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This is an introductory guide to the basic principles of constructing good arguments and criticizing bad ones. It is nontechnical in its approach, and is based on 150 key examples, each discussed and evaluated in clear, illustrative detail. The author explains how errors, fallacies, and other key failures of argument occur. He shows how correct uses of argument are based on sound argument strategies for reasoned persuasion and critical questions for responding. Among the many subjects covered are: techniques of posing, replying to, and criticizing questions, forms of valid argument, relevance, appeals to emotion, personal attack, uses and abuses of expert opinion, problems in deploying statistics, loaded terms, equivocation, and arguments from analogy.
Preface; Acknowledgments; 1. Argument as reasoned dialogue; 2. Questions and answers in dialogue; 3. Criticisms of irrelevance; 4. Appeals to emotion; 5. Valid arguments; 6. Personal attack in argumentation; 7. Appeals to authority; 8. Inductive errors, bias, and fallacies; 9. Natural language argumentation; Bibliography; Index.
Anonymous
Posted July 29, 2003
It has been a long time since I have read a book that is so hard to follow. This book does not put its concepts in a everyday easy to understand way. This book leans more to the philosophical side of the science behind dialogues.
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Overview
This is an introductory guide to the basic principles of constructing good arguments and criticizing bad ones. It is nontechnical in its approach, and is based on 150 key examples, each discussed and evaluated in clear, illustrative detail. The author explains how errors, fallacies, and other key failures of argument occur. He shows how correct uses of argument are based on sound argument strategies for reasoned persuasion and critical questions for responding. Among the many subjects covered are: techniques of ...