Discovering Your Intelligence

Fallacies Fallacy

By Thomas Ganey

It’s a celebrated quotation from Blaise Pascal. You admire the feat of imagination. Nevertheless, a grumpy logician would mutter that it exhibits the fallacy of hasty generalization: the conclusion is too sweeping for the evidence available to support it.

Hasty generalization, begging the question, the straw man, the fallacy of division, false cause, and the like—you know about these from studying them in school. They are classical fallacies in reasoning. Logic professors keep a list of the fallacies and ask students to locate instances of them in printed arguments. Students take tests on their skill in identifying the fallacies.

Now for the twist in this. There is consistently a fallacy that professors leave off the list. They are not even aware that the fallacy exists. It’s the Fallacies Fallacy. This is the fallacy in believing that a classroom introduction to the fallacies, beyond its value as background, will do students a measure of good when they leave the classroom and engage in reasoning of their own. The reality is that nobody—nobody—reasoning in life—avoids this or that error on the basis of remembering it to be one of the classical fallacies. The professor himself leaves the classroom for the faculty lounge where, arriving and pontificating, he registers an error in reasoning before he finishes his first lazy cup of coffee. As for the students, the adage applies that “a cat may go to a monastery, but she still remains a cat.” Studying logical fallacies does not create the will to avoid them, only the desire to pass a test on them. Logic lives in behavior, and intelligence or the lack of it resides in the will.