Sources of Conceptual Confusion

29th November 2011

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Sources of Conceptual Confusion

Conceptual confusion can be the result of committing a logical fallacy, in which case one is confused because one is making an error in one’s reasoning without realizing that one is reasoning fallaciously.

However, conceptual confusion can also come about as a result of attempting to observe a logically valid distinction that is not yet widely recognized (i.e., a distinction that is so commonly conflated that it is not recognized as a conflation) and which is therefore difficult to formulate within a known logical framework.

When a distinction is intuitively felt but not yet made fully explicit, one is likely to swing back and forth between making the distinction where it stands out clearly, even if not explicitly formulated, and conflating the distinction where it appears in a less intuitively obvious context.

In this latter case, one is attempting to reason validly, but the linguistic and conceptual infrastructure ready-to-hand does not have the resources to accommodate the distinction toward which one is groping.

One can experience a certain cognitive dissonance as a result of attempting to reason validly but being channeled into something like a fallacy (or, at least, a conflation) by the received logical theory one is employing.

Thus one can experience conceptual confusion either as a result of cognitive inadequacy (personal error) or logical inadequacy (systemic error).