Customer Reviews

The Logic of Real Arguments

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The book starts with a beautiful argument from Galileo's Two New Sciences (refuting Aristotelian belief on the influence of gravity on bodies of different weight). This is what makes this book far beyond the ordinary: it contains a wealth of instructive examples about the natural world, about society, about policy, about philosophy, and so on. These are not the usual made-up examples, but REAL ARGUMENTS: ranging from numerous samples of scientific argumentation to some more mundane arguments from newspapers. The author further introduces an informal method for analyzing (extracting and evaluating) arguments as they occur in ordinary language texts. The book not only offers an accessible introduction to critical analysis of theoretical argumentation occurring in informal texts. It is also of interest for logicians who want to have a better understanding of the considerations involved in analyzing unformalized arguments. This amounts, in my opinion, to a successful marriage between the insights from logic and the demands from reasoning patterns as they occur in substantive texts.

I've bought this book after reading Alec Fisher's "Critical thinking" which i liked very much. "The Logic..." is not an easy reading for me as it requires a lot of thinking about philosophical issues but very useful as it teaches how to tackle long and difficult arguments. I believe that is the main purpose of the book and if someone likes that sort of reading then this book is a good choice.

There is not much logic in this book. The author picked several social and economical thesis he personally loves or hates, and supports and attacks them under the guise of logical analysis.

The first example is from Thomas Malthus. The author destroy Malthus' arguments by showing how the premises *could* be wrong. That seems to be a really easy job, but the author find it necessary to quote Engels 3 times to corroborate himself. In the end, he suggests that, this thesis is wrong, because it has "always been welcome in the battle of the rich against the poor". The last word is "We can hardly leave this subject without also noting that Malthus always strongly opposed contraception. Such is the logic of man!"

I had to recheck the title of the book, and make sure it's about logic.

Now, if the author applies the same stringent standard to later examples, at least he would be consistent. No social and economical arguments could withstand. But that's not the case in this book. For example the author's verdict on Marx's argument is "Marx's reasoning is hard to fault *however we construe it* and that is partly what makes it a fascinating nugget of reasoning". The author arrived to that conclusion after only 2 pages of analysis, which is apparently enough to cover all ways to construe it.