(1)
Department of Radiology, UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School, Newark, NJ, USA
Abstract
A plea for the relevance of the topic of fallacies is that for me, and I hope for you, a discussion of errors and argumentation is in fact helpful for successful management of any radiological enterprise be it direction of a department or simply interaction between one radiologist and a colleague who may be a fellow radiologist, a referring physician or an administrator. The opportunity to engage in dialog is inevitable and commonplace even if some radiologists prefer the security of physical isolation. Making your position known is important for your business and I daresay your self-respect. So join with me in a recitation of a few mistaken notions your associates might make but you should not.
A plea for the relevance of the topic of fallacies is that for me, and I hope for you, a discussion of errors and argumentation is in fact helpful for successful management of any radiological enterprise be it direction of a department or simply interaction between one radiologist and a colleague who may be a fellow radiologist, a referring physician or an administrator. The opportunity to engage in dialog is inevitable and commonplace even if some radiologists prefer the security of physical isolation. Making your position known is important for your business and I daresay your self-respect. So join with me in a recitation of a few mistaken notions your associates might make but you should not.
The watchword is fallacies, which can be defined as false reasoning often from true factual premises so that false conclusions are generated. Since the articulator of a fallacy is often convinced of the veracity of his claims, a fallacy is a self-deception. But it refers not just to one point made at one time on one issue but rather to a predilection to argue falsely repetitively in other circumstances. So a fallacy is not merely an error but a means of falling into error.
I have been guided in these thoughts by two sources. The first is David Hackett Fischer’s book, Historical Fallacies published 40 years ago but enduringly relevant not just for matters of historical content but also for daily discourse. The second is the collective work of Tversky and Kahnemann whose insights into subjective assessment of probability, biases and judgments under uncertainty have exposed the fallacious reasoning within seemingly logical thought paradigms.
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