Blog commenters recommended these two books from me. I don’t have much to say about them, but I recommend them both, and they have interesting similarities. They were both written by young professors, Fischer in 1970 and Booth in 1961. Both are presented in a much more organized, structured way than I am used to seeing in historical or literary criticism—maybe that was a style back then? Both books systematically criticize fallacious reasoning in their fields, giving lots of examples. I found both books enjoyable to read, but at some point Booth’s book became a slog, not so much for its content, which I continued to find interesting, but because his examples were mostly classic English literature such as Tom Jones and the work of Jane Austen, which I’ve never read, and some modern authors such as James Joyce, which I’ve found difficult to read. He mentioned Twain and Fitzgerald and Lawrence and a few other authors I’ve read, but mostly I couldn’t really follow the examples. I can see why Booth would want to focus on originators and innovators, also the book was written back in 1961 so I can hardly fault it for not including my favorite authors; still, I had the reaction I had. Maybe someone could write an updated version using more recent examples. I really liked the focus on the interaction between author and reader; at a theoretical level, this was the most interesting literary criticism I’ve ever read, even though when it comes down to it I much preferred reading Anthony West’s literary essays or similar reviews by writers such as Claudia Roth Pierpoint.
There are loads of great books I’ve never read and music I’ve never heard and so on, indeed I’m sure I’ve read more junk and fewer classics than you, so I’m not saying this out of a sense of superiority, but I’ve still gotta say it: ffs how is it possible that you’ve never read any Jane Austen? At least try Pride and Prejudice!
Wow! What a surprise to see this blog topic. I have read David Hackett Fischer’s Historians Fallacies three times. Each time, I was reminded that we are unmindful of the fallacies we engage in many conversations and presentations. Historians Fallacies intrigued me b/c I had a hunch that some history contained fictional narratives as well. I gathered this from being in the midst of American, British, Asian, and African academics that influenced Middle East, African and South Asian histories and foreign policies. The casual conversations among them led me to believe that myth-making was an important element in forging history. I could not, at the time, name the fallacies. Fischer account of fallacies was very systematic.
Having said that, I was not convinced by the last chapter. I don’t have the book in my possession, as I am in Denver visiting family. But will return to this subject when I return to DC.
The intricate division into various named categories of fallacy had a charming, scholastic bite about it; but if you were to make a chart out of all those categories and fill it in so that the various named fallacies would build up a sort of square of opposition, or graph of relatedness; in the way Aristotle organizes the vices as extremes in one or another direction on a continuum (the virtue always being right there in the middle), you will find [1] there is a great deal of relabeling and double-booking in that list of Fischer’s and [2] that the overarching remedy he seems to hold in reserve is a meta-fallacy; the prescription for a future practice of “scientific history”, in which all tendentiousness and bias and point-of-view has gone away. And in which “the data” would “speak for themselves”.
I see what you mean. There may be some relabeling and double-booking. But in reading the final chapter, specifically, the last few pages of the final chapter, Fischer seemed to suggest that because we have to worry about nuclear war and proliferation, indulging in fallacious and non-fallacious reasoning will not be useful. I thought that the final sentence of the chapter undermined the utility of the explication of fallacies. In short, Fischer seemed to suggest that the nuclear age presented an epistemological/epistemic dliemma for historians. And it may be so, given our reliance on AI and algorithms with respect to national security decision-making. The book of course was published in 1970. I may be reading far too much into the final chapter.
Analogies At War by Yuen Foong Khong is a great complement to Historians’ Fallacies. Khong delves deeper into the logic of decision-making. But concludes that we need to explore the narratives that shaped decision-making more deeply. I would agree with that. Whether those narratives really justified our national security courses of action has been explored here and there. I’m sure Robert Jervis would certainly agree.
‘And in which “the data” would “speak for themselves”.’
Hilarious, that’s the big modern myth: throw the data on the floor and it spells it’s name. What’s great about this myth is that it’s so flexible. It can be trotted out to oppose one thing and totally ignored to support something else: e.g., your data is cherry-picked, mine spells it’s own name.:)
My father used to have some book or books in the newspaper pile about “data” — this is in the 60s where you’d see these pictures of a big room, with magnetic tape machines, a desk with a lot of buttons, and snappy-looking operators that sort of looked like Marcus Welby MD and his pretty nurse; anyway I asked, “What’s data” and the rejoinder was always, “Dissa and Data”. This was ages before “Gnu is not unix”!
The name “Wayne Booth” sounded familiar when I read the title. But after looking up Booth’s academic history, I realized that I probably heard his name in two contexts: I think my sister had him as a professor when she was an undergraduate at Earlham College, and he was on the University of Chicago English faculty and Dean of the Undergraduate College there when I was a mathematics graduate student there in the late 1960’s.