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A Guide for the Disputatious*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Norman Swartz
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University

Extract

It is obvious that teaching and research in informal logic (critical thinking, rhetoric) is a growth industry, indeed one of burgeoning proportions. Judging by skyrocketing enrolments and the avalanche of books, journals, computer aids, conferences, and workshops during the last decade, it would seem to be no passing fad but the overdue recognition of a societal need.

Type
Critical Notices/Études critiques
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1991

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References

Notes

1 Walton's other recent books in this area are Argument: The Logic of the Fallacies, coauthored with Woods, John (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1982)Google Scholar; Topical Relevance in Argumentation (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1982)Google Scholar; Logical Dialogue-Games and Fallacies (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984)Google Scholar; Arguer's Position: A Pragmatic Study of Ad Hominem Attack, Criticism, Refutation, and Fallacy (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985)Google Scholar; and Informal Fallacies (Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins, 1987).Google Scholar

2 Neither Walton nor the editor at Cambridge University Press seemsto have cared that the masculine pronoun is used virtually throughout.

3 See footnote 2.

4 Not unlike the one he himself warns against in the case of “begging the question” (p. 245–250).

5 Again, see footnote 2. Surely it would have compromised no stylistic principles to have made this a case of mixed-sex or of mother and daughter.

6 On the standard definition of “correlation” (i.e., of“correlation coefficient”), correlation is undefined for a single pair of numerical values (e.g., (2, 7) and must have a value of either 1 or–1 for any two pairs of values (e.g., (2, 1) and (4, –6). Correlation coefficients are significant only for n pairs of numbers, where n > 2.

7 A minor, sixth, point: one sentence is turned inside out. 'If B [sic] tends to be followed by A [sic], even in different circumstances after many trials, the claim that A causes B is made stronger” (p. 232).

8 Rescher, Nicholas, Plausible Reasoning (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1976).Google Scholar

9 Ibid., p. 17.

10 Ibid., chap. 4.