argumentation Archives - Patricia Roberts-Miller

Reasonable policies can be reasonably advocated

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in front of a map of VN — Photo from here: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/us/07mcnamara.html

Why does having a “reasonable” argument matter?

Some people are claiming that the reason so many people are supporting a political figure they dislike is that our education system is bad. And it is, but not in the ways people think. Our problem has long been that we teach argument, but not argumentation. An argument is a claim with a supporting reason (what Aristotle called an enthymeme); it’s a thing you fling at someone with whom you disagree. It’s very effective for making a person feel confirmed in what they already believe, and therefore also useful for confirming the beliefs of in-group members (or moving them very slightly), but it doesn’t really do much for helping people deliberate together about complicated and controversial problems and policies.

The most popular argument textbook confirms (see what I did there?) the false binary of the rational/irrational split—that one’s position on an issue might be rational (i.e., logical) or emotional (i.e., illogical). That split is itself illogical, and very much an emotional response (the desire to feel that one is rational, and to feel that others are irrational). The false assumption is that a “rational” (aka, “unemotional”) stance on an issue is “unbiased.” I’m not advocating that understanding of reasonable deliberation–I think it’s unmitigated bullshit.

The irony is that this way of describing how people think is wrong, as is shown by so very, very many studies. It is, logically, indefensible (but it feeeeels so good to think of oneself as “rational,” as having a viewpoint that is obviously right and objectively true).

People are biased. Everyone is biased. All humans (and probably other animals) rely on cognitive biases when considering information and making a decision. That’s what the research shows. So, if you tell yourself that people who disagree with you are biased, and you aren’t, what you’re showing is that you’re so deep into confirmation bias and in-group favoritism that you are fifty years late to the party of what research on decision-making actually says. You’re too biased to admit that you’re biased.[1]

Argumentation is a set of strategies that tries to help people disagree productively with one another (not necessarily nicely, unemotionally, persuasively, or in ways that make everyone comfortable), but the strategies are ways of correcting for the biases to which we’re all prone. Argumentation is oriented toward productive and inclusive deliberation, and not just coercion or what one scholar of rhetoric called rhetrickery.

Argumentation requires that participants (usually called interlocutors, a term I like since it sounds as though people are locked together) follow these rules:
1) there is an agreement on the “stasis”—what the hell we’re arguing about. (This rule prevents deflection, and various fallacies like motivism, ad hominem, ad baculum.)
2) all the rules (of logic, civility, citation practices, and so on) apply equally to all parties. (This rule ensures that it is good faith argumentation, rather than just a wanking performance to the in-group or another form of ad baculum.)
3) interlocutors engage the smartest and best opposition arguments. (This rule prevents another kind of deflection, as well as bad faith posturing in front of the in-group.)
4) interlocutors cite their sources when asked to provide them, and, as said above, hold their and opposition sources to the same standards of credibility. (In other words, “this is a good source because it agrees with me, or is in-group,” is not good faith argumentation. It’s performatively admitting that you’re full of shit.)
5) Assertions are not evidence, let alone proof. They’re just assertions. That someone can find a source that asserts that bunnies are not fluffy is not evidence that bunnies are not fluffy; it’s evidence that someone has asserted it. (Were I Queen of the Universe this is a distinction everyone would have to understand before they finished middle school.)

Notice that following these rules wouldn’t lead to a pleasant, comfortable, conflict-free discussion, and that someone who insisted on these rules might be seen as a person creating conflict.

This next paragraph is very pedantic. I’ve spent over forty years studying how communities make very bad decisions when they had all the information they needed to make better ones, and this is a list of the approaches to policy disagreements that go badly. The short version is that they engaged in various methods of argument and not argumentation.

There are a lot of ways that people imagine the ideal way that a community might make a decision. One is that everyone would advocate for their preferred course of action without disagreeing with anyone else (expressivist); another is that people would try to make the best case possible for their preferred policy ignoring all norms of ethics and the one that won the most adherents was the best (sloppy social Darwinism applied to decision-making), another is providing all the data necessary for the public to make a reasonable decision (dreamy informationalism), another is for an elite to decide what is best and to give the public (or their audience) the information that will gain their compliance (rhetorical authoritarianism), another is to provide “both sides” of an argument to people and see what they decide (expressive deliberation, sometimes called by scholars agonism).

