Fallacies

This past weekend, partially as a reward for my making Dean's List (woot woot), and partially because they know I have an interest in such things, my parents got me a book called Ideas of the Great Philosophers by William S. and Mabel Lewis Sahakian. (By the way, thank you Dad and Katherine.)It's an introduction to philosophy, and since I know diddly-squat about philosophy, it's a good one for me to start with. It talks about truth, and humankind's search for it.

The first part also deals with logical fallacies, a subject which all inquiring minds should at least glance at. Our government likes to use many of the fallacies mentioned when making their arguments to do whatever the hell it is they want to screw us with next. Argumentum ad hominem, or appeal to personal ridicule, is a favorite of theirs, though to be fair, all politicians use that one. In another blog I read today (sorry, don't remember which), I noticed a mention of an NY Times article which employed a fallacy of equivocation, which assumes that a word with multiple meanings only has one meaning. There are many, many more, a good number of which are mentioned in this article in Wikipedia.

Robert