Fatal Fallacies

In the unprecedented assault on science and logical thinking afflicting the U.S., the role of lies has been recognized, if not adequately, by the general media. Almost totally ignored, however, are the logical fallacies perpetrating ideological nonsense. Christian fundamentalists and Republican plutocrats have formed our first religiously based national political party, dedicated to lower taxes on the rich and imposition of a superstitious dictatorship by the busybodies. Led by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, the worlds highest paid professional liar, the enemies of science and reason have deliberately accelerated the dumbing of America. Republican presidential candidates must reject climate science, and they cant unequivocally endorse the Theory of Evolution (which Theodore Roosevelt did 135 years ago). Enforced by determined Tea Party zealots, this process suppresses fact, endlessly repeats lies, and, more importantly, ignores logic. Every fallacy in the logic textbooks, buttressed by politically originated fallacies, is exploited to the fullest extent. These fallacies include the slippery slope, straw men, red herrings, reversing the burden of proof, vicious circles, language perversion, and single-entry bookkeeping, all united in rejection of science and perpetuation of free-lunch patriotism, supply-side economics, and other false ideologies.

This book examines the nature, sources, and implications of fallacies in philosophical reasoning. In doing so, it illustrates and evaluates various historical instances of this phenomenon. There is widespread interest in the practice and products of philosophizing, yet the important issue of fallacious reasoning in these matters has been effectively untouched. Nicholas Rescher fills this gap by presenting a systematic account of the principal ways in which philosophizing can go astray.

This book is concerned with the evaluation of natural argumentative discourse, and, in particular, with the language in which arguments are expressed. It introduces a systematic procedure for the analysis and assessment of arguments, which is designed to be a practical tool, and may be considered a pseudo-algorithm for argument evaluation. The first half of the book lays the theoretical groundwork, with a thorough examination of both the nature of language and the nature of argument. This leads to a definition of argumentation as reasoning expressed within a procedure, which itself yields the three frames of analysis used in the evaluation procedure: Process, Reasoning, and Expression. The second half begins with a detailed discussion of the concept of fallacy, with particular attention on fallacies of language, their origin and their effects. A new way of looking at fallacies emerges from these chapters, and it is that conception, together with the understanding of the nature of argumentation described in earlier sections, which ultimately provides the support for the Comprehensive Assessment Procedure for Natural Argumentation. The first two levels of this innovative procedure are outlined, while the third, that dealing with language, and involving the development of an Informal Argument Semantics, is fully described. The use of the system, and its power of analysis, are illustrated through the evaluation of a variety of examples of argumentative texts.