Straw man

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I have tried to make this book a simple reference for every person who cares enough to think, and for every student who insists on remaining a student loyal to the truth. I have gathered in it what I could gather - enough to meet the need and serve the necessity - of logical fallacies and cognitive biases, revealing to us the methods of deception used in the process of reasoning, and the accompanying flaws in the thinking process, in accordance with Arthur Schopenhauer’s saying: “How wonderful it would be if we could assign to each dialectical fallacy a short and clear name, so that we could - whenever someone commits this fallacy or that - rebuke him for it immediately.”



I wrote this book because I believe in the necessity of its content in our Arab societies in particular, and in various intellectual discussions in general. This is because the world of argumentation and debate is slippery and deceptive, and because humans are complex and fluctuating beings, subject to much emotion and subjectivity. This makes the soundness of communication and the effectiveness of reasoning depend, above the content, on the nature of the parties involved in the debate and their ability to communicate and receive. Therefore, Plato said in the Gorgias dialogue: “In a debate that takes place before an audience of children about food, the confectioner is capable of defeating the doctor, and in a debate before an audience of adults, a politician armed with rhetorical ability and persuasive tricks is capable of defeating any engineer or soldier, even if the subject of the debate is within the specialization of the latter two. Appealing to the emotions and desires of the audience is more convincing than any appeal to reason.”