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Summary: Invaluble for everyday life, not just the classroom...
Review: Although I gathered that this book was written primarily as a text for logic and critical thinking courses, it helped me immensely in terms of learning how to make sense of argumentative quality in everyday life, not only the classroom. I did not read this book for a class as I have graduated college, but I found it to be a real help in determining the strengths and weaknesses in arguments and other forms of persuasive speech that we encounter daily.
The book uses clear and familiar everyday examples to make the points, instead of presenting things in an abstract and think-tank way, and most people will find themselves realizing that they have had arguments or debates exactly like those described in the book. The book clearly demonstrates how much reason and critical thinking can be diminished or overlooked by laziness or unwillingness on the part of people to care enough to think well.
The chapters follow a clear course and almost every logical fallacy I have ever encountered in the classroom or the real world is covered in the book. It explains the fallacy, gives examples, and shows how to expose the fallacy for being a poor argument, as well as demonstrating ways to combat and point out to the other person (in a nice way) the flaw in the reasoning. The tone of the book is pleasently informal, as it attempts to create familiar dialouge and situations to which the reader can easily identify. I highly reccommend the book and think that anyone who cares enough to want to think more maturely would benefit greatly.
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Summary: Practice Safe Reasoning
Review: As a college logic teacher, I recommend this book. I divide my course into two major areas: formal and informal. Damer's book is perfect for the informal section. I find students are weary after learning about syllogisms (and "Barbara Celarent"). Informal arguments are much more common, and this book addresses 60 of the most common errors. The book is suitably brief for class use, with plenty of exercises to reinforce the detection and correction of the errors. After reading this book, watching political debates will never be the same!
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Summary: Clear, complete explanations without the jargon and symbols.
Review: Damer makes logic logical without the confusion of logical and pseudo mathamatical symbols. A great handbook with many examples. Damer also provides common sense advice to real word dialogue. A good subtitle might be: How to discover truth and keep your friends
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Summary: The antidote for contradiction and controversy.
Review: Damer pulls off a next to impossible task-naming, describing, exampling, and attacking 60 fallacies while structuring them neatly within four criteria of a good argument: relevance, acceptability, sufficient grounds and rebuttal. The last chapter discusses the specifics of "A Code of Conduct for Effective Rational Discussion." I used this test as a key element of my Ph.D. research and continue to use it in my later work. This should be required study for every politician and philosopher. A simpler version should be required study for every middle school and high school student. Discovering what is true would be so much easier with good arguments absence of fallacy. Be the first to rid your "neighborhood" of polemics. Study this book.
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Summary: Argument Karate
Review: I found this book to be well written, but it is more a book of argument karate. It is written with the idea of both ends of an issue following a logic and rules. "Attacking Faulty Reasoning" is certianly thorough, however academic. I found Nicholas Capaldi's "Art of Deception" much more practical- critical thinking street fighting.
Rating:
Summary: Argument Karate
Review: I found this book to be well written, but it is more a book of argument karate. It is written with the idea of both ends of an issue following a logic and rules. "Attacking Faulty Reasoning" is certianly thorough, however academic. I found Nicholas Capaldi's "Art of Deception" much more practical- critical thinking street fighting.
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Summary: clear and effective
Review: T.Edward Damer's book explains the specific fallacies people use to convince us of a claim.These claims are fallacious because they violate one of four criterion. The four criteria are separated into their own chapter.This allows for a clear vision of why the claim is unreaonable. I highly recommend reading this book if you want to improve your skills in what you should believe.It may madden you to see how our elected officials use these techniques to hoodwink us. What this book can not do,despite Mr. Damer's belief,is enlighten an unreasonable person. We too often encounter those who only see what they believe,not believe whay they see.
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Summary: Best critical thinking book out there
Review: That about sums it up. I have read MANY books on informal logic and critical thinking, but this one is by far the most clearly written and accessible.I particularly liked the author's focus on WHY fallacies are bad instead of just rattling them off. This is a book I can recommend to anyone, even the old veterans of argumentation.
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Summary: Excellent overall, but some examples are weak
Review: This book is readable and thorough, and probably the best introduction to critical thinking around. With such a large number of fallacies demanding multiple examples, the author must be forgiven if some of them seem a little off the mark, even while being technically correct. For example, the proposition (I'm paraphrasing) "Our baseball team was 1 and 11 this year, but with a new coach we'll do better next year." is in fact false. However, if the proposition were that "we'll probably do better" it would be true, because the probability is that we would get an average coach and an average coach has a record of 0.500, while assuming that coaching has a positive effect. Another example has former Predident Bush answering the question, "Did Dan Quayle's parents help him get into the national guard?" with words to the effect that "At least he served patrioticly and didn't run to Canada or burn the flag." The answer while technically irrelevant is a politician's way of saying, "Whether his parents helped or not is unimportant, at least ...blah, blah." Such an answer invites a rejoinder along the lines of "It really is important, because ..." The fault of the example is that it implies it is OK to rest on the technicalities even when you have a very good idea of what your opponent is really saying. So if some of the example are a little off-base, perhaps that is all to the good as a learning experience. The small bits of uneasiness are left to the student as an exercise to resolve. The author provides the tools for doing so.
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Summary: Good book except?
Review: This book seems to cover the topic well and has been helpful. I would tend to agree with the other positive reviewers. However, while the core of the book is good, the author's liberal biases show blatantly in his choice of examples of bad reasoning and also his own rebuttals to the examples. While the examples of bad reasoning are indeed bad reasoning, it would seem (from the book) that it is almost always conservatives who are guilty of this. It would not have been hard to come up with at least as many examples of bad reasoning on the liberal side. While the core of the book is good, it does seem that it has also been used as a vehicle to disseminate the liberal world view. This is unnecessary and degrades its overall quality. I suspect that a little more balance would help readers from both sides to overcome their biases and present better arguments.
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