THE HIERARCHY OF CIVILIZATIONAL FALLACIES: AN ONTOLOGICAL-EPISTEMOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF HUMAN THOUGHT

The history of human civilization can be read not only as a history of knowledge accumulation, but also as a history of deeply rooted, structural fallacies that shape the very conditions of thinking and perception. This paper develops a hierarchical model of civilizational fallacies, starting from the primary ontological fallacy—the exclusive acceptance of manifest reality as the only real. Through critical comparison with the philosophical systems of Immanuel Kant, Alfred North Whitehead, Edmund Husserl, and Karl Popper, the paper shows how this root fallacy logically derives into epistemological, scientific, medical, and psychological reductions. A special contribution of the paper is the introduction of the concept of syncretism (according to Vygotsky) as a meta-fallacy that enables the continuity of reductionist paradigms despite their empirical inadequacy. It is concluded that without an explicit revision of these foundational assumptions, technological progress—including artificial intelligence—risks deepening and accelerating the operation of the same deep fallacies in a more sophisticated form.