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.
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I thank an anonymous referee for constructive suggestions of how to reduce in length an initial version of this paper that was too long to be publishable.
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The author has no relevant financial or non-financial interests to declare. In particular, the author’s textbook entitled Critical Thinking (Toronto: Methuen, 1983) is long out of print, and the author has no plans to submit it or a revised version of it for publication. Also, the author has no personal relationships with any of the authors of the textbooks reviewed in this article.
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Hitchcock, D. Textbook Treatments of Fallacies. Argumentation 37, 233–245 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-023-09600-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-023-09600-1