Solutions to exercises in introduction to logic irving copi

Topic 2 Reading exercises from: Copi, Irving M. Introduction to Logic, 14th Edition. Routledge. 4.3 INSTRUCTIONS Identify and explain the fallacies of relevance in the following passages: PROBLEMS 1. If you can’t blame the English language and your own is unforgivingly precise, blame the microphone. That was the route Jacques Chirac took after his nuclear remark about a nuclear Iran. “Having one or perhaps a second bomb a little later, well, that’s not very dangerous,” Mr. Chirac said with a shrug. The press was summoned back for a retake. “I should rather have paid attention to what I was saying and understood that perhaps I was on the record,” Mr. Chirac offered, as if the record rather than the remark were the issue. —Stacy Schiff, “Slip Sliding Away,” The New York Times, 2 February 2007 2. Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid. —George Santayana, Egotism in German Philosophy, 1915 3. Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine marched down the halls of the American Congress and threw his shining lances full and fair against the brazen foreheads of every defamer of his country and maligner of its honor. For the Republican party to desert this gallant man now is worse than if an army should desert their general upon the field of battle. —Robert G. Ingersoll, nominating speech at the Republican National Convention, 1876 4. However, it matters very little now what the king of England either says or does; he hath wickedly broken through every moral and human obligation, trampled nature and conscience beneath his feet, and by a steady and constitutional spirit of insolence and cruelty procured for himself an universal hatred. —Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776 5. This embarrassing volume is an out-and-out partisan screed made up of illogical arguments, distorted and cherry-picked information, ridiculous generalizations and nutty asides. It’s a nasty stewpot of intellectually untenable premises and irresponsible speculation that frequently reads like a “Saturday Night Live” parody of the crackpot right. —Michiko Kakutani, “Dispatch from Gomorrah, Savaging the Cultural Left,” The New York Times, 6 February 2007. 6. I was seven years old when the first election campaign which I can remember took place in my district. At that time we still had no political parties, so the announcement of this campaign was received with very little interest. But popular feeling ran high when it was disclosed that one of the candidates was “the Prince.” There was no need to add Christian and surname to realize which Prince was meant. He was the owner of the great estate formed by the arbitrary occupation of the vast tracts of land reclaimed in the previous century from the Lake of Fucino. About eight thousand families (that is, the majority of the local population) are still employed today in cultivating the estate’s fourteen thousand hectares. The Prince was deigning to solicit “his” families for their vote so that he could become their deputy in parliament. The agents of the estate, who were working for the Prince, talked in impeccably liberal phrases: “Naturally,” said they, “naturally, no one will be forced to vote for the Prince, that’s understood; in the same way that no one, naturally, can force the Prince to allow people who don’t vote for him to work on his land. This is the period of real liberty for everybody; you’re free, and so is the Prince.” The announcement of these “liberal” principles produced general and understandable consternation among the peasants. For, as may easily be guessed, the Prince was the most hated person in our part of the country. —Ignazio Silone, The God That Failed, 1949 7. According to R. Grunberger, author of A Social History of the Third Reich, Nazi publishers used to send the following notice to German readers who let their subscriptions lapse: “Our paper certainly deserves the support of every German. We shall continue to forward copies of it to you, and hope that you will not want to expose yourself to unfortunate consequences in the case of cancellation.” 8. In While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (2006), Bruce Bawer argues that “by appeasing a totalitarian [Muslim] ideology Europe is “imperiling its liberty.” Political correctness, he writes, is keeping Europeans from defending themselves, resulting in “its self-destructive passivity, softness toward tyranny, its reflexive inclination to appease.” A review of the book in The Economist observes that Mr.