My first and most profound philosophical error occurred before I was old enough to form a complete sentence. It didn’t happen in a university lecture hall, debating the nuances of David Hume’s problem of induction, nor in a sterile laboratory, analyzing statistical data for a confounding variable. No, my first grand failure of logic took place in the living room of my grandparents’ house, with a mouth full of fingers and the unshakeable, terrifying conviction that my teeth were supposed to come out. I was, by all accounts, a reasonably intelligent toddler. I had mastered the basics of object permanence, understood that a round block didn't fit in a square hole, and knew with absolute certainty that the furry, four-legged creature in my house was a "doggy." But on this particular day, my nascent intellect collided with a complex logical fallacy that would take decades for me to fully understand, and even longer to articulate: the profound di...