The research on fallacies began in 1985/86 based on those fallacies that had notorious negative social and institutional consequences. The research was developed at The Unicist Research Institute and was led by Peter Belohlavek.

The discovery of perception, reasoning and conceptual fallacies demanded almost 17 years (2003), which contributed to the research on the roots of fallacies and their ontogenesis that developed their conceptualization after hundreds of “fallacious” hypotheses, until their final validation in 2019.

The research showed that all fallacies have the same purpose, which is to maintain the comfort zone of an individual. As fallacies are non-conscious processes, the people involved are not aware that they are trying to maintain a comfort zone. This process can be detected after a fallacy has been installed and the consequences became evident.

This research began based on a set of fallacies that the researcher experienced in the 1980s. The main ones were:

• The paradoxical effect brought about by a set of drugs related to birth control.
• The cyclical behavior in the evolution of four developing countries.
• The decision of a French automotive industry to unify assembly lines, not automated at that moment, for all its range of products, which led to a production debacle.
• A dysfunctional universal solution made by the International Monetary Fund.
• The systematic destruction or nullification of information on reality that contradicted the fallacies which were functional to cultures.

Actions in adaptive environments, which have open boundaries, establish a framework of complexity that requires having a strict method to avoid fallacious decisions. Participants need to have the necessary knowledge of the issues that are being managed in order to avoid fallacious decisions.

Developing solutions in these environments requires simultaneously a competitive approach to expand the boundaries of knowledge and a cooperative approach to ensure the adaptation process.

On the one hand, this competition is what expands the quality of the solutions and allows going towards a superior level of functionality. The competitive approach is natural for human beings who are working on the solution of problems or developing new solutions.

On the other hand, cooperation is necessary to ensure that the adaptive process remains functional. This cooperation requires that the participants need to be internally complemented in order to be able to emulate a complementary cooperation in mind.

The generation of fallacies in adaptive processes is based on three core aspects:

1. The lack of the necessary understanding of the functionality of what is being done (knowledge).
2. The functional requirement of a superior level of ethical intelligence than the one the participants of a process have.
3. The lack of complementation of the logical type of thought, the conceptual intelligence and the strategic intelligence.

The definition of what is possible to be achieved is the first step to avoid fallacies. It makes fears unnecessary and guides the action processes.

The universal inhibitor of fallacy-building is the use of unicist conceptual engineering that integrates the fundamentals of “things” with the necessary technical knowledge to ensure the functionality of solutions.

The universal antidote for fallacies in the development of solutions in adaptive environments is the use of unicist destructive pilot tests to evaluate solutions.

Excerpt of the book “The Origin of Fallacies” by Peter Belohlavek

Unicist Executive Committee

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute has been, since 1976, the pioneer in complexity science research where the Unicist Evolutionary Approach was developed.