Looking for recommended resources dealing specifically with the subject of logial fallacies. Any general consensus or just search and click? Thanks again in advance.
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it" - Thomas Jefferson.
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/resource.html
This chart of theirs is pretty cool.
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/taxonomy.html
Here is a decent list, but to anyone interested in ultimate extirpation of the more subtle logical fallacies I recommend heading straight to the core of the matter, which is the use and abuse of language. Many word-based errors are documented here:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/
Correct logical deduction is not difficult, else people would struggle blindly with even the most basic tasks. The idea that "logic" is hard is itself a fallacy. What is hard is sorting out the fuzzy language and shifting definitions people often use, both within their own minds and in communication with others. Once you realize that words are just communication devices, defined as they are because some people in the past found it convenient to match noises to concepts in that way, you can start to get rid of the social pressure that nudges us toward thinking of utterances as having a meaning in and of themselves.
The meaning of an utterance is two-part: intention, or the thought in the writer's mind that prompted the words, and interpretation, or the thought in the reader's mind prompted by the words. There is intention and there is interpretation; there is no free-floating "meaning." If intention and interpretation do not match, communication has simply not taken place.
This process can also happen when the writer/speaker is your former self and the reader/listener is the current you, either seeing something you wrote or recalling a memory.
With that in mind, we can categorize two types of semantics-based logical fallacies:
1) Those where the writer had a coherent thought but failed to express it, leading to a fallacious/nonsensical interpretation in the reader's mind.
2) Those cases of (1) where the writer has received a verbal communication from his former self (that is, he recalled a verbal memory), and he believes the fallacious/nonsensical words in his memory without question, because he trusts his former self to have gotten it right. He then puts this verbal memory, this utter nonsense, to paper. And he stands behind it.
So it is key to understand that definitions are not subject to proof/disproof, and are imbued with no divine essence; they are simply chosen for their utility. Everyone realizes this when they are noting that words have multiple definitions and that they can coin new words themselves; but they compartmentalize this knowledge and forget it. Later they will find themselves clinging to their own (often private, unstated) definition while inexplicably assuming the other arguers share it. This is the primary generator of logical fallacies, and if this post has made no sense you need only examine just about any controversial thread on these forums for empirical verification.
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