No, you can't win an argument

Thursday, March 4, 2021

It’s become quite commonplace today for people to bemoan the fact that critical thinking and logic are not required courses at most universities, and are generally not even taught at all in high school. While I don’t disagree, I think it would be even more helpful if schools said even a little bit about why one would want to learn such subjects in the first place.

You see, I don’t think the biggest problem is that people don’t know about logic. There’s at least a certain contingent of right-wing Internet trolls whose Twitter bios always mention “Logic” and “Reason”¹ even as they engage in bad-faith arguments and commit informal fallacies. And while some of them probably had their first and last exposure to “logic” from a Jordan Peterson video, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that many of them had taken introductory logic and critical thinking courses in college. The problem isn’t that they didn’t learn it; the problem is how they use it. I believe that a lot of people view logic and reason, not as ways to arrive at the truth, but as tools to help you win an argument.

This approach is wrong, not just because that’s not what logic is for, but because an argument isn’t even the type of thing you can win. At least not an “argument” in the sense that that word is used by logicians. Of course, colloquially, there are those who use it to mean the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says – which, as we all know, is contradiction, not argument.

You see this mistaken approach to argumentation whenever people claim to have won an argument. On Twitter, this usually happens when their interlocutors, realizing they are talking to someone who is never going to give serious consideration to any ideas that don’t already fit into their world view, decide to block them instead of continuing the conversation further. “She blocked me!” they say. “That means I won! Checkmate, SJWs!”

It doesn’t take much thought to realize this is absurd. The whole purpose of logical argumentation is to establish the truth of a proposition, assuming the truth of its premises. This isn’t something that has winners and losers. If you believe a proposition is true, and then provide a proof of it, you haven’t won anything, and those who believed the contrary didn’t lose. You aren’t awarded points for finding faults in someone else’s arguments. And if you provide a thoroughly specious “proof” of a proposition, and someone else gets tired of pointing out your fallacies and walks away, it doesn’t make the proposition you’re arguing for any more likely to be true. And it certainly doesn’t mean your argument is sound or valid by forfeit.

Perhaps the problem is that some people don’t understand the distinction between logic and rhetoric. They learn about informal fallacies, and think of them as a sort of competitive advantage: they can score points by pointing them out in others’ arguments, or by using them in their own (if their interlocutors aren’t savvy enough to recognize them and call them on it.) And when they score enough “points” and declare victory, they think they have “logic” to thank for it. In fact, all they’ve mastered is rhetorical technique.

This confusion of rhetoric with reason might also explain why certain pseudo-intellectuals are so quick to want to “debate” those who don’t share their views – and why they seem to think that, if others refuse to do so, their views must in fact be right. Debates do have winners and losers, but that doesn’t mean the winner’s viewpoint is automatically correct. Actual logical argumentation, by contrast, is a sincere search for the truth. When you discuss a genuine logical argument with someone, you are collaborating with them, not competing. If they point out a flaw in your reasoning, you shouldn’t think that they’ve scored a point against you; if anything, they’ve helped you get closer to the truth by pointing out that you’re going the wrong way. It’s like when you’re writing a computer program, and when you compile your code you get a ton of errors. If you approach the task as though you’re playing a game against the computer and losing, seeing those errors would only make you mad; if you’re genuinely trying to program, those error messages are vital indicators that your program doesn’t do what you want it to do, and are there to help you. (Of course, like any programmer, I often do get frustrated by error messages, particularly if they consist of a huge stack trace that makes it nigh-impossible to decipher what actually went wrong. But that’s kind of like being frustrated with someone who isn’t fluent in your language: they’re trying to express themselves, but they don’t really know how. It’s not Java’s fault it isn’t as fluent in English as, say, Elm.)

Likewise, if all you care about is “winning” an argument, a surprisingly effective strategy is to craft an argument so bad that people get tired of pointing out its flaws – especially when you then refuse to correct them – and just stop engaging with you altogether.² But it’s obvious that this doesn’t get you any closer to the truth, any more than deleting your compiler so it can’t print out any more error messages makes your program work.

I suppose if someone is really spoiling for a fight, pointing out that logic isn’t about fighting isn’t going to stop them. But maybe, just maybe, it will get them to realize that, whatever they’re doing, it isn’t logic.