Seems like at every level of debate, whether it’s two children, two smart grownups, or two decorated philosophers, conversations tend to have all kinds of tangles and messes in them. I’m not talking about mathematical or formal fallacy, even though I’m sure there’s plenty of that. I’m talking about the informal fallacy, the “aha, I see what you did there, now we have to backtrack and untangle it.” It’s the stuff that pushes back against progress toward clarity, relevance, completeness, order, consistency, etc. Can be anything from a subtle ad hom or baculum, to trickier things like confirmation bias, generalization, moving the goal post, equivocation, and I think the list goes on and on, hundreds. Sometimes these are employed by accident, a true fallacy, and sometimes unconsciously to advance a point on which you have a vested interest. Whatever the reason for the fallacy, there it is. Or isn’t. Or, is it? Take this forum. Most of the time we quote swatches of each other’s comments and tell each other about the fallacies the other engaged in. When accused of committing a fallacy you can either challenge and prove it’s not a fallacy, or you can concede, which nobody ever does. That might be because you can challenge the accusation in a number of ways. You can shift the premise, and pretend that the other person had mistaken the premise all along, or you can employ other fallacies to distract the accuser or sway the audience to something that’s more important than the first fallacy. It’s no wonder conversations peter out, it’s exhausting. I once watched Chomsky debate Dershowitz. Two great minds, legal, linguistic masters. Soon it became like watching two petulant children yelling at each other. Chomsky seemed to be slippery, always cherry picking some arcane fact out of his ass to support some disturbing general point he made, or moving the goal post any time a valid point demanded a direct answer. In the end, Dershowitz said something “just because you say it happened that way doesn’t mean it did!” That’s just one example so let’s not focus solely on that one.
No two debaters can advance a complete argument about a non-mathematical subject involving a macro system like politics or war unless they have all relevant facts (impossible), and an identical ethical basis of evaluation, and it’s impossible to place a numeric value to a fact and tally up who has the most facts, or the most important ones. So I don’t expect us to spit out answers to messy polemics in a mathematical way.
But what’s missing from the debate is the humility. The methodical willingness to work together to define terms and agree on a premise, and then collaborate on a new model. Sure, a debate like the one mentioned above is technically a form of entertainment or sport, but you know this sort of derailment happens even in a well-intentioned discussion.
What’s most surprising to me is that we don’t simply blurt out the technical name of the informal fallacy as it occurs, similar to how a judge in a courtroom will say, “denied, leading the witness,” etc. In a philosophical discourse or casual intellectual discussion, you don’t hear “denied, asserting the consequent,” “denied, tu quoque,” “ad populum argument.” To hear Sam Harris attempt to explain to someone where they went wrong in their thinking is to listen to a drawn out analogy and paragraphs of content. [b]You would think we’d be at a point where we (or if not we, SOMEONE) can spot an informal fallacy, name it, agree it happened, or examine if it’s a fallacy or a confusion of premise, prior to proceeding with the argument or introducing new arguments.
[/b] I’ve never seen this happen in person or on ILP. What is preventing this from becoming a thing? Whoever says to me “yeah well you can’t look at chomsky, he’s intentionally doing that” is understanding my point. Whether it’s intentional or not doesn’t change the item we’re discussing, namely the species of each informal fallacy that occurs in any given piece of rhetoric, either monologue or discourse, and our current lack of ability the spot it and redirect efficiently.