How do I learn to detect logical fallacies in a conversation?

It is difficult for me to ascertain when the person I am communicating is using a logical fallacy to trick me into believing him or doubting my judgement, even when I realise it hours after the argument.

I have seen countless arguments in Reddit threads and I couldn’t figure out who was in the right or wrong unless I looked at the upvote counts. Even if the person is uttering a blatant lie, they somehow make it sound in a way that is completely believable to me. If it weren’t for those people that could exactly point out the irrationality behind these arguments, my mind would have been lobotomised long ago.

I do want to learn these critical thinking skills but I don’t know where to begin from. I could have all these tips and strategies memorised in theory, but they would be essentially useless if I am not able to think properly or remember them at the heat of the moment.

There could be many situations I could be unprepared for, like when the other person brings up a fact or statistic to support their claim and I have no way to verify it at the moment, or when someone I know personally to be wise or well-informed bring up about such fallacies, perhaps about a topic they are not well-versed with or misinformed of by some other unreliable source, and I don’t know whether to believe them or myself.

Could someone help me in this? I find this skill of distinguishing fallacies from facts to be an extremely important thing to have in this age of misinformation and would really wish to learn it well if possible. Maybe I could take inspiration from how you came about learning these critical thinking skills by your own.

Edit: I do not blindly trust the upvote count in a comment thread to determine who is right or wrong. It just helps me inform that the original opinion is not inherently acceptable by everyone. It is up to me decide who is actually correct or not, which I can do at my leisure unlike in a live conversation with someone where I don’t get the time to think rationally about what the other person is saying.

GONADS125,

My recommendation is to take a Critical Thinking and/or other philosophy classes at your local community college (granted one exists near you).

prole,

I know it sounds dismissive, but I would get an Introduction to Logic and Reasoning textbook, and read it and attempt the problems. The internet is great, and you can get a lot from wikis, but you’re not going to beat the amount of useful info condensed into a book like that. The problems will also help you apply the knowledge. Also, since logic doesn’t generally change much over time, you don’t need to worry about getting the most up to date edition.

The only way to really get good at detecting fallacious arguments is practice.

Freeman, (edited )

What helped me: “Rationality Rules” on youtube had a video series (and even a tabletop game) about types of logical fallacies with the focus on religious apologetics.

And as you said: Upvotecount show whose opinion/argument is popular with the viewership. There can be a correlation with how sound the argument is logically.

anotherlemmyuser,

I’m genuinely curious here, why is learning to identify logical fallacy at the point of conversation that important to you? Just research yourself afterwards, otherwise how would you know what is wrong unless you have already decided or learnt it is wrong to begin with. In my opinion, it is not that important unless you are engaged in professional persuasion or your opinion at the very moment holds a lot of weight. You could maybe identify inconsistency or twist their words until they contradict themselves? Otherwise, the best approach if you are not sure is to find out later. At the end of the day what matters to me most is my opinion, I do not care if I disagree with the person I am interacting with, or if the person disagrees with me. Maybe cause I’m not a politician. ;-)

HelixDab,

That seems like a dangerous approach to not care if you disagree with people. Shouldn't you know if your disagreement with them is based on sound reasoning?

anotherlemmyuser,

Oh, what I meant is that I wouldn’t care to argue for long if I disagree with the person I am interacting with. I did not mean being stubborn and sticking with the same opinion. I just take into consideration what the person has said, and think or research about it afterwards. Apologies for my unnatural English.

anotherlemmyuser,

Oops, I have no idea why the comment is reposted many times. I shall try to delete.

bouh,

The very first step is to know the fallacies. Find a list.

The second step is to familiarise yourself with them. Learn the fallacies. It can also be called sophism in some languages. Familiarising yourself with them will allow you to recognise them.

Third is to be vigilant during a conversation to detect them. Sometimes you will be the one to use them.

The easiest, and amont the most common, are fallacies tied to reputation: when you consider something right or wrong because of who made the statement. It’s sketchy because it can be used as a shortcut in conversation, but by itself the truth or wrongness of the argument doesn’t depend on who said it, never. But some people have demonstrated expertise or they habit of lying or manipulating. Other fallacies usually involve the language or the logic, so it’s harder to detect, but it’s a great mental exercise.

lvxferre,
@lvxferre@lemmy.ml avatar

Note that a fallacy is a reasoning flaw; sometimes the goal might be to trick you, indeed. But sometimes it’s just a brainfart… or you might be dealing with something worse, like sheer irrationality. That said:

  • look for the conclusion. What is the point that the writer is delivering? (Note: you might find multiple conclusions. That’s OK.)
  • look at what’s being used to support that conclusion. What is the core argument?
  • look for the arguments used to feed premises into the core argument. Which are they?

Then try to formalise the arguments that you found into “premise 1, premise 2, conclusion” in your head or in a text editor. Are the premises solid? Do you actually agree with them? And do they actually lead into the conclusion? If something smells fishy, you probably got a fallacy.