I was once an advocate of agonism, but then I looked at how advocates of slavery talked themselves into a lot of bad decisions, and realized that a public sphere in which opposing arguments were expressed don’t do shit in terms of helping communities make good decisions. It can, in fact, foster fanatical commitments, especially if the disagreement about policies is falsely reframed as a conflict among identities (e.g., pro- v. anti-slavery). And, really, every disagreement about an admitted problem that is framed as a conflict between two identities (or a continnum between the two extremes) is gerfucked.

And so I abandoned agonism in favor of argumentation.

It’s important that I’m not advocating unemotional public discourse (which is neither possible nor desirables—demonizing the expression of feelings is also a contributor to train wrecks, but that’s a different post). Reasonable and emotional are not in conflict; if anything, they’re necessarily connected.

One of the reasons is that I realized that the various policy advocates who advocated ultimately disastrous policies refused to follow the rules of argumentation. Sometimes they did so calmly, with lots of data and quantification (e.g., McNamara), sometimes they did so dramatically and hyperbolically (e.g., Hitler). Their style, platform, set of policies, personal merits, ethical standards and all sorts of other things might be very different, but what was shared was that they couldn’t argue for their policies following the rules of argumentation because their policies were bad. Their arguments were paper tigers, that looked fierce attacking even frailer paper oppositions, and so often felt compelling, but they were bad arguments in favor of bad policies.

And that’s the important point. If you have good policies, you can engage in good argumentation. If you can’t engage in good argumentation, it might be because you have bad policies. There might be all sorts of other reasons (access to resources, for instance).

It isn’t that every individual has to be able to put forward a reasonable argument that engages the smartest opposition for every decision they (we) make at every moment. It isn’t even that every individual who supports a particular policy has to engage in reasonable argumentation in favor of it. But someone should. If there is a major public policy being advocated and no one can advocate it using reasonable argumentation, then it’s a bad policy.

[1] I’m being generous by saying someone is only fifty years late. In fact, various philosophers have noted many of the biases, such as in-group favoritism and confirmation bias, albeit not by those terms. John Stuart Mill is just one example.

Trump supporters, like Stalinists, refuse to look at any evidence that might complicate their views

(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press) https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-01-07/capitol-violence-dc-riots-how-to-explain-to-kids

I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with Stalinists (I was in Berkeley for many years), and no one so much reminds me of arguing with them as arguing with Trump supporters. Neither Stalinists nor Trump supporters could (or can) reasonably engage opposition arguments. In fact, like Stalinists, Trump supporters refuse to look at anything written by someone who doesn’t fanatically support Trump. Because, like Stalinists, they think that “being rational” means “being fanatically committed to our leader.” They ignore that people who actually have a rational/reasonable position can make an argument that responds to the best opposition arguments.

I’m happy to engage in a reasonable discussion with any Trump supporters who did read this far.

(That would be zero. If I’m wrong, please let me know.) So, this post is about how to think about how Trump supporters argue.

I grew up in a family of arguers, and it sometimes ended up in violence. But it didn’t always end there, and so I got interested in the relationship between argument and violence pretty early on.

For reasons too complicated to explain, I ended up taking rhetoric classes. In those days, the Berkeley Department of Rhetoric was (I now understand) very oriented toward neo-Ciceronian understandings of rhetoric—that is, what might be called responsible agonism. It’s rhetoric as the area (not discipline) of responsibly engaging the best opposition arguments.

And so, since I was in Berkeley, I spent a lot of time arguing with the four kinds of communists (who spent most of their time breaking up each other’s meetings), as well as Libertarians, Republicans, liberals (we can improve things through incremental changes), various kinds of environmentalists, constructivist and essentialist feminists, and everyone except Moonies (since they wouldn’t argue, or even admit they were Moonies).

I think I learned the most about argument by arguing with Stalinists. Maoists and Trotskyites didn’t even try to argue with me—once they found out I disagreed, they just said, “Come the revolution, motherfucker, you’re the first one up against the wall.” It’s weird how often I was told that.

What I think of as “Stalinists” didn’t call themselves that—maybe Leninists? I’ve forgotten the terminology—but they defended every single thing the USSR did. It could do no wrong. As it happens, for complicated reasons, I had visited the USSR in 1974 (or so, maybe 1973?), and I had no love for the USSR. It would take me another twenty years to find the terminology to describe what they were doing (demagoguery), but the short version is that if the USSR was accused of doing something wrong—if I said I’d actually seen something, or there was an documented event—they refused to think about it. Anything that might complicate their commitment to the USSR, they dismissed as anti-USSR propaganda.

