in Western philosophy, identifying the most common missteps, pitfalls, and dead-ends of arguments gone awry. Whether an instance of sunk costs, is ought, affirming the consequent, moving the goal post, begging the question, or the ever-popular slippery slope, each fallacy engages with examples drawn from contemporary politics, economics, media, and popular culture. Further diagrams and tables supplement entries and contextualize common errors in logical reasoning. At a time in our world when it is crucial to be able to identify and challenge rhetorical half-truths, this bookhelps readers to better understand flawed argumentation and develop logical literacy. Unrivaled in its breadth of coverage and a worthy companion to its sister volume Just the Arguments (2011), Bad Arguments is an essential tool for undergraduate students and general readers looking to hone their critical thinking and rhetorical skills.
"If I have learned anything in ten years of formal debating, it is that arguments are no different: without a good understanding of the rules and tactics, you are likely to do poorly and be beaten."—HENRY ZHANG, President of the Yale Debate Association Your argument is valid and you know it; yet once again you find yourself leaving a debate feeling defeated and embarrassed. The matter is only made worse when you realize that your defeat came at the hands of someone's abuse of logic—and that with the right skills you could have won the argument. The ability to recognize logical fallacies when they occur is an essential life skill. Mastering Logical Fallacies is the clearest, boldest, and most systematic guide to dominating the rules and tactics of successful arguments. This book offers methodical breakdowns of the logical fallacies behind exceedingly common, yet detrimental, argumentative mistakes, and explores them through real life examples of logic-gone-wrong. Designed for those who are ready to gain the upper hand over their opponents, this master class teaches the necessary skills to identify your opponents' misuse of logic and construct effective, arguments that win. With the empowering strategies offered in Mastering Logical Fallacies you'll be able to reveal the slight-of-hand flaws in your challengers' rhetoric, and seize control of the argument with bulletproof logic.
This book examines the nature, sources, and implications of fallacies in philosophical reasoning. In doing so, it illustrates and evaluates various historical instances of this phenomenon. There is widespread interest in the practice and products of philosophizing, yet the important issue of fallacious reasoning in these matters has been effectively untouched. Nicholas Rescher fills this gap by presenting a systematic account of the principal ways in which philosophizing can go astray.
Presented as a Vorlesung in the German philosophical tradition, this book presents the most detailed account of Nelson’s method of argument analysis, celebrated by many luminaries such as Karl Popper. It was written in 1921 in opposition to the relativistic, subjectivistic and nihilistic tendencies of Nelson’s time. The book contains an exposition of a method that is a further development of Kant’s transcendental dialectics, followed by an application to the critical analysis of arguments by many famous thinkers, including Bentham, Mill, Poincaré, Leibniz, Hegel, Einstein, Bergson, Rickert, Simmel, Brentano, Stammler, Jellinek, Dingler, and Meinong. The book presents a general theory of philosophical argumentation as seen from the viewpoint of the typical fallacies committed by anybody arguing philosophically, whether professional philosophers or philosophical laypeople. Although the nature of philosophy and philosophical argumentation is one of the most recurrent objects of reflection for philosophers, this book represents the first attempt at a general theory of philosophical fallacy. According to Nelson, it is in the shape of false dilemmas that errors in reasoning always emerge, and false dilemmas are always the result of the same mechanism--the unwitting replacement of one concept for another.
This book is an investigation into metaphysics: its aims, scope, methodology and practice. Dyke argues that metaphysics should (and on the whole does) take itself to be concerned with investigating the fundamental nature of reality, and suggests that the ontological significance of language has been grossly exaggerated in the pursuit of that aim.
For seven decades Charles Hartshorne has presented his philosophical themes with ingenuity and deep historical awareness, comparing his positions in illuminating fashion with those of major figures from Plato to Kant to Popper. Integral to Hartshorne's thinking have been bold, fresh interpretations of such notions as God, freedom, change, creativity, aesthetic meaning, the social character of experience, and generalized causal possibility with a place for probabilities and open possibilities.
