I'm not satisfied after having read this book. Or possibly, I am just confused. I get the feeling that when Perelman made the connection in his mind between formal logic and the racist arguments of the Nazis, he created an obstacle for himself, and he had to contort his own system of informal logic to work around it at all costs. (After all, the the arguments of the Nazis were the opposite of appeals to the rationality.) But ultimately, I get the feeling that his system is really just shorthand for formal logic. Whether you base your arguments on first principles or human foibles, the force of argument is still reducible via analysis to the traditional rules. There is indeed a sense in which an audience is convinced informally by an argument, but the process of critical thinking that we apply to evaluate it is not more than the formalized tools which have come to us from the ancient philosophers.

The value of this book may be that it could be a starting point for looking at the ways in which an argument may be accepted by a human audience, especially a non-sophisticated one. But I think the goal for every human being is to reduce the irrational and non-rational portions as much as possible. ( )