Douglas N. Walton.
Informal Logic: a handbook for critical argumentation.
CUP. 1989
This is an introductory guidebook to the basic principles of
how to construct good arguments and how to criticize bad ones.
It is non-technical in its approach and is based on 150 key examples,
each discussed and evaluated in clear, illustrative detail.
Professor Walton, a leading authority in the field of informal logic,
explains how errors, fallacies, and other key failures of argument occur.
He shows how correct uses of argument are based on sound strategies
for reasoned persuasion and critical responses.
Among the many subjects covered are:
forms of valid argument, relevance, appeals to emotion, personal attack,
uses and abuses of expert opinion, problems in deploying statistics,
loaded terms, equivocation, arguments from analogy,
and techniques of posing, replying to, and criticizing questions.
The book will be ideally suited to courses in informal logic and in the introduction to philosophy. It will also prove valuable to students of pragmatics, rhetoric, and speech communication.
