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Articles

Bad Arguments That Make You Smarter

Henrik Schoeneberg gets smart about fallacious reasoning.

Have you ever heard of the Straw Man fallacy, or the Red Herring fallacy? If not, perhaps you will be interested to know that these form parts of a set of concepts that have the potential to enhance your thinking power. In fact, by the time you finish reading this article you will have become smarter, because you will see the flaws in your own and others’ arguments more clearly.

Think of your brain as a toolbox. In the same way that there are tools for building, there are what philosopher Daniel Dennett calls ‘thinking tools’. Language, for instance, is a thinking tool, because it enables us to think better, through internal dialogue and by the sharing of ideas with others.

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