How to Prevent Logical Fallacies

An Easy Way to Prevent Errors

An easy way to prevent errors is to withhold judgement or conclusions until all the relevent information is obtained. This is explained best by Descartes.

Whenever I do not perceive the truth clearly, I simply suspend judgment in order to avoid error.

Rene Descartes

For example, if your spouse or partner does not reply to your messages or answer your calls, do not let your mind jump to a false conclusion that he or she is cheating on you. Instead, calm your feelings down and get more information.

How to Counter Sophistry

All of these then imply that all sophistries and fallacies are caused by humans having different or uncontrolled feelings.

• “He advocates children’s programs because he loves children.”
• “Einstein created hidden variables theory because he felt that God shouldn’t play dice with the world.”

Since all sophistries arise from the natural variation in feelings among all humans, does this mean that more and more arguments, and subsequently more and more chaos will arise as time passes?

If people feel the desire for chaos, then it will.

An example of growing chaos is the Seven Years’ War leading to the Napoleonic wars, which led to World War 1 and then World War 2, each with more deaths than the war that came before.

But if people feel the need for peace and order, then they can create a solution to sophistry, perpetual arguments, and chaos.

Socrates’ solution is called dialectics — a system of logic that has a goal that everyone agrees to. With dialectics, the parties don’t push their own egos and argue endlessly.

In the non-dialectic system of debate, people just push their own egos without coming to any synthesis of ideas. But with dialectics, they agree to surrender their egos from the very beginning in order to eventually synhesize their minds and come up with a real solution.

So if you’re arguing with someone endlessly without any compromise, it simply means that his ego only feels for himself and his own ideas and has no desire to reduce itself. Normally, this is solved by disconnecting from that person in order to avoid his toxic ego.

But if that person is your boss or the president of your country, then without any system of dialectics, the only choices are to stay and accept the problem or leave to find a new boss or country. Therefore, it would make sense for stability-loving people to advocate dialectics as early as possible.

Socrates suggests it be taught to people 30 years old and above:

Therefore, that your feelings may not be moved to pity about our citizens who are now thirty years of age, every care must be taken in introducing them to dialectic.

Socrates

Republic Book 7