Madsen Pirie

Ha ha, this is shit. For an adaption of what was likely a better book The Book of the Fallacy (which at least would have done what it said on the tin--althought what kind of person wants to "win every argument" anyway?), Pirie went full vaudeville, contradicting himself from pompous entry to wokka-wokka example to sneery baggy-pants commentary. All kinds of snobbish opinions that are unwelcome in what had potential to be a good simple glossary. A world inhabited by Spanish peasants, patent medicines, Pirie Torying it up in 2007. He wears a bowtie.

The guy never heard that reasoning is heuristic, is what it is--thinks we work by evaluating propositions syllogistically and acting on their basis. Never heard of a inguistic turn, even though 90% of the fallacies he presents here are mere careless speech. Rubbishes gun ownership as a cause of gun death (it's almost too hard to pick one example of his shit) by mentioning Switzerland, but quite evidently, you add "in the USA" to your argument and that's all it takes. What's the Latin for "pretended noncomprehension of your opponent's argument"?

The best thing was I lerned the meanings of some words, like "equivocate" and "prevaricate" and "tergiversate" all kind of go in the same bucket until you find out that the former means "make two words mean the same thing, illegitimately," and they you're like okay I'll give that a home. Learning the Latin is less fun than you think, mostly because you're like "oh, post hoc ergo propter hoc is just what Aquinas said when he wanted to say "correlation is not causation." I can say that in English." And then he's all "oho! the exception that proves is the exception that TESTS the rule! my father says everything's negotiable! I went to St Andrew's! have some more claret" but that's a fucked-up thing to try to prove anybody wrong on because he knows very well that the exception that proves the rule means something like "the exception despite which we maintain that the rule generally holds." How do you function without probabilistic thinking? It's easy to see the connection with the market logic that Pirie, the president of the Adam Smith Institute, espouses. You starve, you fail, you die, because the market, because market logic trumps all other concerns because growth.

Formal logic is limited in its scope. We are rhetorical beings, and also formed by the culture and biases the study of which Pirie rubbishes. Enough.… (meer)