A short course in intellectual self-defense.

9781583227657

A short course in intellectual self-defense.

Baillargeon, Normand. Trans. by Andrea Schmidt.

Seven Stories Press

2007

335 pages

$14.95

Paperback

BF441

Equally concerned with the deleterious effects of irrationality and stupidity on the one hand and propaganda and manipulation on the other, Baillargeon (education fundamentals, U. of Quebec, Canada) provides an introduction to critical thinking necessary for avoiding charlatanry and for being a good citizen. In the first half of the book, he synthesizes knowledge on the property of words, notions of logic and logical fallacies, common forms of innumeracy, issues of probability and statistics, and manipulations of forms of data presentation (such as graphs that use the same data but visually tell different stories). The second section of the book discusses the conditions necessary to hold a proposition true when justified by personal experience, by recourse to experimentation, or by representations in the media (this last part is influenced heavily by the propaganda model pioneered by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky).

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