Thirty-eight dishonest rhetorical tricks

Thirty-eight dishonest rhetorical tricks and how to overcome them.
From Straight and Crooked Thinking by Robert H. Thouless, Pan Books, ISBN 0 330 24127 3, copyright 1930, 1953 and 1974, via this site.

In most textbooks of logic there is to be found a list of "fallacies", classified in accordance with the logical principles they violate.

Such collections are interesting and important, and it is to be hoped that any readers who wish to go more deeply into the principles of logical thought will turn to these works.

[Those who wish to go more deeply into the principles of effective communication and the art of persuasion should likewise consult treatises on Rhetoric and other readily available works on the subject of thinking straight.]

The present list is, however, something quite different. Its aim is practical and not theoretical. It is intended to be a list which can be conveniently used for detecting dishonest modes of thought which we shall actually meet in arguments and speeches.

Sometimes more than one of the tricks mentioned would be classified by the logician under one heading, some he would omit altogether, while others that he would put in are not to be found here.

Practical convenience and practical importance are the criteria I have used in this list.

If we have a plague of flies in the house we buy fly-papers and not a treatise on the zoological classification of Musca domestica. This implies no sort of disrespect for zoologists; or for the value of their work as a first step in the effective control of flies.

The present book bears to the treatises of logicians the relationship of fly-paper to zoological classifications.

Other books have been concerned with the appraisal of the whole of an argumentative passage without such analysis into sound and unsound parts as I have attempted.

Undoubtedly it is also important to be able to say of an argued case whether it has or has not been established by the arguments brought forward. Mere detection of crooked elements in the argument is not sufficient to settle this question since a good argumentative case may be disfigured by crooked arguments.

The study of crooked thinking is, however, an essential preliminary to this problem of judging the soundness of an argued case. It is only when we have cleared away the emotional thinking, the selected instances, the inappropriate analogies, etc., that we can see clearly the underlying case and make a sound judgement as to whether it is right or wrong.

The thirty-eight dishonest tricks of argument described in the present book are listed here [a more readable version of the list as shown on this page].

See also Arthur Schopenhauer's 38-item list in The Art of Controversy.