Crimes Against Logic Read online

  11.1 This is a simplification. Where a portion of costs is fixed (i.e., does not vary with sales volume, such as television advertizing), unit profit also depends on volume, since average unit costs will vary inversely with volume. Most businesses have some fixed costs, so knowing unit profit at any given price also requires knowing volumes at that price. But the point still holds: the difficult part is knowing how price affects volume.

  11.2 I owe this example to Steven E. Landsburg, The Armchair Economist (New York, The Free Press, 1994), p. 132. I say a better answer rather than the right answer because this sample may not reflect recent changes in average periods of unemployment.

  11.3 Better research by Edward Laumann in 1994 found the percentage of men who are consistently homosexual to be 4 percent.

  11.4 Death rates from a disease are normally expressed annually, i.e., as the percentage of sufferers who will die in a one year period. If the 20 percent death rate of our example is not annual, but over some longer period, then the number of anorexia-caused deaths each year would be smaller, but not small enough to save the alleged statistic from massive error. For example, if 20 percent die in a ten year period, then the number of deaths each year in women from 15 to 35 should be 2,800.

  11.5 If the BMA isn’t too good to make up statistics, nor am I.

  11.6 I owe this observation to an editorial by Anatole Kaletsky in the Times, June 10, 2003.

  12.1 The IQ controversy was most recently stimulated by R. J. Hernstein and C. Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York, Free Press, 1994). Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, (London, Penguin, 1981, Revised in 1996) argues against the “genetic determinism” of The Bell Curve.

  12.2 The Guardian, April 19, 2002.

  Publication Information

  About Crimes Against Logic

  “Whets a long knife of ultra-rationalism on the cold stone of logic, and death by a thousand cuts is inflicted on prejudice, statistics, morality, religion, weasel words, and seductive sirens such as politicians, New Agers, advertising executives, and, of course, journalists who expect you to be persuaded by anything other than facts.”

  —Times

  “An incisive philosopher.”

  —Sunday Telegraph

  IN the daily battle for our hearts and minds—not to mention our hard-earned cash—the truth is usually the first casualty. It’s time we learned how to see through the rhetoric, faulty reasoning, and misinformation that we’re subjected to from morning to night by talk-radio hosts, op-ed columnists, advertisers, self-help gurus, business “thinkers,” and, of course, politicians. And no one is better equipped to show us how than award-winning philosopher Jamie Whyte.

  In Crimes Against Logic Whyte takes us on a fast-paced, ruthlessly funny romp through the mulligan stew of cant, folderol, and bogus logic served up in the media, at the office, and even in your own home. Applying his laserlike wit to dozens of timely examples, Whyte cuts through the haze of facts, figures, and double-talk and gets at the real truth behind what they’re telling us.

  JAMIE WHYTE is a past lecturer of philosophy at Cambridge University and winner of Analysis journal’s prestigious prize for the best article by a philosopher undcr thirty. He lives in London.

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  Cover design by Tom Lau

  Cover photograph © by Ken Whitmore

  Copyright Notice

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Whyte, Jamie

  Crimes against logic : exposing the bogus arguments of politicians, priests, journalists, and other serial offenders / Jamie Whyte.

  p. cm.

  Rev. ed. of: Bad thoughts.

  ISBN 0-07-144643-5

  1. Fallacies (Logic). I. Whyte, Jamie. Bad thoughts. II. Title

  BC175.W45 2004

  160–dc22

  2004053941

  First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Corvo Books Ltd.

  Copyright © 2005 by Jamie Whyte. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 FGR/FGR 3 2 1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4

  ISBN 0-07-144643-5

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  eBook Version Notes

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