They said it was, so to speak, fake news.

They were suckers. Anyone who refuses to consider evidence that they might be wrong is a sucker.[1]

Sometimes the Stalinists would argue with a bit, but they too would eventually say, “When the revolution comes, you’re the first up against the wall, motherfucker.” In other words, because they couldn’t defend their position rationally, they resorted to threatening me.

They couldn’t defend their position reasonably because it wasn’t a reasonable position. And that’s why they had to resort to threatening me.

That’s why so many Trump supporters threaten or harass anyone who disagrees with them. That’s why so many gun nuts threaten or harass anyone who disagrees with them. That’s why Trump supporters end up shouting at people over Thanksgiving dinner. Because they can’t argue any better than a Stalinist—because, in fact, they can’t argue in a way that responds reasonably to critics of their position. If you can’t respond reasonably to your best critics, you have a bad argument.

What Stalinists couldn’t do (and Trump supporters can’t do) is hold themselves, their in-group, or their in-group arguments to the same standards they held/hold anyone who disagreed with them. That’s what it means to have a rational argument—not that you have a calm tone, or that you have data, but that you hold yourself and your opposition(s) to the same standards of proof and logic as you hold yourself. The way I got Stalinists so mad was pointing out that they held themselves to lower standards than they held others’ arguments. And that’s why Trump supporters get so mad at me now. They’re mad that I’ve pointed out that even they think their argument will fall apart if they have to treat opposition arguments reasonably.

In other words, Trump supporters (like Stalinists) agree with me that they can’t defend their arguments reasonably. And that’s why they engage in ad hominem, motivism, whaddaboutism, and threats.

The difference is that Stalinists didn’t care if they were reasonable. Like Trump supporters, they were clear that they held their beliefs because those were the beliefs of their group—they believed what it was loyal to believe, and they refused to consider any data that might complicate their loyalty to Stalinism. Trump supporters similarly believe what it’s loyal to believe in order to support Trump, and they refuse to look at anything that might complicate their fanatical loyalty. But Trump supporters claim to follow Jesus.

Jesus said, “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.” Trump supporters rage when their position is misrepresented, when people make fun of them, when people cite bad data, when he is treated as they wanted HRC or do want Hunter Biden treated. They rage at “libruls” who, they say, live in a propaganda bubble.

So, do they treat others as they want to be treated?

Nope.

Were Trump or his supporters followers of Jesus, then they would never misrepresent others’ positions, lie, cherry-pick, refuse to engage the smartest opposition, or argue as they do.

Trump supporters reject Jesus because they worship someone who treats as others as he doesn’t want to be treated, and their worship of him means that they treat others as they don’t want to be treated.

There are two ways to make a Trump supporter incoherently, foaming-at-the-mouth, pound on the table mad: 1) ask them if their commitment to Trump is open to falsification—what evidence would cause them to reconsider their commitment? 2) ask them if they are willing to hold their out-group(s) to the same standards they hold Trump.

They get triggered because they’re very sensitive. While they have a position they can, in their minds, support with lots of data, even they know that their arguments are such fragile gossamer that they disappear if touched with the slightest breath of a reasonable opposition argument.

Here’s how Trump supporters can prove me wrong: they link to sites that support Trump and engage the opposition arguments as they want their arguments treated, arguments that hold themselves and others to the same standards of evidence, proof, and logic. Or they PM or email me to have a reasonable discussion.

Here’s how Trump supporters prove I’m right: they attack me personally, harass me, make an argument about “libruls,” or otherwise admit that it isn’t possible to support Trump and follow Jesus’ rule about treating others as they want to be treated.

Maybe they should think about that. Jesus didn’t mumble.

[1] That doesn’t mean we have to consider every piece of evidence that contradicts what we believe.

What grade would Goebbels get in fyc? Pt. II

What grade does Goebbels get, pt. II

In an earlier post, I argued that a common way of thinking about first-year composition courses that claim to teach argument means that Goebbels could easily write an essay that would fit the criteria implicit in what remains a tremendously popular prompt. I said that the prompt forces teachers into a false dilemma of either giving Goebbels a good grade, or suddenly introducing a new criterion. The problem is the prompt.

I have a lot of crank theories, but this isn’t one of them.

