Reacting To Entrenched Philosophical Errors

Reactionary worldviews, or worldviews that are constructed mostly or exclusively as a response to another person's worldview, stand on fallacious grounds [1].  It is folly to never engage in any wholly self-prompted contemplation of philosophical issues, whether or not one has already been exposed to true claims about those issues by happenstance or out of curiosity.  Intellectual autonomy is necessary for a sound worldview.  At the same time, reacting to the fallacious claims of others is still a vital part of life as a social being in the midst of the many people who might never stop to consider matters of ultimate truth on their own.

Different cultures and eras have their own dominant fallacies and heresies that need to be addressed, and responding to expected and unexpected cultural errors is a task of great significance that any rationalist can equip themselves for via reflection.  In fact, most conversations about philosophical subjects like morality and politics that happen to be points of popular discussion tend to focus on attempts to correct misconceptions.  Ignoring the prominent philosophical errors of a given community can even be an indication that someone does not care about truth enough to challenge denials of it.  Moreover, it can even be beneficial to a person's understanding of a culture or idea to seek out conversations with irrational people for the sake of reacting to popular errors.

While reacting to the often random false positions that one might encounter in social experiences can sometimes lead to the discovery of new aspects of some truths, it is still at best haphazard and intellectually lazy to intentionally seek out information from others about a philosophical matter before considering it to, at a minimum, some small extent.  At least the basic logical facts governing a certain subject or part of reality are immediately accessible to anyone who simply tries to look to them!  For example, no one needs to ask or listen to others to realize that logic is distinct from physics or that theology and secular ethics are inherently exclusive frameworks.

Even someone who might casually, thoughtlessly say that they "know absolutely nothing" about a matter does actually know something about it, even if it is only self-verifying, axiomatic truths about it.  Everyone can directly recognize that politics is not the same as anything that falls outside the category of politics, whether or not they are familiar with the conceptual or experiential aspects of politics.  There are specific misconceptions about politics and practically every other category of philosophy that would not necessarily ever occur to the minds of rational people if it was not for social encounters with the irrational, but there are logical truths encompassing all of reality that should be directly, personally grasped by all.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2020/06/reactionary-worldviews.html