Five Common Thinking Errors





1. Non Sequiturs

A non sequitur is when you your conclusion seems to come from out of nowhere. You may have true premises but you conclusion just doesn't make any sense at all. It doesn't follow logically from you premises. 

It would be like saying:

Some video games are violent
Violent people play video games
Video games make people violent
None of the premises said anything about the effects of video games but just stated that some are violent and that violent people do in fact play video games. It never said anything about what type of video games the violent people play because the first premise stated that not all video games are violent(since only some are). There is also nothing said about non-violent people. In order for a video game to make a person violent they would have to be non-violent before the inclusion of violent game in their life. This conclusion does not even come close to following logically from the given premises.




2. Bad Premises

You have a bad premise when words in the premise are not clearly defined or when the premise is just completely false. The conclusion would follow but it would be false since it came from false or unclear premises. 

An example would be:

Nintendo makes horrible consoles
A ton of people bought the Nintendo Wii
A ton of people like horrible consoles
The conclusion follows logically but it is unclear what is meant by the word "horrible". It is a subjective word unless it means the consoles are cheaply made or something more descriptive. It is also unclear what is meant by "a ton of people". This needs to be more clearly defined.




3. Ad Hominem

An ad hominem is a personal attack that might occur during discusion. When someone is losing a debate or cannot think of something to say they might start spouting inflammatory remarks. This is a mistake. You should try to attack a person's arguments and not the person. Sometimes you disagree with an argument just because this wrong person said it; this is another form of ad hominem. You cannot dismiss any aspect of the argument, but you can dismiss the person so you ignore both.




4. Begging the Question

Begging the question is when you put the conclusion directly into a premise. It is circular reasoning. You never prove anything. An example would be: 


Nintendo is a great software company because they make great software.


This is obvious. Nowhere in that statement is it proven that Nintendo is a great software company. I am sure you have heard this reasoning in a discussion with a little kid. Here is the same statement in a discussion: 


Mark: "Nintendo is a great software company!"
Ryan: "Why?"
Mark: "Because they make great software!"

It begs the question by stating the obvious and answering nothing.




5. Red Herrings

Red Herrings are meant to distract you from the original argument. When someone cannot think of something to say they might say something totally unrelated(or sort of unrelated) to what you were discussing. This brings the pressure off of them and might confuse you. An example would be: 

Louis:"Sony is the best company ever!"
Mark:"Sony has horrible customer service."
Ryan:"Yeah. Their console warranties are horrible."
Louis: "Well Microsoft's consoles have 33% failure rates"

Mark and Ryan were both replying to Louis's initial statement about Sony but when Louis found that they were knocking down his statement he quickly tried to change the subject. He was afraid to be proven wrong in front of his friends.


The Problem

These thinking errors prevent intelligent conversation and lack any clear sense of reasoning. In order to improve the way you think, you should look for these thinking errors in your daily speech. Everyone has made one at one point in their life. The important thing is that you notice them and work on thinking more clearly and getting your thoughts out in a way that everyone can understand and believe them.

Other Sources

-Some of you may have a book on writing Essays and Research Papers(it was on the list of books for the year) and in that book there is a section on thinking errors.
-Wikipedia has a page on all of these thinking errors plus some variations of them.
- The Fallacy Files is another page with more information on thinking errors.
- To see my examples in real life just talk to anybody devoted to playing only one video game console and you will get all sorts of thinking errors. You can also check almost any video game news site that allows for user comments and you would see the same thing. Just go to IGN and look at any news article and the comments below it to see a whole bunch of these thinking errors in action 1