Attacking Faulty Reasoning


Attacking Faulty Reasoning is a textbook on logical fallacies by T. Edward Damer that has been used for many years in a number of college courses on logic, critical thinking, argumentation, and philosophy. It explains 60 of the most commonly committed fallacies. Each of the fallacies is concisely defined and illustrated with several relevant examples. For each fallacy, the text gives suggestions about how to address or to "attack" the fallacy when it is encountered. The organization of the fallacies comes from the author’s own fallacy theory, which defines a fallacy as a violation of one of the five criteria of a good argument:
Each fallacy falls into at least one of Damer's five fallacy categories, which derive from the above criteria.

The five fallacy categories

The text also sets forth 12 principles that constitute a "." This code incorporates Damer’s fallacy theory and provides a procedural and ethical standard for the development of an effective intellectual style to be used when engaging in a rational discussion of important issues.