A puzzle, however, usually hands you the terms already cut. The work of saying what a word means, whether a sentence is even a statement, whether “all” and “some” and “only” and “if” have been used as they sound — that work has been done offstage. The student who is quick at the grid and slow at the sentence has not skipped grammar. He has borrowed someone else’s.
The same is true of many “fallacy” lists. A name is given to a bad move, and the student learns to stick the name on a paragraph. But a fallacy is a failure in speech: something was said, or implied, that does not hold. If you cannot say what the sentence was doing, the label is a sticker on a box you have not opened.
The cost is hidden until the terms are his own. A news claim, a theorem, a creed, a law, a diagnosis — no one has prepared the tokens. Then the puzzle-trained mind discovers that it does not know what was being said, only how to shuffle counters whose faces it cannot read. It may also confuse contradiction with disagreement, and treat every clash of views as if two people had said opposite things about the same subject in the same respect.
Inference without the grammar of statements is not a shortcut to logic. It is a machine for moving what has not yet been understood.