Last week’s podcast, Relationality, Identity, & Reality, was a lively conversation with author Pieter Niemann where we discussed authenticity in relationality, the nature of identity, compensation patterns, autism, and more.
Today’s article is about an endangered species known as “critical thinking.” There’s a lot of conversation about how AI might end human civilization in ways we’ve seen in the movies, but I’m not afraid of human extinction. What I am afraid of the acceleration of the existing trend of the end of critical thinking as a value, which AI is already doing. That future is now, and the better AI gets, the more people are likely to delegate their thinking to it. That appears to be the most probable disaster, far less dramatic than being enslaved by machines, but in one way no different.
Logical fallacies are usually taught as mistakes in argumentation: straw man, ad hominem, false equivalency, circular reasoning, appeal to authority, and so on. They are treated as things to identify in debates, essays, or political arguments.
But their developmental significance is much greater than that.
A logical fallacy is not merely an intellectual error. Very often, it is what thinking looks like when something else has become more important than accurately representing reality.
Consider the straw man. Someone makes an argument that threatens us, and instead of engaging with the argument as it was actually made, we unconsciously alter it into something easier to defeat. The intellectual failure is misrepresentation and that is usually what’s addressed. But psychologically, the distortion serves a purpose: it protects us from having to seriously encounter a position that might destabilize our own.
Ad hominem works similarly. Rather than examining whether a claim is true, we shift attention to the person making it. Perhaps they are hypocritical, biased, “privileged,” selfish, ignorant, or otherwise objectionable. Some of those observations may even be true. But none of them determine whether the claim itself is true. The shift from proposition to person allows us to escape the more demanding task of evaluating the proposition.
False equivalency performs another kind of regulatory function. Two things share some characteristic, so we treat them as equivalent while ignoring important differences. This can relieve us of the burden of making finer distinctions. Instead of determining how two situations are similar, how they are different, and which differences are relevant to the question at hand, we collapse them into the same category.
These are failures of reasoning in the mental domain, but they are also frequently failures of emotional regulation.
Can You Think While Triggered?
One of the more important developmental questions is not whether you can reason. Most reasonably intelligent adults can reason when nothing important is at stake.
The harder question is: Can you continue reasoning while emotionally activated?
Can you accurately represent someone else’s argument while angry at them? Can you distinguish evidence from interpretation when you feel threatened? Can you update your position while embarrassed? Can you remain curious when the available evidence is moving toward a conclusion you do not want?
Or does reasoning effectively shut down when emotional regulation becomes difficult?
Because that is a system that causes serious stagnation. The answer to these questions hinges significantly on whether you can value truth more than comfort, which is something many subscribe to, but few embody.
This is where logical fallacies become useful diagnostics. They reveal the places where the need to regulate an internal state overrides the obligation to represent reality accurately.
The person may still “feel” as though they are reasoning; however, this is not determined via feeling. In fact, they may become more articulate. But intelligence can just as easily be recruited into defending an existing conclusion as into discovering what is true. The sophistication of the argument therefore tells us relatively little about whether actual reasoning is occurring.
The more important question is whether the reasoning remains corrigible.
Can You Be Wrong Without Shame Taking Over?
Being wrong is not an unfortunate side effect of development. It is one of its primary mechanisms.
You cannot become more competent without discovering where you are incompetent. You cannot improve your model of reality without discovering where the existing model fails. You cannot develop discernment without making distinctions badly and then learning to make them better.
This means that the capacity to be wrong is inseparable from the capacity to grow.
Yet for many people, being wrong is not experienced simply as receiving new information. It is experienced as a threat to identity.
This grinds development to a halt.
“I was wrong” rapidly becomes “I am stupid,” “I am inadequate,” “I am a bad person,” or “I cannot trust myself.” Once that happens, the problem is no longer the original error. The person now has shame to regulate.
And that creates enormous pressure to make the error disappear.
Evidence gets reinterpreted. Definitions change. Responsibility moves elsewhere. Intentions are substituted for consequences. Irrelevant facts become suddenly important. The other person’s flaws are introduced. The original claim changes.
Logical fallacies flourish under precisely these conditions because they allow the mind to preserve identity at the expense of accuracy.
A mature relationship with error is different. An error is information about the limits of a model, skill, perception, or decision. It may be uncomfortable. It may have consequences. It may require repair. But it does not have to become an existential judgment about the person who made it.
The less identity depends upon being right, the easier learning becomes.
Can You Apologize for an Objective Mistake?
This becomes particularly visible when an error affects another person.
Can you simply say, “I made a mistake”?
Not “I made a mistake, but you also…” which I call “The Turnabout.”
Not “I’m sorry you experienced it that way” which is an evasive Appeal to Subjectivism.
Not a lengthy explanation of the circumstances that made the mistake understandable, scrounging for compassion.
Not an immediate demand that the other person recognize your good intentions, which I call the Good Intentions Fallacy.
Just recognition of what happened.
A competent apology requires several capacities at once. You have to perceive reality accurately enough to recognize the error. You have to tolerate the emotional consequences of recognizing it. You have to separate responsibility from self-condemnation. And you have to remain sufficiently oriented toward the other person to repair the consequences rather than immediately regulating your own discomfort.
This is why something as apparently simple as apologizing can be developmentally demanding. This is also why most people are not very good at it. It could have been something we learned in 8th grade Health Class, in addition to the surprising truth of the equivalent alcohol content per serving of beer, wine, and liquor. We could have been taught reasoning, as well, but that might not have gone over well at the dinner table when you argue with your parents about their most sacred beliefs at age 15. Real reasoning is stunningly scarce.
The Normalization of Bad Reasoning
Poor reasoning is so common that much of it has become socially invisible.
We routinely see people answer arguments that were never made, attack people instead of propositions, change standards when the original standard becomes inconvenient, confuse explanations with excuses, treat intentions as evidence of outcomes, and manufacture equivalencies between situations whose relevant features are substantially different.
Because these moves are ubiquitous, they can begin to look like ordinary disagreement.
They aren’t. They are an intellectual blight in our society and contribute to the current decline of our civilization.
Disagreement is compatible with rigorous reasoning. Two people can examine the same evidence, identify genuine uncertainties, weight competing values differently, and reach different conclusions. Neither person has to distort the other’s position for disagreement to exist.
Logical fallacies are different. They degrade the process by which disagreement could potentially produce greater understanding.
That is why learning them matters beyond philosophy or debate.
Knowing the names—straw man, ad hominem, false equivalency—is useful. But memorizing a list of fallacies is the least important part. The deeper practice is learning to notice the moment when your relationship with reality becomes conditional.
Can you keep thinking when the answer hurts? Or does your grade level drop precipitously?
Can you represent an opposing argument accurately enough that its advocate would recognize it?
Can you discover that you were incompetent at something without converting that discovery into shame?
Can you admit an objective mistake without immediately defending yourself?
Most importantly: Can you allow evidence to change you?
These are not merely intellectual skills. They are developmental capacities.
Logical rigor ultimately requires more than intelligence. It requires enough emotional maturity that reality is allowed to remain reality even when you would strongly prefer it to be something else.