One danger of accusing people of committing a logical fallacy is that you may not actually know what you’re talking about.

Last month I wrote a blog post that a colleague of mine whom I admire disagreed with. She specifically accused me of writing a post that was “full of fallacies.” But when she was asked for examples of these fallacies, she couldn’t name one actual fallacy in the piece. She was only able to name something she didn’t like about the piece. (And, as it turned out, she was objecting to an argument I didn’t even make.)

I’ve been noticing this tendency more often lately. People, especially pro-life nerds like me, are tempted to talk about fallacies all the time in conversation. I think this is often because being able to point out fallacies seems to help us quickly demonstrate the problem with the other person’s reasoning, and it kind of shows that we know what we’re talking about when it comes to logic and argumentation. To put it simply, it makes us sound smart. But there are several dangers to this. I’m going to talk about one of them in this post, and another in a followup.

The first danger is talking about fallacies when you don’t actually know what you’re talking about.