It is difficult for me to ascertain when the person I am communicating is using a logical fallacy to trick me into believing him or doubting my judgement, even when I realise it hours after the argument.
I have seen countless arguments in Reddit threads and I couldn’t figure out who was in the right or wrong unless I looked at the upvote counts. Even if the person is uttering a blatant lie, they somehow make it sound in a way that is completely believable to me. If it weren’t for those people that could exactly point out the irrationality behind these arguments, my mind would have been lobotomised long ago.
I do want to learn these critical thinking skills but I don’t know where to begin from. I could have all these tips and strategies memorised in theory, but they would be essentially useless if I am not able to think properly or remember them at the heat of the moment.
There could be many situations I could be unprepared for, like when the other person brings up a fact or statistic to support their claim and I have no way to verify it at the moment, or when someone I know personally to be wise or well-informed bring up about such fallacies, perhaps about a topic they are not well-versed with or misinformed of by some other unreliable source, and I don’t know whether to believe them or myself.
Could someone help me in this? I find this skill of distinguishing fallacies from facts to be an extremely important thing to have in this age of misinformation and would really wish to learn it well if possible. Maybe I could take inspiration from how you came about learning these critical thinking skills by your own.
Edit: I do not blindly trust the upvote count in a comment thread to determine who is right or wrong. It just helps me inform that the original opinion is not inherently acceptable by everyone. It is up to me decide who is actually correct or not, which I can do at my leisure unlike in a live conversation with someone where I don’t get the time to think rationally about what the other person is saying.
Generally a good approach is to try learning the rules of logic. Logic is all about proving things to be true using only facts. It can also be helpful to try some logic puzzles or riddles which can only be solved using hard logic. Note that this won’t automatically make you a better critical thinker, but it will help you exercise that muscle.
Also, it’s helpful to play devil’s advocate. If you hear someone making an argument, try to imagine how you would dispute that argument if you disagreed with it. It doesn’t matter if you actually agree or not, just imagine you did and think about what your counter argument would be. This is what high school debate teams have to do; they are given a topic and a position and have to defend their position.
It always helps to be aware of the facts, or at least of how to find facts. If you see a debate happening where you can’t tell who is right, do your own research on a site like Wikipedia and try to see what the truth is for yourself. Not every argument has a correct answer, but you will at least be able to see where each side is coming from.
I know it’s nit-picky but logic can be (and often is) decoupled from facts and truth. An argument can be logically valid and still untrue. For example:
An argument can be said to be sound when truth is factored in. Only both a valid and true argument is considered to be sound.
Only if at least one premise is untrue. If however the premises are true and the argument is logically valid, the conclusion is also true.
Interesting to note that the opposite is not necessarily true - flawed premises and/or a flawed argument do not imply an untrue conclusion. Easy to show with an example:
…which leads to the “fallacy of fallacy” - "the proposition is backed up by a fallacious argument, thus it is false is on itself fallacious.