In fact, what I’m saying is pretty much mainstream for scholars of argumentation, informal logic, cognitive psychology, policy argumentation, or political psychology. Just as what apparently controversial scholars in our field say about “grammar” is old news to anyone familiar with sociolinguistics, so anyone familiar with research in any of those fields would know I’m saying anything particularly insightful or new.[1]

And, because what I’m saying isn’t particularly controversial to anyone who is reading the relevant research, there are lots of ways of teaching fyc that don’t get teachers into that false dilemma. One solution is not to claim to teach argumentation, and to do any of the many valuable things that non-argumentation fyc can do.[2]

But, if we’re going to claim to teach argumentation, let’s do it. And there are lots of ways of doing it. That’s the next several posts.

Here, though, I need to argue why we should teach argumentation.

The problem is that fyc has long been dominated by a uselessly formalist presentation of argument, strongly connected to self-serving (and incoherent) definitions of rationality, teaching generations of people that having a “good” argument means having a “rational” tone, giving evidence from a “good” source, and giving reasons from “good” sources.

We do so because of staffing. FYC arose in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century when the notion was that there was a mental faculty, judgment, which could be trained through study of literature, music, or art. A person taught to have good taste would necessarily have good ethics because both were questions of good judgment. Similarly, writing “correct” English meant that they were thinking correctly, and communicating clearly (thesis first, list reasons) meant having a clear understanding of the situation. Interpretation was a universally valid skill, so teaching someone to read a poem was the same as teaching them to read a scientific study. College was seen as training someone to join a community of like-minded people with good judgment, good taste, and “good English.”[3]

Thus, teaching students to appreciate literature, and to write “well” about that literature made students better citizens. With that model of citizenship, it made sense to assume that graduate students who had been excellent literature undergraduates, highly skilled in meeting standards of “correct” grammar—even with no training in argumentation or linguistics—could teach first-year composition classes that would help students as citizens and students. That’s the staffing model we still have.

And, just to be clear, I think college students should study literature, although not for the reasons above. Reading literature cultivates empathy , can help people become more comfortable with uncertainty, fosters perspective-shifting. Literature courses can be tremendously important for an inclusive democracy.

But literature courses do not teach argumentation, and people skilled in literature are not magically capable of teaching argumentation.

This whole set of posts began because, in a comment thread about how our problem (meaning why do so many people think Trump’s open refusal to follow legal or cultural norms is okay) is that students don’t have civics classes,[4] I threw out the comment that fyc could be that class, but it would require a different staffing model, and someone asked me to explain. This set of posts is the explanation.

I meant something like, fyc could be a pretty effective civics course, but not a magic wand. And, of course, the very notion of a civics course that would make people reject toxic populist authoritarianism means a course that is grounded in a particular notion of democracy. It assumes seeing the democratic ideal as a community of people who value disagreement, who strive for a pluralistic world not about your group triumphing, but about a one in which we are all fairly represented, included, and accountable, and held to standards of fairness in terms of benefit and burden.

Depending on your model of education, there are lots of courses that could do this work–history, government, sociology, psychology, and first-year composition. Whatever class it is, it is not a course that relies on the transmission model of education; it has to be a course that persuades people to do the hard work of democratic deliberation. Telling students how to think about politics doesn’t work. I’ll come back to this.

Democracy is counter-intuitive. When we are making decisions, we are tempted to rely on what cognitive psychologists call System 1 thinking : we let our cognitive biases (especially in-group favoritism, binary thinking, associational thinking, naïve realism) drive the bus. Democracy requires that we step out of our world and engage in perspective-shifting, value fairness across groups (do unto others), are willing to lose, and can make our arguments rationally.[5] Ida Wells-Barnett’s Southern Horrors, Martin Luther King’s “Beyond Vietnam,” or Hans Morgenthau’s criticisms of Vietnam were all rational, offensive (condemned as violating norms of civility in their era), and deeply committed—perhaps even vehement—texts.[5] They are fair to their opposition not in terms of niceness, or attributing good motives to them, but in terms of accurately representing their arguments. Their arguments are internally coherent, applying standards across all groups.

In the previous post, I asked what grade Josef would get with a standard paper prompt, and I pointed out that, given that prompt, he would either get a good grade, or we would introduce a new criterion. That’s a dilemma created by how bad that assignment is. It’s also a dilemma created by how bad fyc argument textbooks are on the issue of “logic,” and how gleefully free they are from any influence by the various scholarly fields that should be influencing them: argumentation theory, cognitive psychology, political psychology. And that’s what this post is about.

