Spot the Flaw: a bilingual trainer for bad arguments

Most of us can feel that an argument is wrong long before we can say what is wrong with it. That gap is where bad reasoning survives: in newspaper columns, in family WhatsApp groups, and in our own heads when we are defending something we already believe.

I have put up a short interactive page for closing that gap: Spot the Flaw.

It gives you fourteen arguments of the kind that actually circulate. For each one you name what is wrong with it, choosing from eleven common flaws, and you get an explanation either way. It works in English and Urdu, with a toggle at the top.

Two of the fourteen arguments have nothing wrong with them. That is deliberate. A lesson in logical fallacies that makes every example broken teaches people to produce a fallacy name on demand, which is not the same skill as reasoning well and is sometimes worse than the disease. Being able to look at a sound argument and say that it holds is half of what is being trained.

One warning, also printed at the end of the page: naming a fallacy is not the same as refuting a claim. A badly argued position can still turn out to be true. The honest use of a page like this is to run the check on your own reasoning first, where it costs you something.

Free to copy, translate and adapt.

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