Short description
Provides a guide to using logic in order to win arguments. This book shows you how to simultaneously strengthen your own thinking and identify the weaknesses in other people's arguments. It also shows how to be deliberately illogical - and get away with it.
Long description
In this witty and infectious book, Madsen Pirie provides a complete guide to using - and indeed abusing - logic in order to win arguments. He identifies with devastating examples all the most common fallacies popularly used in argument. We all like to think of ourselves as clear-headed and logical - but all readers will find in this book fallacies of which they themselves are guilty. The author shows you how to simultaneously strengthen your own thinking and identify the weaknesses in other people's arguments. And, more mischievously, Pirie also shows how to be deliberately illogical - and get away with it. This book will make you maddeningly smart: your family, friends and opponents will all wish that you had never read it.
Review
'an entertaining...idea' Nottingham Evening Post, 29/07/2006 'Armed with this book, we can go fearlessly into verbal combat...knowing how to muster our arguments and showing the fallacies in theirs...make a space for this on your shelves too. You never know when you may need it.' DMJ, The Ark, Spring 2007
Table of contents
- 79 A-Z entries, including:
- Abusive analogy
- Blinding with science
- The complex question
- Damning the alternatives
- Exclusive premises
- The gambler's fallacy
- Hedging
- Irrelevant humour
- Loaded words
- The red herring
- Shifting ground
- Trivial objections
- Wishful thinking.