We are faced with the dilemma about grading Josef because how fyc textbooks conflate “logic” with Aristotle’s term “logos.” (This recent article does a great job explaining that.) And can we start with: why in the world are fyc textbooks arranged around an anachronistic reading of Aristotle’s ethos/pathos/logos? If we’re going to rely on Aristotle, why not the enthymeme, which is what he actually cared about? Or, clutch your pearls, why not recent scholarship in argumentation, cognitive biases, reasoning, or any actually relevant field?

When we teach that “appeal to logos,” “logical appeal,” and “logical argument” are the same, we are conflating two very different meanings of the word “logic.” One is descriptive, and one is evaluative. The first is simply saying that the move is trying to look as though it’s logical (and maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t), and the second is saying that it is logical (it fits the standards of logic). I don’t think Aristotle meant either of those, but, if anything, something closer to the first.

Whatever Aristotle meant, he did not mean what argument texts say is an appeal to logic, since they emphasize what are surface features of a text (if anything, what he would have put in the ethos category): facts, statistics, and various other concepts that wouldn’t even have been in Aristotle’s world.

So, what I’m saying in this post is that, while teaching students to read literature is a tremendously important task, people who are deeply trained in reading and writing about literature are not a priori any more capable of teaching argumentation in a way that enhances inclusive democratic deliberation than graduate students in any other discipline. But, since that’s who’s teaching fyc courses, textbooks have to be ones that people with no training in argumentation can teach. And that is our problem.

If we want to teach argumentation, then we have to hire people who are trained in argumentation.

[1] At one point, I started trying to write a post that had all those references, and I got overwhelmed. These two articles are good starting points, with good citations.

[2] Notice that this solution is good as far as argumentation, but it still means that there are people who are teaching “grammar” without adequate training in sociolinguistics. I’ll come back to that.

[3] As a former Director of a Writing Center, and someone who argues on the internet a lot, I will also say that people who are most rigid about “grammar” are particularly likely to be wrong, even about prescriptive grammar. I have seen papers in which students were wrongly “corrected” for having said something like “The ball was thrown to Chester and me.” The number of faculty who believe in the breath rule for commas leaves me breathless.

[4] This argument is often represented as our needing to go back to some time when we had civics courses and people rejected open abuses of power oriented toward disenfranchising groups and violating democratic norms. Um, when would that be? When disenfranchising black voters was openly advocated? Granted, Trump supporters are very open that they want to go back to the early fifties, except without the taxes, because they believe (correctly) that then they could have political and cultural hegemony. In the fifties, when there were civics courses.

[5] As, I hope, will become clear in these posts, I don’t mean that out-dated, but still popular, understanding of “rationality” promoted by fyc textbooks and popular culture—the one grounded in 19th century logical positivism. All of those false models assume a binary of rational/irrational—a model of the mind falsified by research in cognition for the last thirty years, and also based in myth. Turns out the Phineas Gage story is probably wrong. Since I’ve cited that story more than a few times, my previous scholarship is part of the problem.

I think there are a lot of models of “rationality” that are more useful than the rational/irrational split, and more grounded in recent research on cognition. This research on cognition is usefully and cogently summarized in Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain, Superforecasting, and Thinking Fast and Slow.

[6] Notice that I’m picking examples that are vehement, upsetting, decorum-violating, and controversial. Also, I’m not being precise about the distinctions among reason, rationality, and logic because I think that’s sort of inside baseball.

What if Josef Goebbels took first year composition (fyc)?

In Deliberate Conflict I ridiculed a particular kind of assignment as not teaching argumentation. Since I’m retired, I can make the stronger argument: this kind of assignment teaches students to think they know what good argumentation is, when it it isn’t teaching argumentation at all. It’s like telling students you’re teaching them how to play chess, when you give good grades to students who tip over the board. It does so because it puts teachers into a false dilemma when it comes to grading terrible arguments.

Here’s the assignment prompt:

Write a well-organized five page argument for a policy about which you care, and use four credible sources to support your claims. Use [MLA, APA, Ancient Sumerian] method of citation, and [this font that I happen to like], have a summary or funnel introduction, put your thesis at the end of your introduction, and use correct English.

Having directed a Writing Center for six years, I can say that this is the fallback writing assignment for people all over the university. Sometimes the last three criteria aren’t mentioned, but are simply assumed as included in the “well-organized” criterion.

