Straight & Crooked Thinking

187 Pages·2011·0.55 MB·English

by  R. H. Thouless

Straight &
Crooked
Thinking
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Straight &
Crooked
Thinking
R. H. Thouless & C. R. Thouless
Hodder Education
First published in UK 1930.
This edition published 2011 by Hodder Education, part of Hachette UK, 338 Euston
Road, London NW1 3BH.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First edition © 1930 R. H. Thouless
Second edition © 1953 R. H. Thouless
Third edition © 1974 R. H. Thouless
Fourth edition © 1990 R. H. Thouless and C. R. Thouless
Fifth edition © 2011 C. R. Thouless
www.hoddereducation.co.uk
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Acknowledgements
My thanks are due to Mel Thompson for a very helpful review of the
manuscript, to Charles Foster for reading it and describing it as ‘anti-
septic’, to my cousin Peter Sobey for helping with proof-reading and to
my wife Caroline and children Clare and Robert for trying to read the
book, and being willing to discuss examples of crooked thought at the
breakfast table.
I would particularly like to thank my late grandfather for asking me
to carry on his work, and I hope that he would have approved of what
has been done to his book.
Contents
Preface vii
1 Different ways of using language 1
2 Words and facts 15
3 The meanings of words 29
4 Defi nition and some of its diffi culties 37
5 Good and bad defi nitions 44
6 All and some 51
7 Some dishonest tricks in argument 62
8 Some logical fallacies 74
9 Habits of thought 85
10 Prejudice 97
11 Predigested thinking 111
12 Pitfalls in analogy 118
13 Oratory and suggestion 127
14 Tricks of suggestion 138
15 Straight thinking 146
16 The future of straight thinking 151
Appendix 1: Thirty-seven dishonest tricks
commonly used in argument, with
the methods of overcoming them 159
Appendix 2: A discussion illustrating
crooked thinking 165
Index 171
Preface
The world’s need for straight thinking and its susceptibility to
crooked thinking are as great now as when my grandfather fi rst
wrote this book in the late 1920s. However, the relative impor-
tance of different kinds of abuse of language has changed, as has
the political context in which they take place. For these reasons
it seems a good idea to revise Straight & Crooked Thinking for the
fi fth time.
Although many books have been published with similar
themes in the intervening years, this one has had an endur-
ing appeal which makes it worth updating. A major part of this
appeal is its emotional detachment and a dry sense of humour
about the things that people do to language to obstruct clear
thinking. I have attempted to retain these characteristics. By
detachment I mean that, although it is made clear that straight
thinking is preferable to crooked thinking, the message is not
rammed down the reader’s throat. As a result the book has the po-
tential to be used for evil as well as good ends. It could just as well
be used by a dishonest communicator to understand and refi ne his
technique as by an honest person to understand how he is being
duped by others.
It is important to remember that this book is a ‘fi eld guide’,
not a self-improvement manual. The features that make Straight
& Crooked Thinking such an attractive book are a refl ection of the
humanity and intellectual independence of my grandfather. He
was remarkable in his ability to write and talk in a detached and
objective way even on issues about which he felt deeply.
Robert Thouless was born in Norwich in 1894. He was educated
at a local grammar school and won an award to Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge, where he studied physical sciences. During
the First World War he served as a signals offi cer in the Salonika
expeditionary force in northern Greece. He took part in a brief and vii
Straight & Crooked Thinking
unsuccessful British offensive against the Bulgarians, known as the
Second Battle of Doiran. Robert was in the thick of this battle,
and his diaries describe his experience of taking a telephone line
through no-man’s land towards the enemy lines. He continued in
his task, despite shelling, gunfi re and a dose of mustard gas.
After the war he returned to Cambridge, where he turned from
the physical sciences to the emerging fi eld of psychology. He was
greatly infl uenced by his friend and colleague William Rivers, who
is now best known for his work with shell-shocked patients (includ-
ing the poet Siegfried Sassoon), during the First World War. Robert
wrote his doctoral thesis on ‘The Psychology of Religion’. This was
published as a book which remained in print for nearly 60 years.
From 1921 to 1926 Robert was lecturer in psychology at the
University of Manchester, where he met his future wife Priscilla
Gorton, who was a lecturer in English. Between 1926 and 1938
he was head of the Department of Psychology at the University
of Glasgow where he conducted some of the earliest experiments
on visual perception, trying to understand the nature of optical
illusions, and how they are seen differently by people of different
cultural backgrounds. During this time he became interested in
radio broadcasting, and two series of radio talks were turned into
books.The Control of the Mind attracted little notice, but Straight &
Crooked Thinking was immediately successful. It was deliberately
written as a popular book because, as an academic psychologist,
Robert Thouless thought that it was important for ordinary people
to understand their unconscious impulses towards irrationality
and how these irrational forces could be a major cause of war. The
book was successful, perhaps partly because it presaged the rise
of fascism in Europe and made comprehensible some of Hitler’s
tactics.
In 1938 Robert returned to Cambridge as a fellow of his old
college and reader in the Department of Education. Although he
had become a pacifi st after the First World War, he recognized the
need to fi ght against the Nazis and served in a Home Guard anti-
aircraft battery. Ever the psychologist, he wrote notes about the
morale of a small group of middle-aged and elderly men staying
viii up night after night, sometimes in dreadful weather, without once
Preface
catching sight of an enemy aircraft. Straight & Crooked Thinking
was distributed to US troops during the Second World War, and
a similar book with a more specialized theme, called Straight
T hinking in Wartime, was published. This was based in part on a
detailed analysis of Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, and he was
astonished by how little attention had been paid to how openly
Hitler divulged his plans to gain power.
He remained at Cambridge for the rest of his life. He taught
trainee teachers the basic principles of psychology, including the
use of statistical methods. However, his research concentrated on
visual perception and the paranormal. He was President of the
British Psychological Society from 1949 to 50 and of the Society
for Psychical Research from 1942 to 44. Although a frequent result
of his painstaking investigations was the detection of cheating in
apparent cases of psychic powers, he remained open to the pos-
sibility of such abilities. He was a close friend of the philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein, and some of the ideas that he added to later
editions of Straight & Crooked Thinking came from his discussions
with Wittgenstein about the relationship between language and
reality.
My grandfather retired shortly after I was born in 1960, but he
continued to work, writing Experimental Psychical Research and
From A necdote to Experiment in Psychical Research as well as revising
several of his earlier books. His last area of interest was the evidence
for survival after death, and his last experiment (which required his
death to carry it out) gained a certain degree of notoriety. He had
become frustrated with the vagueness surrounding the supposed
evidence for the dead communicating with the living, and tried to
come up with a foolproof experiment. He devised a code that was
unbreakable during his lifetime, with the intention of communi-
cating the key through a medium after his death. The correct key
would translate a coded message, and unlock a safe with a combi-
nation lock. About a hundred possible solutions were sent to the
Society of Psychical Research by mediums, but none was right.
Various suggestions were provided as to the reason for this, includ-
ing the possibility that he had forgotten the key once he passed over
to ‘the other side’. However, given the reluctance of a number of ix