Evaluating Arguments & the Creeping Spectre of Gullibility

I’ve strived from the start to be a fair skeptic, to see arguments as they are, to analyse and evaluate them in such a way that I see errors in reasoning, logical fallacies, only where they actually exist, and so to avoid attacking straw-person caricatures of what is being argued…to see an argument as it really is, and to attack it only on its merits, or lack of them.

But as someone diagnosed with an illness like mine, I find that the real danger is not seeing fallacies of argument where they are not, but failing to see them where they are, and this I find unsettling. It’s sometimes the case that I’ll read or hear an argument, and while a skeptic without my disorder would easily note the error, rather than to not make out the sense of a reasonable argument, I sometimes make out too much sense out of unreasonable arguments — I sometimes see valid arguments where they are not.

While my treatment plan helps substantially with the more overt forms of delusional thinking, aided to a degree with skeptical thinking, I can and sometimes do, without thinking carefully, experience a feeling of sensibility when none is actually warranted.

Sometimes, I catch myself, with a brief mental “Aha! Gotcha!” followed by a rejection of the spurious feeling of sensibleness, sometimes, though, it slips past me, and lo, I am fooled.

This means that I sometimes miss what would be obvious and glaring logical errors to others with even the same knowledge and experience as I, minus the diagnosis of course.

I’m currently expanding my understanding of logical and rhetorical fallacies, and this has been very helpful, but I know that if anything, I must learn more and train my intuitive faculties further still. There is much to learn, still much to take in.

I must always be on the lookout for my overactive intuition, and I’m engaged at reining it in, to limit its purview to — mostly at least — those things that actually do make sense once truly understood, and not misleading fallacies, deepities, and word-salad with no real meaning at all.

While I can’t ever be absolutely certain to avoid that, so what? I’m not convinced that anything in the world can be known as absolutely certain, nor needs to be absolute to count as knowledge.

That it does is a claim that I’m deeply suspicious of, and maybe that’s a good sign.

Funny thing, that, the common phrase denoting claims to absolute knowledge, “set in stone,” when it doesn’t take a scientist to know that a stone wears away with time, and even the universe has a lifespan.

There’s hope yet. And where there is hope, there is life.