The Logic of Real Arguments

Rating:
Summary: Bridging Logical and Real Arguments
Review: The book starts with a beautiful argument from Galileo's Two New Sciences (refuting Aristotelian belief on the influence of gravity on bodies of different weight). This is what makes this book far beyond the ordinary: it contains a wealth of instructive examples about the natural world, about society, about policy, about philosophy, and so on. These are not the usual made-up examples, but REAL ARGUMENTS: ranging from numerous samples of scientific argumentation to some more mundane arguments from newspapers. The author further introduces an informal method for analyzing (extracting and evaluating) arguments as they occur in ordinary language texts. The book not only offers an accessible introduction to critical analysis of theoretical argumentation occurring in informal texts. It is also of interest for logicians who want to have a better understanding of the considerations involved in analyzing unformalized arguments. This amounts, in my opinion, to a successful marriage between the insights from logic and the demands from reasoning patterns as they occur in substantive texts.