Sunday, October 24, 2004

Humbug!

Download here Father and son, Jef Clark and Theo Clark, have written a delightfully entertaining guide to 'spotting fallacies in thinking.' Only 39 pages long, each page contains a description of a fallacy, an example of the fallacy, a comment explaining the example, and a cartoon illustrating some aspect of the fallacy. There are, of course, many more fallacies of thinking than are contained in this book, but those included give an excellent introduction to some of the more common fallacies of thinking. The book is in pdf format and you can download it free of charge by clicking on the link above or here. Highly recommended! Here's a sample: the description of the fallacy of 'browbeating':
This flaw usually occurs in face-to-face discussion. A discussion in which this flaw occurs is likely to be heated and aggressive in tone. The advocate is loud, threatening and voluble. He or she doesn't allow the opponent an opportunity to make his or her argument. When the opponent seeks to make a point, he or she is cut off abruptly and not allowed to finish. The speech rate of the advocate is rapid with minimal pauses. The flaw of browbeating can also occur in print, but the histrionics characteristic of browbeating are limited by the mode of communication... browbeating when expressed in print or writing is better described as polemics.

No comments:

Post a Comment