C. L. Hamblin

Charles Leonard Hamblin was an Australian philosopher, logician and computer scientist who taught at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. In Fallacies he examined the catalogue of fallacies inherited by logic textbooks and showed that the standard definitions were confused and could not do the work claimed for them. He proposed treating arguments as moves in rule-governed dialogues, and also made early contributions to computing.

Key ideas

• The textbook account of fallacies as arguments that seem valid but are not is incoherent.
• Many arguments labelled fallacies are reasonable in some dialogical contexts.
• Argument is best studied through formal dialectic: systems of rules for exchanges between parties.
• The meaning of a question can be modelled as the set of its possible answers.

Major works

• Fallacies (1970)
• "Questions in Montague English" (1973)
• Imperatives (1987)

In the conversation

• Question After reading Hamblin, should I still teach my prison class the list of fallacies? Brian Otieno Ouma · 5 replies
• Question Outside a courtroom, who should carry the burden of proof? Hamza Qureshi · 6 replies