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Textbook treatments of fallacies
Journal article

Textbook treatments of fallacies

Abstract

In his Fallacies, Hamblin (1970) castigated what he called the “standard treatment” of fallacies in introductory textbooks of his day as debased, worn-out, dogmatic, and unconnected to anything else in modern logic. A bit more than 50 years later, I investigate the treatment of fallacies in six English-language introductory textbooks with a section on fallacies that have gone into 10 or more editions, to see whether their treatment of fallacies has taken account of the scholarship on fallacies that Hamblin’s book evoked and is better than the treatment that Hamblin described. The answer is: not much. I conclude by setting out criteria for an adequate treatment of fallacies in an introductory textbook.

Authors

Hitchcock DL

Journal

Argumentation, , , pp. 1–12

Publisher

Springer Nature

Publication Date

June 1, 2023

DOI

10.1007/s10503-023-09600-1

ISSN

0920-427X

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