How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic (2006)

92 How to Win Every Argument

include fairly large audiences. ('You, as members of the working
class, will appreciate ...') Especially useful to you will be the
nominal membership of the Christian Church. Many people like
to think of themselves as Christians, although they do not like the
obligations which serious Christianity would impose. Thus when
you appeal to them that as Christians they can hardly oppose
your views, they will be forced into a reluctant and resentful
acquiescence you could never have gained otherwise.
The second version is spectacular in the rejection of expert
evidence against you. An expert is someone in the field, and as
such his views represent only his circumstances as one who is
involved. Thus, when the town-planner refutes your claims on
town-planning; when the oil company expert shows what non-
sense you have uttered on energy; and when the businessman
exposes your cockeyed views about business, you smile sweetly
in each case and observe: 'Well he would say that, wouldn't he?'

Ignorantiam, argumentum ad

Socrates was thought by the oracle to be the wisest man because
he alone knew how ignorant he was. The knowledge of ignor-
ance might have been good at keeping Socrates modest, but it
forms a poor basis for deduction. The argumentum ad ignoran-
tiam is committed when we use our lack of knowledge about
something in order to infer that its opposite is the case.

Ghosts exist all right. Research teams have spent many years and mil-

lions of pounds attempting to prove that they don't; and they have never

succeeded.

(The same could probably be said of Aladdin's lamp and the pro-

spects for world peace.)