Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XXIV FAlLACIES Of all the anomalies and antinomies of Traditional Logic, of all its defects and futilities, none strikes a new-comer as so anomalous or so extraordinary as the fact that the fallacies it enumerates, specifies, and describes, are not breaches of its own rules. If the syllogism were the universal principle of reasoning that Traditional Logic claims that it is, it would clearly be impossible to perpetrate any fallacy without infringing some rule of the syllogism. Yet not one of the fallacies of the Sophistici Elenchi is a breach of any syllogistic rule. The very fact that there are fallacies that admittedly have nothing to do with the syllogism, and can be perpetrated though every syllogistic rule is punctually observed, is of itself proof that the syllogism is not the only mode of reasoning, and ought to have aroused a suspicion, at least, that there is some other mode of reasoning besides and apart from the syllogism; but this suspicion seems never to have arisen in the minds of logicians. Modern Logic provides many modes of reasoning, but these are to be regarded, not as substitutes for the syllogism, but as variants of it; whichever they may be, however, Modern Logic does not recognise, any more than Traditional Logic, that a fallacy in reasoning, if it is indeed a fallacy, must be a breach of some Canon of Reasoning. In any complete scheme of Logic, every fallacy should be referable to the Canon that it violates, thus revealing how and why it is a fallacy, and placing it in its proper position in the scheme of fallacies. Nothing of the sort is attempted in any book on Logic known to me. There are many different classifications of fallacies, but there is no classification founded on the Canons that are...