What a ride! It looks like this year (2021) is going to be just as insane as last year.
Is the world ready for the second truthful book about fallacy?
I took a break from my Conspiracy Science project to do a little work on another project that interests me, fallacy. What I thought would be a fun but mostly trivial project turned out to be a horse of another color. To my amazement (or not), I discovered that the fallacy literature appears to be one big—wait for it—conspiracy.
An Australian philosopher named Charles Hamblin began to penetrate the bullshit when his book Fallacies was published in 1970, though I’m not sure if he realized he was poking at a conspiracy.
Suffice it to say there’s probably a reason Irving Copi, who Hamblin thoroughly debunked, still gets far more publicity than Hamblin. It’s the same reason that anti-conspiracy propagandists and self-appointed fallacy gurus alike revere the great quack Karl Popper (in whose honor I minted a new fallacy, the appeal to Murphy’s law).
It appears that some very powerful people have planted us on a slippery slope, subverting fallacy to help them spread their propaganda. There may be no better example than a fallacy dubbed the appeal to Nature, which is grossly distorted in the literature.
Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
Thomas Huxley
Or consider the appeal to conspiracy, which Bo Bennett, the author of Logically Fallactions, calls “conspiracy theory.” Is he trying to tell us that all conspiracy theories are fallacies?
Even Adolf Hitler has been falsely associated with a fallacy—maybe two or three fallacies, in fact. On the other hand, some people claim Jesus was one of the first fallacists.
At any rate, I guarantee you won’t confuse Fallacy Pro with the competition. While Hamblin’s book is apparently available only in hardcover for $300, my book will be available as an epub, tentatively priced at $25.
Fallacy Pro will be published sometime in 2021, though I’m not yet sure when. If you would like to be notified when it’s available, please contact me.
By the way, Fallacy Pro is heavily illustrated, including more than one hundred fallacy avatars. How cool is that?
Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy.
Benito Mussolini
