Published by Granta Books, 2008, softcover, index, 334 pages, condition: new.
This companion volume to "The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten" provides another rapid-fire selection of short, stimulating and entertaining capsules of philosophy. This time the focus is on the bad argumentative moves people use all the time, in politics, the media and everyday life. Each entry will be around 700 words and will take as its starting point an example of questionable reasoning from the media or literature. As with "The Pig", the aim is to give readers something to chew on and work through for themselves.
This is a fun, useful, and quick-to-read book with a lousy title. The Duck part is fine because it's intriguing, but what are "experiments for the armchair philosopher" when they're at home? I had no idea what I was going to read when I picked this one up.
I see that there's another edition that is subtitled, instead, "and 99 Other Bad Arguments" and that's much more representative of the content. The author is indeed a professor of philosophy and the book is about rhetoric, with a very accessible and pop culture sort of treatment of the subject. He takes 100 different statements from the news that are badly argued in some way - either logically deficient or using rhetorical techniques meant to persuade by emotion, side stepping logic. He analyzes each one for its deficiencies and labels it with the kind of error being made or technique being used. Baggini encourages analytical thinking, both by example and by instruction.
Some of the examples don't require a philosopher to determine that they are poor arguments. In the title story, a lottery winner ascribes his luck to having followed a waiter's instruction in a Chinese restaurant to stroke a duck statue. Most of us would realize that didn't cause him to win the lottery, even if we might not know to label the error a post-hoc fallacy. Others are much more subtle and seem well argued at first.
Each quote is only a sentence or two and each analysis is a page or two, making this a quick read. An interesting extra feature is after each analysis he walks the condemnation of the kind of argument back a little, asking when it might be appropriate to defer to authority, or argue from uncertainty or whatever. These thought provoking final paragraphs underscore the idea that many of these questions do not have settled answers.
Julian Baggini is a British philosopher and the author of several books about philosophy written for a general audience. He is the author of The Pig that Wants to be Eaten and 99 other thought experiments (2005) and is co-founder and editor of The Philosophers' Magazine. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1996 from University College London for a thesis on the philosophy of personal identity. In addition to his popular philosophy books, Baggini contributes to The Guardian, The Independent, The Observer, and the BBC. He has been a regular guest on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time.
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