ABSTRACT
Most logical fallacies, psychological blocks to critical thinking, and forms of bias—for example, stereotypes and prejudices, causal reductionism, and either-or thinking—are variants of one master fallacy: oversimplification. Oversimplification is the essence of election campaign oratory and ads, advertising, talk radio and TV programs, and propaganda in general. Just as most modes of fallacies are varieties of oversimplification, most modes of critical thinking are varieties of complex thought. Students must learn how to recognize complexity and paradox as necessary, not only in the arts but in every other discipline as well. "Complexity and paradox," along with multiple viewpoints and levels of meaning, were key characteristics of the movement of literary modernism in the twentieth century, especially in the novels of writers like Marcel Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Faulkner. One of the defining works of modernism was Proust's seven-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past.
