yazadjal.com

Indians routinely say “alphabets” when they mean letters. Most of us don’t even know that an alphabet is the complete collection of letters of a language. Besides, this mistake is uniquely Indian. (Perhaps Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Nepalis also make the mistake, but let us leave that aside for a moment.) I once remarked to a friend that if you ever see this mistake in print, you can be dead sure that the writer was an Indian.

I thought this point was quite clear, but somehow we got into an argument about it. He argued that “the number of Indians who make that mistake is not statistically significant”.

Now, note that his statement does not refute mine (and “refute” means “disprove” and is not a synonym of “deny” - another common mistake, but by no means confined to Indians). For my claim to be true, it is only necessary that no one other than an Indian would make that mistake and not that lots of Indians would make that mistake.

That was an elementary mistake and I pounced on it, but the point is, my friend wasn’t dumb. You don’t clear JEE and CAT without the ability to spot such mistakes. Besides I have seen such errors of logic and reasoning being made so often that I think that there is a cause other than lack of brains. I believe it is because our brains are wired to be combative rather than logical. When we argue, we are more focussed on winning the argument than on getting at the truth. So we tend not to notice the fallacies in arguments that are on our side.

That is my hypothesis, and this is why I prefer arguing using the written word - where I can make a nuanced argument, than debating verbally - where my combative instincts come into conflict with my desire to get at the truth.

Just some random thoughts.