The main causes of bad reasoning are ignorance, laziness, pride, and prejudice.

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Rana Ali                 ToK

The main causes of bad reasoning are ignorance, laziness, pride, and prejudice.

        William Drummond once described the situation with reason, “He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; and he that dares not reason is a slave.” Reason, called by some logic or rational thinking, is considered as one of the most significant ways to acquire knowledge however, as human beings we sometimes do acquire false or biased knowledge as a result of bad reasoning. Bad reasoning could be caused by several things be it the ignorance of a person, their laziness towards finding information, their pride or even prejudice and bias towards a certain situation.

        “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” Einstein once commented on ignorance. As said earlier, ignorance can be a cause of the bad reasoning, Einstein considers ‘dangerous’. This is the case because when people lack in knowledge about a certain topic and then try to use reason to explain the “little” they know things get messed up as fallacies occur. Einstein has not been the only man to call ignorance ‘dangerous’, however this has been ceaselessly repeated among the philosophers and the men of power. This can only lead to the conclusion that the bad reasoning caused by a lot of the people’s ignorance is what makes ignorance dangerous. When it comes to ignorance and reasoning, what a lot of people tend to do is shift the proof burden, no matter what little proof is available, to one side in order to support their own argument.

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         Laziness, defined as the lack of desire to perform work or give further effort, is recognized as another main cause of bad reasoning. Most human beings tend to believe everything they read or are told as long as it seems believable, without bothering to look for evidence supporting the argument. This simply happens because humans are lazy. A lot of newspaper/ magazine articles, a lot of T.V shows provide the audience with information that is, one way or another, biased. The validity of this information, whether it is true or not, does not seem significant to lazy people as they ...

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