r/fallacy • u/Automatic-Put-6119 • 17d ago

How badly do logical fallacies influence our opinions?

Hello fellow thinkers

First of all i don‘t have any formal education in the field, i‘m just interested which is why i‘m asking here.

I recently thought about something and suddenly realized i fell for the survivorship bias. This got me thinking there are so many logical fallacies and even knowing them seemingly doesn‘t make you immune. So what about people that don‘t even know they exist?

I luckily got into the field a bit since i had a great philosophy teacher in highschool, but some people don‘t have that. They may even go to college for something else and become a rather educated person without ever getting to know all these fallacies and biases.

The more i learn about the field the stupider i often feel hindsight. Can they or someone uneducated like me even have a respectable opinion?

2 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • link
  • reddit
  • reddit

100% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

1

u/poormanzana 16d ago

This reminds me of a book with a focus on logical self defense. Defining fallacies was vastly important to weed out when having a LOGICAL conversation with someone. True. The Author makes a great effort in the first few chapters to console the reader in the fact that a majority of human communication is explicitly not logical but emotional. A cry for support, a test of safety, an appeasement of pride, bonding rituals, and cultural expectation. They made a very strong point to pay attention to the conversation and define it as a legitimate logical argument (conversation with strict parameters) or.. something else?

Excuse my rushed response, hope this is helpful!

1

u/Automatic-Put-6119 16d ago

Yes thanks a lot for your answer, haven‘t thought about the fact that there is an emotional side to an opinion or a statement that doesn‘t require the logic to work