Thanks for Maarten Boudry’s “Fallacy Fork” (September/October 2017). He’s right: we should think before we casually dismiss an argument as fallacious.
Still, fallacious arguments are like intellectual tar pits that our ancestors kept falling into until someone sifted human experience to map out empirically where the tar was deadliest. Lists of fallacies are something like those WWII charts of airplanes in silhouette: if you spot something like this, watch out!
Boudry seems mostly concerned with good-faith arguments badly executed through sloppiness or ignorance, arguments that require us to expend the effort to bridge leaps of logic but are still salvageable given effort.
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