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You are confusing physics with biology, if you will. You could say the entire field if biology is redundant -- it's all consequences of basic physics -- and yet biology is a very useful science.

Arguments aren't presented mechanically step-by-step with a citation of rule at each step; they elide and summarize information, and skip logical steps. The fallacies show you where to look for insufficencies, to avoid being misled by invalid shorthand arguments.



Well, no. We can trivially identify the presence of a fallacy by knowing a few things about logic and so on. The same is not true of biology: an experienced physicist won't necessarily have much ability solving biology problems, as you know.

(I don't remember thinking about the individual fallacies by name very much at all except when I was learning logic, where they were used as examples. Once you're a little more experienced, it would be akin to saying to oneself "okay, now I am using the present tense" while writing.)




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