![]() It brought precision where there was potential ambiguity and rigor where there was some hand-waving.ĭuring the same time, I perused a few books on propositional logic, both modern and medieval, one of which was Robert Gula's A Handbook of Logical Fallacies. ![]() It was an intriguing way of reasoning about invariants using discrete mathematics rather than the usual notation-English. Many years ago, I spent part of my time writing software specifications using first-order predicate logic. This work primarily talks about things that one should not do in arguments. The mathematician George Pólya is quoted as having said in a lecture on teaching the subject that in addition to understanding it well, one must also know how to misunderstand it. In his book, On Writing, Stephen King writes: “One learns most clearly what not to do by reading bad prose.” He describes his experience of reading a particularly terrible novel as, “the literary equivalent of a smallpox vaccination”. Reading about things that one should not do is actually a useful learning experience. Each fallacy has just one page of exposition, and so the terseness of the prose is intentional. Unlike such works, there isn't a narrative that ties them together they are discrete scenes, connected only through style and theme, which better affords adaptability and reuse. The illustrations are partly inspired by allegories such as Orwell's Animal Farm and partly by the humorous nonsense of works such as Lewis Carroll's stories and poems. ![]() This work's novelty is in its use of illustrations to describe a small set of common errors in reasoning that plague a lot of our present discourse. The literature on logic and logical fallacies is wide and exhaustive. ![]()
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