Philip Ward - The Book of Common Fallacies

BOOKS BY PHILIP WARD

Poetry

Collected Poems, 1960

Seldom Rains, 1967

At the Best of Times, 1968

The Poet and the Microscope, 1969

Maps on the Ceiling, 1970

A House on Fire, 1973

Impostors and their Imitators, 1977

The Keymakers, 1977

Drama

A Musical Breakfast, 1968

Garrity and other Plays, 1970

Pincers, 1973

Television Plays, 1976

Travel

Touring Libya, 3 vols., 1967-9

Tripoli, 1969

Touring Iran, 1970

Sabratha, 1970

Motoring to Nalut, 1970

Touring Cyprus, 1971

The Way to Wadi al-Khail, 1971

Touring Lebanon, 1971

Come with me to Ireland, 1972

The Aeolian Islands, 1973

Bangkok, 1974

Indonesia: a Travelers Guide

(as Darby Greenfield), 2 vols., 1975-6

Fiction and Essays

The Okefani Song of Nij Zitru, 1966

Ambigamus, or The Logic Box, 1967

Apuleius on Trial at Sabratha, 1968

The Quell-Finger Dialogues, 1969

A Lizard and other Distractions, 1969

A Maltese Boyhood, 1976

Librarianship

Simplified Cataloguing Rules (with R. Cave), 1959

A Survey of Libyan Bibliographical Resources, 1964

The Libyan Research Library Catalog, 1970

Planning a National Library Service, 1973

Indonesia: the Development of a National Library

Service, 3 vols., 1976

Literature

Spanish Literary Appreciation, 1969

Indonesian Traditional Poetry, 1975

The Oxford Companion to Spanish Literature, 1978

Copyright 1978, 1980, 2012 by Philip Ward and The Oleander Press

Additional content 2012 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

Originally published as A Dictionary of Common Fallacies by The Oleander Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ward, Philip, 1938
The book of common fallacies : falsehoods, misconceptions, flawed facts, and half-truths that are ruining your life / Phillip Ward ; with Julia Edwards.

p. cm.

Updated ed. of authors: Dictionary of common fallacies, c1988.

ISBN 978-1-61608-336-6 (alk. paper)1. Common fallacies--Dictionaries. I. Edwards, Julia. II. Ward, Philip, 1938- Dictionary of common fallacies. III. Title. AZ999.W36 2012 001.9'6--dc23

2012006614

Printed in the United States of America

Originally published more than three decades ago, The Book of Common Fallacies sought to educate, entertain, and enlighten at a time when there was no internet, personal computers were extremely rare, and smartphones and internet-connected tablets only existed in the minds of science fiction writers. Nevertheless, Philip Ward managed to pack the original two volumes full of myth-debunking knowledge, much of it still relevant even today in our always-connected, instant-answers-at-our-fingertips world.

In this new single-volume edition, we have left the majority of Wards original text and style unchanged, only deleting those entries that were truly outdated (though we retained those entries that were outdated but histotrically interesting). In addition, we have added more than a hundred brand-new entries to address some of the myths, urban legends, and common misconceptions that plague modern society today. Youll find these entries in gray boxes.

The Book of Common Fallacies deals not only with the narrow field of purely logical fallacies, but also with a number of important ideas or theories common either now or in the past which have been proved wrong by scientific experiment or observation, or are so intrinsically improbable that their widespread acceptance should be questioned.

The Latin word fallere (to escape from, deceive) gave the Vulgar Latin fallire (to commit a fault, deceive, fail), and the adjective fallax (deceptive), which provided the English adjective fallacious through fallaciosus. In classical logic, a fallacy is understood to denote an argument violating the laws of correct demonstration; more generally, it refers to any mistaken statement used in argument, while in common parlance is understood in the even wider sense of a mistaken view which is held by a relatively large number of people in spite of its having been disproved by some form of scientific or logical test.

For a mind, let us not say exactly ignorant, but shall we say superficial, a work on popular errors might appear quite useless. Why, indeed, he might complain, give the slightest attention, the least emphasis to those daydreams which occupy the brain of the common people, old wives, nurses, and children? asked Louis Pierre Francois Adolphe, Marquis de Chesnel de la Charbouclais, in mock despair, before contributing 1360 closely printed columns of popular fallacies to Mignes Troisime et dernire encyclopdie thologique (Paris, 1856, vol. 20).

Why indeed! As if it were not provocation enough to read newspapers and magazines still containing horoscopes in the 1970s, to see shelf upon shelf of fashionable occult literature in otherwise reputable bookshops, fanatic religious sects springing up to make claims of miracle-working and Messianity, extremist political groups seeking converts among the badly educated and the confused, and pseudo-sciences making untestable and incredible claims. However, a dictionary which exhaustively attempted to examine all the various fallacies which have bewitched, beguiled, and bemused the minds of men (and women) would fill an anti-encyclopedia more voluminous than that of the Marquis de Chesnel de la Charbouclais. The intention of the present work is not so ambitious: it merely offers to anatomize some of the popular beliefs which have been shown to be false by those without a vested interest in deceiving the multitude for power, wealth or prestige.

The compiler has taken to heart the three mildly skeptical attitudes proposed by Bertrand Russell in Let the people think (London, 1941, p. 2):

1. That when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain;
2. That when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert;
3. That when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.

These opinions may seem mild, wrote Russell, yet, if accepted, they would absolutely revolutionize human life. The opinions for which people are willing to fight and persecute all belong to one of the three classes which this skepticism condemns. When there are rational grounds for an opinion, people are content to set them forth and wait for them to operate. In such cases, people do not hold their opinions with passion; they hold them calmly, and set forth their reasons quietly. The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction.