In an earlier post, I compared online debates to basketball games where your opponent pushes you, won’t count your baskets, and says he made shots he clearly missed. What’s worse, the audience--the other people watching the debate--may think he’s winning, too. If he calls you a “libtard” or a “rethuglican”, people who agree with him may think he just made some sort of point. Of course, he hasn’t, because personal insults like that don’t actually give a reason for believing his claims, or rejecting yours. They’re a kind of fallacy called an ad hominem attack, and they’re the equivalent of punching someone to make a shot in a basketball game. They shouldn’t count, but people often think they do, because they don’t understand the rules of good arguments.
So what are those rules? To start answering that question, I need to say exactly what I mean by the word “argument”. In reasoning, an argument doesn’t mean a verbal quarrel. Instead, it’s an attempt to convince someone of a claim by offering reasons for accepting that claim. An argument, then, has at least two parts: 1. a premise or premises, which are the reasons given. 2. the conclusion.
So, if I say, “Biff’s a thief. I saw him taking money from the register.”, then I’ve made an argument, because I’ve made a claim and offered reasons supporting it. If we put the argument in what’s called standard form, we have a premise and a conclusion:
Premise: I saw Biff taking money from the register.
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Conclusion: Biff is a thief.
But if I just say, “Biff’s a thief!”, then I haven’t made an argument, because I haven’t given any reasons. I’ve just offered a naked claim with no visible means of support. The difference is important, because reasoning is about making sure your conclusions are solidly based on good reasons.
Of course, most arguments in real life aren’t in standard form. The conclusion may be given before the premise, as in “Biff’s a thief, I saw him taking money from the register”. But the premises and conclusions are usually recognizable, because it will usually be clear that some statements are given in support of others. And oftentimes you can spot premises and conclusions by looking for indicator words. Premises often include words or phrases like “because” or “since”, while conclusions usually include indicator words like “so”, “thus”, “therefore”, and so on.
However, words that can be indicator words aren’t always indicator words. If I say, “Since Jed is a dog, he probably doesn’t know algebra”, the word “since” indicates a premise in an argument. But if I say, “Jed has been howling since midnight”, it doesn’t. Words are tricky--that’s one of the things that makes good reasoning hard. Another is that not all arguments have indicator words. The one above about Biff doesn’t, for example. We just have to infer that “I saw him taking money from the register” is a premise, and “Biff is a thief” is the conclusion.
Another issue is that many arguments are enthymemes, which is just a fancy word meaning they have unstated premises. In the argument about Biff’s thievery, there’s actually an unstated premise:
Premise: I saw Biff taking money from the register.
(Unstated) Premise: Anyone who takes money from the register is a thief.
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Conclusion: Biff is a thief.
We don’t need to put every argument in standard form, but knowing the concept is useful, because it makes the underlying structure and assumptions of arguments clear, and that makes them easier to evaluate. For example, when you put unstated premises in words it makes the shaky ones easier to spot. The premise “Anyone who takes money from the register is a thief” is pretty shaky, because it’s easy to think of situations where it isn’t true. A store manager, for example, would be authorized to take money from a register, perhaps to put it in a safe or another register. If Biff’s a store manager, then seeing him take money from the register doesn’t support the conclusion that he’s a thief.
Once you understand the definition of arguments, and start looking for them in real-life debates, you’ll notice something strange: people don’t make many actual arguments. A lot of argumentative discourse is full of claims made without any reason given to believe them. Sometimes that’s OK, if most people accept a claim already. If I say, “Barack Obama was in office for eight years”, there’s no need to give reasons backing that up, because everyone accepts it as true. But most debates--especially heated ones--are full of claims that need to be backed up with reasons...and aren’t.
If you look at the average overheated social media debate, you’ll see insults (You liberals are a bunch of idiots!), jokes (If Trump came out for oxygen, Democrats would stop breathing), ridicule (Nobody with any sense believes that), demonization (Republicans love it when homeless people die in the gutter), cheerleading for your side (I'm a conservative and proud of it!), and old-fashioned, meaningless verbal abuse (Screw you!). You’ll see a great many exclamation marks, and when things get really hot, you might even get ALL CAPS!!!
Actual arguments, where someone makes a claim and then backs it up with reasons, are the exceptions to the rule. Even when people do offer arguments, lots of them are bad arguments--they’re fallacies, whose premises don’t support their conclusions.
The only way to improve this situation is for more people to learn the difference between sound arguments and the kind of noise that fills many debates. And it’s not just the debaters that need to know the difference; but the audience as well. Many debates, especially in the social media age, aren’t just about arguing against an opponent--they’re also about convincing the people watching. Whether you’re trying to convince an individual or a group of people, making good arguments is only effective to the extent that they can recognize them as good arguments. If they don’t, there’s not much point in trying to reason with them. You can’t reason with someone who doesn’t know what reasoning is.
Now, does that mean there’s no point in reasoning well? Certainly not. First, we need to be able to reason for ourselves, even if we’re not trying to convince anyone of anything. Second, it’s possible to teach people to reason better. If too many people don’t know how to reason well, the solution is to try to promote better reasoning, not give up on reason entirely.
Of course, promoting reason is an uphill battle. As it stands now, far too many people think insults, ridicule, and fallacies are just as compelling as good arguments. In fact, since those things are more likely to be entertaining and memorable, people may even find them more impressive. To go back to our basketball metaphor, they think you can win a game with trash talk and personal fouls instead of actual baskets. If we want to make the game more worth playing, we have to define what counts as a real point. And the game is worth playing, because at its best, debate can help us flesh out issues and get closer to truth. Talking to other people can give us valuable insights and perspective. We can’t learn much by butting heads, but we can learn a lot by putting our heads together. But we have to be reasonable, and to do that, we need to look at how arguments work, so we can tell good ones from bad ones.
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