Chapter One, "The Standard Treatment," is very widely
referred to and quoted in recent writing on logical fallacies. The standard treatment
refers to accounts of logical fallacies in textbooks in common use around 1970, when
Hamblin’s critique first appeared.
Excerpts from Chapter One: The Standard Treatment:
"There is hardly a subject that dies harder or has changed so little over the
years. After two millennia of active study of logic and, in particular, after over half of
that most iconoclastic of centuries, the twentieth A.D., we still find fallacies
classified, presented, and studied in much the same old way. Aristotle’s principal
list of thirteen types of fallacy in his Sophistical Refutations . . . still
appears, usually with one or two omissions and a handful of additions, in many modern
textbooks of logic; and though there have been many proposals for reform, none has met
more than temporary acceptance. . . . .
[From the renaissance of the twelfth to] the present century textbooks of logic not
containing a short chapter on fallacies have been the exception; and since, for most of
the period, all students took Logic, Europe’s men-of-affairs have generally regarded
a nodding acquaintance with a standard version of Aristotle’s doctrine as a routine
necessity of the same character as knowledge of the multiplication table. . . .
The truth is that nobody, these days, is particularly satisfied with this corner of
logic. The traditional treatment is too unsystematic for modern tastes. Yet to dispense
with it, as some writers do, is to leave a gap that no one knows how to fill. We have no theory
of fallacy at all, in the sense in which we have theories of correct reasoning or
inference. Yet we feel the need to ticket and tabulate certain kinds of fallacious
inference-process which introduce considerations falling outside the other topics in our
logic books.
. . . let us set the stage with . . . the typical or average account as it appears in
the typical short chapter or appendix of the average modern textbook. And what we find in
most cases, I think it should be admitted, is as debased, worn-out and dogmatic a
treatment as could be imagined—incredibly tradition-bound, yet lacking in logic and
in historical sense alike, and almost without connection to anything else in modern Logic
at all. This is the part of his book in which a writer throws away logic and keeps his
reader’s attention, if at all, only by retailing the traditional puns, anecdotes, and
witless examples of his forebears."
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