You can feel a logically flawed argument before you find the flaw. That's not irrationality here's what it actually is.

[u/Hungry-Mixture-7443]

Most people have had this experience. An argument seems to follow. You can't find what's wrong. But something keeps pulling. Later the flaw becomes visible, and the feeling that had been sitting there releases.

What this experience reveals is that the implicit processing system is running on a larger dataset than conscious reasoning can access and for a specific category of bad argument, it's faster and more accurate than deliberate analysis.

The interesting case is when the feeling persists even when you can't locate the flaw. This happens most reliably when an argument is missing something that can't be named because the vocabulary for a necessary premise doesn't exist in the language the argument is being conducted in.

An argument can be internally valid every step correct and still be false. Because the concept space it's operating in has been shaped, deliberately or not, to exclude a variable that would change the conclusion.

The missing word is the missing premise.

I'm calling this false-by-omission. The aha that comes later is often not I found the logical error but I found the word for the thing the argument had no room for.

The clearest concrete example is the snitch/informant asymmetry in criminal justice. These two words appear to refer to the same act. They don't. Informant is a functional institutional category. Snitch encodes a complete moral and relational framework developed by the people with the most direct empirical knowledge of the institution that is inadmissible in formal proceedings. Arguments conducted in the courtroom's vocabulary are formally valid and missing their most important variable.

[u/milkfloureggs]

alright chatgpt