You get this paper from your student Josef. The introduction is:

Since the dawn of time there has been a problem with Jews. Now, more than ever, Germans are faced with the question of what to do with Jews. Making Germany great again requires expelling Jews because Jewish leftists agreed to the Versailles Treaty, leftist revolts made the major political figures believe they had to surrender, and Marx was a Jew.

The paper has three body paragraphs showing that each of those minor premises (his data) are true. They are, so he has no problem citing credible sources to support those claims. There are no grammar errors, and his citation is faultless.

What grade does this paper get?

On a rubric model, assuming the prompt implies the rubric, he could easily get a good grade. He cares about this issue, he has four credible sources, he uses the correct method of citation, the right font, his thesis is right there, he could easily have the kind of “organization” that student writing is supposed to have (which is specific to student writing, but that’s a different post), and he meets whatever idiosyncratic grammar rules the teacher has.

Josef might have worked a long time on this paper—should he get a good grade on the labor contract model?

If a teacher abides by the criteria implied by that assignment, they seem to be faced with giving him a bad grade because of his argument being awful (and it is)—which is a criterion not mentioned in the prompt–, or giving him a good grade because he met the criteria.

If we give him a bad grade because his argument is awful, we’ve introduced a new criterion, and one that only applies to him. Since Josef’s (false) narrative about him and his group is that they are persecuted by “leftists,” we seem to have given him evidence to support that claim of persecution. He would definitely get invited to go on Tucker Carlson’s show.

If we give him a good grade, we’re saying this is a good argument, and it isn’t.

So, what do we do with Josef’s paper?

This will take me several posts, but the short answer is: the problem is the prompt. It doesn’t ask that students engage in argumentation. We don’t do anything about Josef’s paper because we don’t give that prompt.

It’s fine if we choose to have an fyc program that doesn’t have the goal of teaching argumentation. FYC is overloaded with things it’s supposed to do, and it’s great if programs choose to do one or two things well rather than a lot of things badly. And those one or two things aren’t necessarily argumentation. What’s not fine is claiming that we’re teaching argumentation when we aren’t.

It’s also not fine to set teachers up for the false dilemma of how to deal with Josef’s argument, but that’s what we’re doing. There are many ways that we can write prompts that don’t put us (or teachers of fyc) in that false dilemma, and even many ways that do so while actually teaching argumentation.

What happens next: arguing (or not) with people who still support Trump

vivien leigh raising an eyebrow — Image from here https://belldora.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/vivien-leigh-vii.jpg

As I said a long time ago, a lot of Trump supporters stopped trying to defend him through rational-critical argumentation fairly early on in his Administration. I’ve read defenses of him, ranging from your high school friend to scholars. It’s either fallacious zero-sum demagoguery–non-Trump supporters are SO bad that nothing Trump can do is something I will condemn– or, more commonly, charismatic leadership. A lot simply refuse to engage, and those who do try to engage in argumentation are kind of impressive in terms of how many fallacies they can fit into a few words.

Trump supporters (and not just Trump supporters) believe our political spectrum is a binary, and so believe “fairness” is saying that “both sides are just as bad.” So here I should say, “both sides” are not just as bad because there aren’t two sides. Politics isn’t a binary or continuum. More important, while there are people who can’t defend their position through rational-critical argumentation who have all sorts of affiliations, I haven’t run across a Trump supporter who can in a long time.[1] So, much of what I’m saying applies to people who aren’t Trump supporters but are irrationally committed to Paleo, Brittney, Obama, single-payer health care, Santana, hating Santana, and, well, everything.

And here I should explain why I use the term “argumentation” rather than argument. An argument is a claim. That you can make a claim and support it with data from a reliable source doesn’t mean that you’ve supported your claim rationally, nor that your commitment to that claim is rational.

But a lot of people think that a claim “supported” by a piece of evidence from a reputable source is a good argument. That the best-selling argument textbook endorses this view has made me ragey for years.

When you arguing with someone whose commitment isn’t capable of rational defense, and you point out that 1) they don’t believe their own major premise (explained below), 2) and/or their claim is contradicted by other sources, 3) and/or they’ve put forward a fallacious argument, or 4) and, the most important point, that the way they’re deliberating about politics is a way they would never make decisions in their own area of expertise, in my experience, people respond in one of three ways.

