How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic
by Madsen Pirie
Continuum, £8.99 (pb), ISBN 878-0-8264-9894-6
A catalogue of those hardy perennials of human reasoning, fallacies, might seem like something for the specialist only, but this lively, even breezy, guide is a highly readable handbook, running alphabetically from abusive analogy to wishful thinking. Along the way we find, of course, the classic fallacies of affirming the consequent, the undistributed middle and argumentum ad hominem. Alongside them are perhaps less well-known types such as poisoning the well, the runaway train and Thatcher’s blame, the latter two, at least, not so often mentioned by Aristotle and his colleagues.
Each of the 80-odd entries is a clear and careful explanation of a fallacy, but what distinguishes this book from other books on logic and argumentation is a Machiavellian coda in each case, suggesting how an unscrupulous reader might make skillful use of the fallacy in order to beat an opponent. Naturally, the fair-minded, noble, truth-seeking readers of this journal would never dream of deliberately using invalid arguments to help demolish the cherished, time-honoured and universally popular theories and stories of life-threatening charlatans and psychic crooks. Would they?
Paul Taylor
