I was just about to write a comment in another blog about someone resorting to a reducto ad absurdum argument and I caught myself. Where the hell did I, who never finished college, get all these fancy latin phrases?
Looking back, I remember a 16mm film from high school. It was about how to identify propaganda and counter it. It stuck with me because "propaganda" was depicted as a 7-headed dragon, with one head being ad-hominum attack, another being false analogy, and so on. It was a keystone in my logical development.
I guess it's a pretty dry concept and they filmmakers had to do that to "catapult the propaganda." And it didn't occur to me until just now that depicting propaganda as a dragon IS propaganda.
Setup... beat... beat... beat... (repeat for 30 years) ... PUNCHLINE!
I learned about this stuff in a speech class in college, but the most valuable sopurce was a dictionary of philosophy and religion, which listed out logical fallacies.
ReplyDeleteThis list is nicely reproduced on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
--S