A fair number of people never get your point. It isn’t about whether they can find evidence to support their position; it’s about whether they’re willing to think about how they’re thinking. They just get confused when you talk about major premises and non-falsifiability. These people aren’t uneducated. My most recent failures to get someone to understand that their way of reasoning about Trump is a bad way to reason include an anesthesiologist and mechanical engineer.
Some people (in my experience, this is less common than it used to be) will say, now that you’ve shown their position is completely irrational, that everyone’s position is irrational. That’s just projection, and the kind of universalizing that comes from being in such a position of privilege that they’ve never had to listen to others. This response is deflection–instead of defending their inability to engage in rational argumentation, they just declare that no one engages in it.

It’s motivism. The problem for them, of course, is that there are lots of examples of people engaging in rational-critical discourse and thereby changing their minds about an issue. But they won’t look at those examples because being a Trump supporter means refusing to look at any disconfirming data. They’re in a vicious circle of irrationality.

They believe that what they believe is true, and they so much believe that it’s true that they refuse to look at evidence that it isn’t true. If they are presented with evidence that their beliefs aren’t true, they reject that evidence on the grounds that it’s biased, since it says their beliefs aren’t true.
They say that they aren’t really engaged in good faith argumentation—they’re just teasing libruls. They seem to think that their admitting to be unable to defend their position rationally is a virtue.

I’ve said elsewhere that it’s like when cats get entangled in the blinds and pretend they meant it, but it’s actually worse.

Not all extremists are Trump supporters, but, in my experience, all Trump supporters are extremists in that they refuse to think about how their commitment might be wrong. What has happened, as always happens in demagoguery, is that their sense of themselves as good people has gotten attached to the claim that supporting Trump was/is a good choice. They believe that admitting that their support was mistaken would be shameful submitting to anti-Trumpers. They live in a world of demagoguery in which there are two groups: the good and the bad. They think that admitting that Trump was bad means admitting that they are the bad group.

Everyone makes bad decisions. Imagine that you decided to invest in a Redball, Inc project that claimed it would eternally keep squirrels from the redball, and it went bust. Does that mean you’re a bad person, that what the squirrels said was right?

No. It means you made a bad decision. And making better decisions means understanding why investing in Redball, Inc seemed like a good idea. Having gotten suckered doesn’t make you a bad person, but a person who has reasoned badly. If we think about decision-making as good or bad people, then we’re in a world of demagoguery. If we think about decision-making in terms of better or worse ways, then we have ways of agreeing with wildly different people. We’re in the world of democracy.

The problem is that Fox, a completely demagogic site, is trusted by 40% of people because it is demagogic. Fox, Limbaugh, and various others are completely anti-democratic. They’re authoritarian populist. And that’s why people like them. People like hearing that their point of view is the only legitimate one, that they are the real people, and so only the political agenda promoted by someone who embodies real people is democracy (that’s how current GOP rhetoric says that their minority views are the real American views).

Because the premise of the pro-GOP propaganda machine is that only their political position is the real position of real people, then people advocating it can feel that they’re the realists, arguing from a real position. It isn’t real in terms of being falsifiable; it’s real in terms of feeling real. And it’s real because they can find evidence.

Fox’s talking points are derived deductively from whatever talking points will be most effective at supporting today’s GOP agenda. And their rhetoric is irrational (such as inconsistent appeals to major premises and refusal to look at disconfirming data, lame whaddaboutism).

What’s kind of genius about the rabid pro-Trump propaganda is that it is telling people, “Say this, and, then, when people point out that what we’ve told you to say is stupid, false, fallacious, and you can’t defend it, then say you’re just triggering libs.” They’ve found a way to transform the pro-Trump camp’s inability to support Trump rationally into a virtue.

I think this rhetorical strategy is an admission that the GOP political agenda—especially supporting Trump—is a fragile house of cards that can’t stand even the breath of rational-critical policy argumentation. I think that’s important. People with good policies can support them in argumentation. People with bad policies can’t. So, we should start with the observation that supporting Trump is rationally indefensible.

