Book Review - How to Win Every Argument
"How to win every argument - the use and abuse of logic" by Madsen Pirie
This is an updated version of a classic guide to logical thinking and how to spot mistaken arguments.
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 is an updated version of a book published in the mid 1980's with the title "The Book of the fallacy - a training manual for intellectual subversives." The new text is about 95% common with the earlier version, although it has a few updated concepts such as "Thatcher's Blame."
"Thatcher's Blame" means setting up two possible outcomes so that whichever happens everything that goes wrong is the fault of the person you are trying to scapegoat. For example, early in Mrs T's premiership when we were still recovering from stagflation (actually caused under the previous Labour government), law and order problems were represented by the left as being due to poverty in general and the Thatcher government's supposed callous disregard for the poor in particular.
A few years later when the economy was roaring ahead the same commentators represented law and order problems as being due to materialism and people having too much money due to the policies of the same government. (Yes, Polly Toynbee and Roy Hattersley, Madsen's got you bang to rights. Come along quietly now ...)
Very sadly the new book does not include the highly amusing cartoons which illustrated the original version. That is almost the only fault I can find with it - a criticism which would be covered under the chapter of the book on "Trivial objections."
This is an updated version of a classic guide to logical thinking and how to spot mistaken arguments.
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 is an updated version of a book published in the mid 1980's with the title "The Book of the fallacy - a training manual for intellectual subversives." The new text is about 95% common with the earlier version, although it has a few updated concepts such as "Thatcher's Blame."
"Thatcher's Blame" means setting up two possible outcomes so that whichever happens everything that goes wrong is the fault of the person you are trying to scapegoat. For example, early in Mrs T's premiership when we were still recovering from stagflation (actually caused under the previous Labour government), law and order problems were represented by the left as being due to poverty in general and the Thatcher government's supposed callous disregard for the poor in particular.
A few years later when the economy was roaring ahead the same commentators represented law and order problems as being due to materialism and people having too much money due to the policies of the same government. (Yes, Polly Toynbee and Roy Hattersley, Madsen's got you bang to rights. Come along quietly now ...)
Very sadly the new book does not include the highly amusing cartoons which illustrated the original version. That is almost the only fault I can find with it - a criticism which would be covered under the chapter of the book on "Trivial objections."
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