Sunday, April 10, 2011

Fallacies in Thinking

The Thinker's Guide to Fallacies: The Art of Mental Trickery and Manipulation

It is for this reason that cultivation of intellectual virtues is so crucial to human development. Without a long-term transformation of the mind, little can be done to produce deep ly honest thought. When challenged, the human mind operates from its most primitive intellectual instincts. This can be verified in the history of politics, economics, religion, and war -indeed in any history that deeply plumbs the human mind in action.

Consequently, it is important to learn to recognize the most common tricks of persuasion, that we might better understand ourselves and others. Used on others, fallacies are intellectually indefensible tricks of persuasion and manipulation; used on ourselves, they are instruments of self-deception.

In this guide we concentrate on the most common and flagrant intellectual tricks and snares. Sometimes these tricks are "counterfeits" of good thinking. For example, a false dilemma is the counterfeit of a true dilemma. We shall see this most obviously in dealing with errors of generalization and comparison.

Mistakes Versus Fallacies

“What about mistakes?" you might ask. Isn't it possible that some of the time we commit fallacies inadvertently, unintentionally, and innocently? The answer is, of course, yes. Sometimes people make mistakes without any intention of tricking anyone. The test to determine whether someone is merely making a mistake in thinking is relatively simple. After the mistake is pointed out to the person, and the person is explicitly faced with the problems in the thinking, observe to see whether he or she honestly changes. In other words, once the pressure to change is removed, does the person revert to the original fallacious way of thinking, or does he demonstrate that he has truly been persuaded (and modified his thinking (accordingly)? If the person reverts, or invents a new rationalization for his behavior, we can conclude that the person was using the fallacy to gain an advantage and not making a simple mistake.

There is No Exhaustive List of Fallacies

It is not possible to create an exclusive and exhaustive list of fallacies. The intellectual tricks, traps, and snares humans so commonly engage in (or fall prey to) can be described from many differing standpoints and in a variety of differing terms. In this guide, we deal only with those most common or most easily recognized. There is nothing sacred about our list or our analysis. Here is a list of common problems in human thinking. See if you can add to this list. It is common for people (in their thinking) to:

be unclear, muddled, or confused

jump to conclusions

fail to think-through implications

lose track of their goal

be unrealistic

focus on the trivial

fail to notice contradictions

use inaccurate information in their thinking

ask vague questions

give vague answers

ask loaded questions

ask irrelevant questions

confuse questions of different types

answer questions they are not competent to answer

come to conclusions based on inaccurate or irrelevant in.formation

use only the information that supports their view

make inferences not justified by their experience

distort data and represent it inaccurately

fail to notice the inferences they make

come to unreasonable

conclusions

fail to notice their assumptions

make unjustified assumptions

miss key ideas

use irrelevant ideas

form confused ideas

form superficial concepts

misuse words

ignore relevant viewpoints

fail to see issues from points of view other than their own

confuse issues of different types

lack insight into their prejudices

think narrowly

think imprecisely

think illogically

think one-sidedly

think simplistically

think hypocritically

think superficially

think ethnocentrically

think egocentrically

think irrationally

be incompetent at problem solving

make poor decisions

lack insight into their own ignorance

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