Logical fallacies in arguments.

Avoiding them will help you make accurate decisions and calculated risks.

In our daily life we hear and make arguments over decision making and assuming things, later realise that the reasoning behind it is flawed or biased. This leads to misjudgement of things, increase the risk of failure, loss of others trust and also self confidence.

When you commit a fallacy you might sound unintelligent, dishonest or deceptive. Best way to avoid these is by self evaluation before making a argument. So to do that we should know some common templates of flaws. This post will discuss about those common modes of fallacies and biases.

Lets start with what’s a fallacy?

Our arguments are made of assumptions and statements. Statements are made from our perspective so they might sound reasonable, superficially true but actually flawed which makes our argument invalid.

Not only avoiding them but also detecting them in other’s arguments will help us not to be fooled by false line of reasoning.

First one is Argumentum ad Populum

It’s choosing the popular opinion without researching the underlying reasoning for that. We just think it’s right because many others think it’s right.

Popular acceptance of any argument does not prove it to be valid.

For instance, 85% of consumers purchase IBM computers rather than Macintosh, all those people can’t be wrong. IBM must make the best computers. This is also a tool for propagandists to promote their agenda escaping reasoning.

Circular reasoning

This happens when one statement bases on other statement and dependency chain forms circle. This is best to be explained with a example:

We can see the formation of deadlock, which leads to no conclusion.

Straw Man

It’s much easier to defeat your opponent’s argument when it’s made of straw. The Straw man fallacy is aptly named after a harmless, lifeless, scarecrow.

When people challenge a argument with another argument, they miss the line and give facts that doesn’t necessarily prove the other argument wrong, draw insights doesn’t challenge the other argument.

Attacking a argument the opponent doesn’t really hold is straw man fallacy.

Slippery slope

Once the first step is undertaken, a second or third step will inevitably follow, much like the way one step on a slippery incline will cause a person to fall and slide all the way to the bottom.

When a scenario comes where something happened, and we have a bias towards the next outcome out of all other possibilities. This makes our thinking narrow. We may be un prepared for other outcomes and making our decision inefficient.

Example, If we allow the government to infringe upon our right to privacy on the Internet, it will then feel free to infringe upon our privacy on the telephone. After that, FBI agents will be reading our mail. Then they will be placing cameras in our houses. We must not let any governmental agency interfere with our Internet communications, or privacy will completely vanish in the United States.

Anecdotal evidences

This is backing up your argument with facts that are very specific to context or expecting a outcome because it happened somewhere in some case.

For example, we don’t estimate average height of American with average height of NBA stars.

Also that a fallacy doesn’t always result in failure but our foresight gets limited.

Have a good day!
Email: harsha.hd@go-jek.com

Harsha Vardhan Dharmavarapu

Written by

Product Engineer @ Go-Jek Tech | IITan | Ideologist | Finding peace on chaos.

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