The Fallacy Fallacy Why you shouldn't go looking for faulty reasoning everywhere.

Hume

Verified User
In my experience, fallacy theory is not just useless—it can be actively harmful. It encourages intellectual laziness, offering high-minded excuses to dismiss any argument you don’t like. It impoverishes debate by pretending that messy, real-world disagreements can be resolved with the blunt tools of formal logic. You end up like my students: slightly paranoid, dismissive, and, ironically, less critical than when they started.

 
In my experience, fallacy theory is not just useless—it can be actively harmful. It encourages intellectual laziness, offering high-minded excuses to dismiss any argument you don’t like. It impoverishes debate by pretending that messy, real-world disagreements can be resolved with the blunt tools of formal logic. You end up like my students: slightly paranoid, dismissive, and, ironically, less critical than when they started.

This just sounds like you don't like having the errors in your reasoning pointed out to you. You make a lot of unsubstantiated claims in that post. Maybe that's something you should consider before whining about fallacies.
 
In my experience, fallacy theory is not just useless—it can be actively harmful. It encourages intellectual laziness, offering high-minded excuses to dismiss any argument you don’t like. It impoverishes debate by pretending that messy, real-world disagreements can be resolved with the blunt tools of formal logic. You end up like my students: slightly paranoid, dismissive, and, ironically, less critical than when they started.

Thanks, great article.
 
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