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 Traveler’s 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 All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018. Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected]. Skyhorse® and Skyhorse Publishing® are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation. www.skyhorsepublishing.com 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 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 author’s: 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 Editor’s Note to the 2012 Edition 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 Ward’s 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. You’ll find these entries in gray boxes. Philip Ward’s Preface to the Original Edition 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 Migne’s Troisième et dernière encyclopédie théologique… (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 holder’s lack of rational conviction.” There is no sign that impostors, charlatans, and the plain misguided have diminished in numbers since the Middle Ages. The steep rise in population since the Crusades has been accompanied by the fragmentation of a greatly increased quantity of scientific knowledge, so that fewer and fewer possess a clear understanding of a smaller segment of knowledge and their skepticism about their own “truths,” healthy as it is, leaves ample scope for the less scrupulous to protest the truth of new “religions,” occultist movements varying in integrity and intelligence, pseudo-sciences, and obsessions touted as facts. Excluded from this catalogue of common fallacies are a majority of the phenomena generally classified as hallucinations and delusions of an individual or of a closely knit group which are evidently not shared by the generality of mankind; hoaxes except insofar as they have led to fallacious conclusions; mere ignorance before major discoveries, inventions, or new patterns of awareness pervade the times; miracles of the various churches which have a vested interest in advertising the power of their magic or the ease with which they can obtain favors from a deity; simple mistakes which are subsequently recognized and rectified; occult beliefs which appeal, however irrationally, to a sector of the consciousness allegedly different from that to which known scientific principles can be seen to apply; religious systems which, through their dogma of faith, claim to be immune from the process of verification which is logically applicable to them as to everything else; superstitions, which are by their nature irrational and, as their name suggests, constitute survivals of religious systems now abandoned; and unsolved mysteries, which are stated with data that are normally either incomplete or prejudiced. The compiler has not fallen into the predictable trap of believing that his is the whole truth, or even most of it (whatever “truth” is). He would be very grateful for suggestions as to ways in which the book might be improved by omission, correction, or addition. Describing an idea as a “common fallacy” does not of course thereby automatically make it so; the intention is merely to reflect the best scholarly opinion currently available and the reader’s indulgence is craved for mistakes and distortions which, regrettably, as the book demonstrates, are all too obviously part of the human condition. How to Use the Book A. Readers not looking for any subject in particular may start anywhere and find cause for amusement or concern, depending on their temperament. B. Readers interested in one particular subject should: 1. Look up that name or subject in the INDEX. If no reference seems to be present, seek synonyms or heteronyms. 2. Should there be no reference at all, check the PREFACE for the categories deliberately omitted from the book. 3. Should there be a reference, consult the TEXT of the dictionary and, if desired, note the source (where given) for verification. 4. Refer to the BIBLIOGRAPHY for general or specialized studies on fallacies in your field of interest.