Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion by Heinrichs Jay

Author:Heinrichs, Jay [Heinrichs, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2008-02-11T16:00:00+00:00

He was in logic a great critic,

Profoundly skill’d in analytic;

He could distinguish and divide

A hair ’twixt south and south-west side.

There are scores of hair-splitting logical fallacies; I focused on the ones that infest politics and your daily life, and grouped them into seven sins. My list of seven logical sins can be boiled down still further, to just three:

Bad proof

Bad conclusion

Disconnect between proof and conclusion

1. False Comparison: Two things are similar, so they must be the same. The all natural fallacy falls under this sin: some natural ingredients are good for you, so anything called “natural” is healthful. The appeal to popularity makes another false comparison: other kids get to do it, so why don’t I? Reductio ad absurdum falsely compares a choice with another, ridiculous choice. The fallacy of antecedent makes a false comparison in time: this moment is identical to past moments. I’ve never had an accident, so I can’t have one now. The closely related false analogy joins apples to oranges and calls them the same. Because gay men are sexually attracted to other men, we should keep them out of the classroom—they must be pederasts as well. Finally, the unit fallacy does weird math with apples and oranges, often confusing the part for the whole. Violent crime dropped by 5 percent last year, and by another 8 percent this year, so it dropped a total of 13 percent. A part of a part gets confused with a part of the whole.

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