The Duck That Won The Lottery

Cairo Publishing

The Duck That Won The Lottery

Catch your friends “loading the dice”, or broadcasters committing the “fallacy of the complex question”. Learn how to spot false dichotomies, gambler’s fallacies and unflagrant contradictions, and add “slippery slopes” and “post hoc fallacies” to your rhetorical toolkit. The author of 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 arguments people use all the time, in politics, the media and everyday life. Each entry takes as its starting point an example of questionable reasoning, and Baggini, with characteristic clarity and wit, dissects the argument and then invites readers to do the same with other examples, and in their daily life. The Duck that Won the Lottery provides a series of addictive mental workouts, and will help you vanquish wooliness, cool hot air, and question the way you think. (Of course, the duck didn’t win the lottery, but chapter 26 on “post hoc fallacies” will explain everything.)