Success in propagating a meme isn't necessarily related to it's truth-value, merely to it's value in engendering behavior in others. But the mechanisms of intelligence are involved even there. Appeals to emotion or other assorted well documented fallacies have been well described (by reason). The problem, perhaps, is in some philosophical jig where the word 'reason' (traditionally the most gloried phenomenon of human thought) somehow takes on multiple meanings. ...So what is reason?
Is it logic? The claims (referred to in) this article, would seem to negate a pure aristotelian glory of A implies not B and the like. Thus it would seem to cheapen the idea of those who bother to think logically. It leans towards suggesting that 'reason' is merely a sociological, nay, anthropological phenomenon. A matter of primates beating their chests, albeit with their brains instead of hairy arms.
And this is utter nonsense.
First of all, it denies the fact that fallacy is -necessary- in order to convince another thinking being of a false truth, and then turns around to imply that reason has no truth outside of a group phenomenon.
Obviously, pre-and-up-to-humans evolved language to share ideas. (It's audible telepathy, afterall!) And that was adaptive ..why?
Because a meme, a social construct, a compellingly successful narrative could coordinate collective group behavior in an adaptive manner? Of course.
But however does any argument manage to do such a thing? By presenting a compelling explanation to other individuals that they fail to refute the truth of.
It all comes down to the personal analysis of truth of the part of the recipient of an argument, though. To be crass, we all have personal bullshit detectors. ;) And some worse than others, of course.
But to decry the the fact that false but compelling arguments can be accepted too-readily negelects the very fact that they succeed BECAUSE THEY ARE COMPELLING. That they make a logical and self-consistent sense to the recipient. To the recipients own personal sentience, thought, and reason (however mistaken).
Many people may be ill-educated, worse; evilly-educated into a false set of hot-button moral certitudes (due to the social-darwinisticly-adaptive usefulness of such levers, perhaps, so as to facilitate obedience to certain top-down social hierarchy command structures)...
But it's still the reasoning of their own minds that reaches either accepts or rejects any such rhetorical exercise.
Reason is beautiful. Were it not for man's ability to reason, we'd still be living in caves, at best! Nowadays we use ion-beam lithography to carve out features thousands of times smaller than a single hair on our bodies. Nowadays we know the chemical composition of the outer atmostphere of stars billions of light years away. And how?
From reasoning.
