Blog post continuation

Argument Culture

9/24/2015

There are around three ways I generally see arguments progress in the culture around me, and none of them seem to really produce anything useful. The first kind are the kind of arguments had when two people who already agree with each other get to talking about a subject, and in order to affirm their own opinions feel the need to argue against a theoretical person who disagrees with them. For instance, as a young college aged person I encounter a lot of people with the same political views. As a result of this anytime an election or political policy is brought up it tends to give rise to an echo chamber of ideas in which people argue against no one and hear their own ideas back. This results in people feeling like they’re arguing their ideas and having them critically reviewed, when in fact the person they are talking to is unlikely to be very critical because both people already agree. In this situation people never really learn anything because they aren’t being presented with well thought out arguments against them. This isn’t to say that people in the culture around me don’t have any legitimate arguments at all, however many of these arguments are also of the second type which end just as they get going.  The culture of a college campus is very oriented towards being inoffensive and this leads to many people being more willing to back down and diffuse an arguments before become too confrontational. So when controversial social issues related to race, gender, religion, economics, etc. the conversation often peters out as soon as people start to cement themselves in opposing opinions so as to not cause trouble or discomfort.  The final way that I see arguments progress around me is the more traditional, but still ultimately futile way. These are the more intense arguments in which people staunchly disagree and argue with only the goal of proving themselves superior in mind. When I see two students arguing between the traditionally republican and the traditionally democratic stances on an issue this is the way things usually go. Both sides begin the argument already so incensed that they would never admit to losing the coming debate, and will dogmatically deny any arguments presented to them that risk undermining their current opinion for the sake of self-esteem. People are usually in these types of arguments to have themselves proven right, instead of arguing to have their ideas critically evaluated and to do the same for others. There are surely some productive arguments that take place around me, but they are sufficiently scarce to leave the impression that arguments in the culture I see don’t tend to produce anything useful.

11/13

As a continuation of this post I would like to supplement the common paradigms under which people argue with an alternative that is less common, but ultimately much more useful.  This strategy is what I would call Socratic argumentation. It involves forcing people to evaluate their own arguments by just asking them questions about those arguments rather than explicitly presenting your own. Taking this approach results in a conversations that feel much more like a discussions than arguments, which as we saw in the last post don’t usually amount to much. This method is useful for avoiding the pitfall of getting caught up in personal conflict that then takes precedence over the actual issue being argued by painting oneself as simply curious and seeking to better understand something, instead of trying to prove someone wrong. This method of argumentation can also be one of the most effective there is. This is largely due to the fact that the points one makes when arguing through inquiry are individually arrived at by the person being argued against. People are much more likely to accept ideas that they feel they themselves have come up with because it avoids some of the issues mentioned in the earlier post. Even if you do not convince someone, this method of arguing is extremely useful because it helps the person being argued against cement their ideas and refine them to be even more convincing in the future by giving that person a chance to explore every facet of their argument. This paradigm of argumentation is not especially prevalent in my environment, but it can happen and hopefully it will do so more frequently in the future.