Get used to at least a few “big” types of fallacies. There are lists across the internet, do read a few of them; you don’t need to memorise names, just to understand what is wrong with that fallacious reasoning. This pic has a few of them, I think that it’s good reference material, specially at the start:

https://www.pesec.no/content/images/size/w1460/2020/03/School-Of-Thought---Fallacies-Poster.png

In special I’ve noticed that a few types of fallacy are really common on the internet:

  • genetic fallacy - claiming that an argument is true or false because of its origin. Includes ad hominem, appeal to nature, appeal to authority, ad populum, etc.
  • red herring - bringing irrelevant shit up as if it supported the conclusion, when it doesn’t matter. In special, I see appeal to emotion (claiming that something is false/true because it makes you feel really bad/good) all the time.
  • oversimplification - disregarding key details that either stain the premises or show that they don’t necessarily lead to conclusion. False dichotomy (“if X is true, Y is false” in situations where both can be true or false) is a specially common type of oversimplification.
  • strawman - distortion of an opposing argument into a way that is easier to beat. Again, notice that “intention” doesn’t matter; only that the opposing argument isn’t being addressed.
  • moving goalposts - when you counter an argument, the person plops another in its place, without acknowledging that it’s a new argument. Often relies heavily on ad hoc (making stuff up on the spot to shield an argument)
  • four terms - exploiting multiple meanings associated with the same word to create an argument like “A is B¹, B² is C, thus A is C”.

There are also some “markers” that smell fallacy for me from a distance. You should not trust them (as they might be present where there’s no fallacy, or they might be absent even when the associated fallacy pops up); however, if you find those you should look for the associated fallacy:

  • “As a” at the start of a text - genetic fallacy, specially appeal to authority
  • "Trust me" - red herring, specially appeal to emotion (once you contradict the argument there’s a good chance that the other will create drama because you didn’t blindly trust them, so the whole thing boils down to “accept this as true otherwise you’ll hear my meltdown”).
  • “I don’t understand” followed by a counter-argument - strawman. Specially common in Reddit.
  • “Actually” - red herring through trivia that is completely irrelevant in the context.
cinaed666,
@cinaed666@kbin.social avatar

It doesn't look like it has been mentioned here yet: https://www.amazon.com/Skeptics-Guide-Universe-Really-Increasingly/dp/1538760533
This book goes really deep into every different kind of logical fallacy.

XiELEd,

Mostly Informal fallacies, but I liked that book too!

Nonameuser678,
@Nonameuser678@kbin.social avatar

There's this app called cranky uncle and it goes through things like this and then helps to you learn how to identify them. It was developed by a university researchers in Australia with the aim of improving people's ability to recognise misinformation

Clipper152, (edited )

It helps to remember that the mind is not a truth machine, but a survival machine.

I recommend learning some psychology. The more you know about how the mind works, the easier it is to understand and spot logical fallacies, both in yourself and others.

Edit: also, you should practice those critical thinking skills instead of just keeping them in theory. You could apply them to past situations, for example.

XiELEd,

I’m a bit new to self-studying logic (and rhetoric) but I think you should learn about “Formal fallacies” and “Informal fallacies”. Formal fallacies are those that arguments that are systematically false, like all A is B, some C is A, some C is not B, therefore all C is A. But in real arguments you have to convert those organic arguments into these terms (which could be the hardest part), and then you find out if it is a fallacy… I remember there was a way to find out if arguments are valid based on adding stars, I’ll probably send it later… But be warned, an argument can be “valid”, but still have the wrong premises! You can say, All cats are on fire, therefore some things on fire are cats… and the argument would still be valid, but rest on false premises… Informal fallacies, I think, are somewhat out of the scope of formal logic, but they are still considered faulty arguments, like Strawman…

Parsnip8904,
@Parsnip8904@beehaw.org avatar

I would suggest getting a book called Thinking Fast and Slow, and reading it slowly and deliberately, less than 5-10 pages a day. It not only tells you how to find these kind of fallacies but also why you’re likely to fall for them and how.

Moghul, (edited )

I have seen countless arguments in Reddit threads and I couldn’t figure out who was in the right or wrong unless I looked at the upvote counts. Even if the person is uttering a blatant lie, they somehow make it sound in a way that is completely believable to me. If it weren’t for those people that could exactly point out the irrationality behind these arguments, my mind would have been lobotomised long ago.

Upvotes on a comment or thread are absolutely not the way to determine which person is right, and it’s not even the way to determine which point of view is more popular. All those numbers give you is how many upvotes the comment got. In two separate communities, you’ll see completely contradictory statements be most popular because the people who feel a certain way tend to congregate.

If you want to become a more discerning information consumer, you can look up the common logical fallacies and keep them in mind, but nothing beats actually being informed, and forming your own opinion. Now, this is pretty hard because all news media is inherently biased, and so many things happen all the time that it’s hard to keep up.

What I’ve found helpful, is when it comes to things I don’t know about, I read the discussion as “this person says this, and that person says that”, rather than “this person is saying the truth, and that person is lying”. If it’s a subject that matters to me, I’ll have a look at some news, see where the general consensus is, analyze it from my own point of view, and form my opinion like that. If it doesn’t really matter to me, I don’t really do that, and just relay information as “I heard it might be either X or Y, but I don’t know for sure”, “I heard from Z that something or other”.

Edit: Of course, it’s not like I’m some paragon of unbiased information crunching. I have my own biases that I’m aware of, but naturally I think I’m right, so I think they’re not a problem, which is probably a problem. Everything you experience is relative.

PatFussy,

Sometimes a strawman gets more upvotes/reception than a well thought out argument. Its difficult to win over people when their minds are made up in the first sentence. It only gets harder if you are doing this irl so your best bet is to gaslight them before they gaslight you. Its the American way.

Viking_Hippie,

You had me until “to hunt the monster you must become the monster” 😄

Viking_Hippie,

I recommend using your fallacy is as both a handy reference and a shortcut for explaining it to the person committing one of the most common fallacies as well as anyone else reading.

By using that, you’ll be able to spot a lot of bullshit you might otherwise miss and eventually get to the point where you’re able to spot the ones you come across most often without looking it up 🙂

NeoLikesLemmy,

Read some of the old “Miss Marple” Stories, then some “Hercule Poirot” Stories.

C4d,

Ah yes. The little grey cells.

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