I've always believed that you should adopt the attitude that winning an argument is a waste of time. If you win an argument, you don't know any more than you knew before the argument. You should always go into an argument with the goal to lose because losing means you're marginally smarter now than you were before.
My goal is to come out with a plan that works best. That almost always involves taking criticism and advice into consideration, and sometimes involves not doing things my way. Sometimes I'm even completely wrong. But sometimes I'm completely right. There's no way to know before having the "argument".
I just mean that having a technical discussion is not an argument. There will be disagreements, but that doesn't make it an argument unless someone involved is taking things too far.
There is another sense of the word argument where it simply means a well reasoned defence of something. This is the sense in which it is used within Philosophy and Mathematics.
I go into arguments with the goal of generating a diff of the logic trees in the participant's brains. In the best case, you find your assumptions are the same but that your reasoning differs -- these are often tractable. In the worst case, you find that you have irreconcilable fundamental assumptions. But even in such cases, the act of unveiling your assumptions allows you to gracefully "agree to disagree."
You are thinking of a very specific scenario of debate where knowledge is merely a set of observable/observed facts and everything in the discussion is fully described, strictly bounded and available for scrutiny.
In such a "sandbox" of logical positivism, sure, one can see a debate as an unfolding of consequences from logical primitives.
That's very far from what most actual real-world debates are like. There's typically a profound lack of facts, knowledge and experience. Deciding something like "how to proceed" with a business decision involves dabbling in a lot of uncertainty, subjectivity and emotional baggage from both sides. Subjectivity is often a dirty word amongst software developers but, outside of stackoverflow.com, it's fundamental to human experience and argument.
Exactly. Logic is universal and self-evident, so the point of any argument is to dig into which fundamental assumptions you disagree about. And once you've reached this point, the argument is over.
Though, it's possible to keep arguing after by challenging the internal consistency of the other person's assumptions. You can often win arguments by demonstrating that their set of assumptions leads to a illogical and contradictory result, or you can show how their assumptions prove something that they don't agree with.
Yeah, that's wrong. I've often won an argument where I knew afterwards better what I was talking about than before. Same often holds of course when I lost the argument.
That depends on why you argue. If I win an argument with an anti vaccine person they (or an onlooker) start vaccinating and that action protects my children that are still to young for vaccines.
Of course the above is a big if. I don't think I've ever done it. But that is my goal.
Most of the time though you are right, I want to find the truth which might or might not be what I think it is.
That is a wrong attitude since you chose to marshal your arguments forward without listening to the other party. Should always think whether theres a possibility that you’re wrong and that’s the best strategy for learning something new. If you think you’re abdolutely wasting your time with an antivaxer then don’t debate. If neither party is listening then it’s a pure waste of time and not a debate
I have, once. Or at least I came close. The lady had two arguments: vaccines, like most medicine, make our immune system weaker; and "they" put poisonous stuff in vaccines. I pointed out that (i) vaccines aren't a crutch that may relieve or replace our immune system, but a kind of kick in the butt designed to strengthen our immune system, and (ii) that yes, they put poison in it, because that's how we can ensure our body reacts to it and prepares itself for the real thing.
That was enough to cause her to reconsider her conspiracy thinking. I think one key here was to acknowledge one of her arguments (the poison thing). I also did not discuss regular drugs, so I could focus on vaccines. I did not deny drugs makes our immune system weaker, even though I don't think they do in most cases.
Turned out listening can be a rhetoric weapon as well as a learning tool.
