The author of this book, Mei Sen peary, is currently the chairman of Adam Smith Institute, a British think tank. He has profound attainments in the fields of logic and philosophy. At the same time, I often participate in the recording of CNN and BBC programs. At present, there have been many bestsellers in the field of logic. His writing style is relaxed and humorous, and he often skillfully introduces obscure logical principles into humorous examples to entertain and educate.
1. People will make many fallacies in good faith because they ignore logical reasoning, the nature of evidence, or how to identify relevant information.
It is easy for individuals to fall into the emotional trap, especially when they are sure that others are as amiable as themselves, they will carefully give up their original position, otherwise they will be regarded as uncooperative.
When we are asked to explain the truth, we should weigh the evidence of each side and then get the truth as much as possible.
Advertisers all know that a specious appeal can gain credibility and strength as long as it is repeated enough.
Knowing some knowledge of formal logic and mathematics is very helpful to improve logical thinking ability.
Formal logic is an important branch of logic and a science that pays attention to research and reasoning. The most striking feature of formal logic is that all logic patterns have certain structural forms. The rigor of formal logic is reflected in the one-to-one correspondence between premise assumptions and inevitable conclusions, and any interference with this one-to-one correspondence through various wrong ways will form fallacies.
In the field of logic, people have summarized many wrong ways of thinking. Knowing these kinds of fallacies, we can easily identify fallacies, save thinking time, improve the response speed of the brain, and thus improve our logical thinking ability.
Mathematics, especially the knowledge of probability, is very necessary to identify those counter-intuitive logical fallacies. Luck, chance and magic in life are normal and ordinary from the perspective of probability. It is wrong to attribute small probability events that happened in the past to good luck. Things that seem to require harsh conditions are actually staged every day.
1. What we often say in our daily life is rational and unreasonable, and right and wrong belong to the field of informal logic research. Unlike formal logic, which emphasizes reasoning, informal logic focuses on argumentation in daily life.
2. Common fallacies in life are: appealing to wealth, authority, antiquity, novelty, absolute generalization, grassroots, emotion and one-sided evaluation.
Transcendentalism and emotional fallacy are the two most important fallacies that affect our daily life. A dozen fallacies, large and small, will be derived from it. These fallacies come from people's summary of early experience and human's powerful emotional ability.
In order to make a rational judgment, we should pay more attention to the feedback of facts in our life, and at the same time control the influence range of emotions, let emotions inspire us to do things, and let rationality decide what we should do.
When a person puts forward his views, he should provide evidence to support his views. That is, who advocates and who gives evidence. In this type of fallacy, debaters often use some language skills to avoid the burden of proof. If this situation is discovered in time, the fallacy can be identified quickly.
The correct argumentation procedure relies on credible arguments to prove one's point of view. The conclusion of this fallacy is not based on relevant evidence, but on interference factors such as emotional tendency or superstitious experts.
It is impossible to draw a convincing conclusion with unfounded premises and assumptions. This fallacy often introduces unproven assumptions and uses language skills to make the assumptions look correct. It is easy to infer pre-designed results from unfounded assumptions.