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The Book of the Fallacy: A Training Manual for Intellectual Subversives
  
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The Book of the Fallacy: A Training Manual for Intellectual Subversives (Hardcover)

by Madsen Pirie (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 189 pages
  • Publisher: Routledge (3 Oct 1985)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 071020521X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0710205216
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 728,207 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Product Description
Those tricks of logic or language used to persuade people into accepting false beliefs are gleefully exposed.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Invaluble guide to spotting faulty logic, 27 Jul 2006
By Marshall Lord (Whitehaven, UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   
We've all been in the situation where some smart-alec produces an argument, often as a joke, which everyone knows must be wrong but where nobody can quite see the mistake.

More seriously, I suspect most of us have seen debates where one side appears to have much more evidence to support their case, until someone comes along who presents the other side of the argument so much better that everyone is convinced - at least until after the superior speaker has won the vote/verdict/board or council decision, by which time it is too late.

Madsen Pirie's book is a masterly and very entertaining guide to the different tricks which people can use to make their argument sound much stronger than it really is, how to spot them, and what the holes in their logic are.

He lists the logical fallacies which, by accident or design, can lead people to support false conclusions.

Unfortunately, as Madsen Pirie points out, knowing why the argument you are listening to is wrong does not always make it easy to defeat the person advancing it. Arguments "ad baculum" (by threat of force) do not go away if you prove the person making the threat to be wrong, irrelevant humour, if it is funny enough, can carry away a valid argument on a gale of laughter, and emotional appeals can be extremely hard to stop with mere logic.

Nevertheless, to be able to understand why an argument is wrong is a useful start - if you don't know yourself you have little chance of persuading anyone else. And this book is really helpful at showing you how to see where faulty logic is in play.

This book was republished in 2006 with a new title "How to Win Every Argument - the use and abuse of logic." The text is about 95% common, although the new version has a few updated concepts such as "Thatcher's Blame."

Unfortunately the new book does not include the highly amusing cartoons which illustrate this original version.
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