#personal incredulity

[sumpix]

Personal incredulity.

[inevitablyscience]

Logical Fallacy of the Week

A fallacy is an incorrect argument in logic and rhetoric which undermines an argument’s logical validity or more generally an argument’s logical soundness. Logical fallacies are faults in reasoning; they are calculation errors of language. You can make those mistakes accidentally or use logical fallacies on purpose in order to trick people into believing you and defeat your opponent. An argument that involves logical fallacies is not a fair or objective argument. In order to be good at arguing you should learn to spot and correct logical fallacies both in yourself and your opponents.

Personal incredulity

A notion that just because something is difficult to understand or you are unaware of its mechanisms it is therefore wrong.  Also known as argument for personal incredulity or argument form ignorance, this fallacy is common in arguments about science, technology and medicine. A lot of topics that are controversial in STEM and medicine are often complex and require some time and research to understand. It is easy to claim that just because something sounds complicated and improbable it cannot be real.

Personal incredulity can also include a tendency to look for and accept easier explanations over more complicated ones. That’s why this fallacy is also common for people of faith or believers in paranormal. Often they will claim that something is ‘magical’ or ‘unexplainable’ even though science did explain it many times because the scientific explanation is too hard for them to understand, so they would rather believe there is no explanation at all.

Examples:

‘How do random mutations can turn a bacteria into a human? Don’t you think it is a bit far-fetched to say that a complex organism can just happen randomly overtime?’

‘They say that it’s a complex optical illusion but if you listen to the explanation, it’s nonsense. Obviously they don’t want to admit that we actually filmed an UFO’

Why is this a fallacy?

This way of reasoning is incorrect because your level of education or your ability to understand a scientific concept (or anything else) does not in fact determine whether that concept is actually correct! As Neil deGrasse Tyson have said, ‘The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it’. I admit, sometimes a very complicated explanation is conceived to deny a simpler, but less desirable explanation. For example the geocentric model of solar system had such a complicated explanation for the movement of stars and planets in the sky, it was ridiculous. The more simple and accurate heliocentric model was a much better explanation, but nobody wanted to believe it at that time.

However scientific theories are often complicated because nature itself is complicated. Often it takes time and hard work to conceptualize an idea such as evolution by natural selection, but if you truly understand it, it doesn’t seem confusing anymore. I think this sort of reasoning is somewhat related to the strawman fallacy because often the person attacks not the theory itself but their own wrong and simplified version of that theory. In the end you can claim that something is wrong because you don’t understand it, or came up with an incorrect version of that something, and in both cases you will be wrong.

Resources and further reading:

In case you want to learn more about logical fallacies and maybe call them out in arguments

In case you want to listen to me talking about logical fallacies

In case you want to track logical fallacy of the week