Supporters of Trump and the GOP are well-trained in deflection. If a critic points out that, for instance, Trump’s vacations not only cost taxpayers far more than the trips Obama took that had Fox pundits and viewers choking with rage, but a tremendous amount of that money went directly to Trump. If you point that out, though, you’ll get deflection, usually some version of whaddaboutism. The basic argument is that “Trump is good because Biden kicked a squirrel.” The impulse for critics of Trump is to take issue with the minor premise. We’ll try to show that Biden didn’t kick a squirrel, or it wasn’t a squirrel, or Trump has kicked more squirrels. If you want to do that (and I often do) go for it, but just be clear that it won’t work because Trump supporters don’t support Trump because of his behavior to squirrels. They support Trump. They then find reasons to justify their support. Their position isn’t rational.

Here’s a digression that won’t be interesting to most people, but, if you teach argumentation, you need to be able to follow this.

“Trump is good because Biden kicked a squirrel” is an enthymeme with an undistributed middle.

A is B b/c C did D.

A [Trump] is B [good] because C [Biden] kicked a squirrel [D].

Instead of arguing the minor premise (whether Biden kicked a squirrel), point out that the whole argument is fallacious. They might both be bad.

So, how do you argue with people who won’t (can’t) argue their case rationally, engage in deflection, and when, pantsed, will just claim to be trolling when they’ve made a fool of themselves argumentatively?

You can argue with them to see if you can get them to change their minds. (You can, but they’ll never admit to it, which is interesting–they think being closed to persuasion is a virtue. I find that very odd.)

There are, I think, three responses that sometimes work. First, if it’s possible, show them that their claims are refuted by in-group sources.

Second, show them that the way they reason about politics isn’t how they reason about their job. A doctor who had a commitment to a particular treatment and refused to look at any studies that showed his commitment might be wrong would be a terrible doctor. A citizen who does the same is a terrible citizen.[2]

Third, and the most effective, is refusing to argue with them unless they put forward a rational argument. Ask them: are your beliefs about Trump falsifiable? What evidence would cause you to change your mind about Trump?

If the answer is no, and nothing, then you say, “Fine, your beliefs aren’t rational, and we aren’t talking politics.”

They will try to make you defend whatever they think Biden believes, and you have several options.

You can say, “We aren’t talking politics. Have more pie.” You can also say, “If Biden is wrong, that doesn’t mean Trump is right. Are your beliefs about Trump falsifiable? What evidence would cause you to change your mind about Trump? If not and nothing, then we aren’t talking politics because your position isn’t rational.” You can be very loving in what you say, “I love you so much, and this topic makes us all unhappy, so let’s talk about cousin Dwerp winning a hokey-pokey trophy.” Some people I know have said, “You taught me to reason thoughtfully, and you can’t when it comes to Trump, and that makes me sad. Let’s change the subject.”

Stand your ground. Refuse to talk about politics. They will do everything they can to shift the burden of proof to you, but you can just refuse to take it on. They’ll engage in passive-aggressive swipes at Biden and Democrats. When they do so, raise an eyebrow like Vivien Leigh, ask them if they’re trying to talk politics, snicker, smirk, walk out of the room, take a careful assessment of your fingernails, offer them pie, ignore them, do complicated math problems in your head, but you are under no obligation to engage people who are engaged in demagoguery. If they won’t say that their beliefs are falsifiable and that they can name the evidence that would cause them to change their minds, then they aren’t open to argumentation.

They will explode like someone throwing a match into a fireworks stand. In my experience, they and their enablers will try to use norms of “let’s get along” to allow them to make their arguments while silencing you. You might have to leave. Authoritarian families will try to make you the villain, although the Trump supporter is the one who violated boundaries (in authoritarian families, only the asshole is allowed to set boundaries).

It is not your job to put out the fire they have started on themselves by supporting someone who is rationally indefensible. Trump appeals to authoritarians. Paradoxically, insisting on the authority of argument, which means a lot of walking away and refusing to engage, has far more impact than staying in the authoritarian space and trying to refute demagogic arguments point by point.

Change the subject, and, if that doesn’t work, walk away.

[1] I have run across figures who can defend specific actions of his. I’m not saying that they’re right, or that I agree with them–being right and being able to put forward a rational-critical argument aren’t the same thing.

[2] Here is another issue that makes me ragey. Propaganda is for free, since it’s paid for by groups that can profit from it getting out there. Being actually informed about politics is incredibly expensive.

The salesman’s stance, being nice to opponents, and teaching rhetoric

I mentioned elsewhere that people have a lot of different ideas about what we’re trying to do when we’re disagreeing with someone—trying to learn from them, trying to come to a mutually satisfying agreement, find out the truth through disagreement, have a fun time arguing, and various other options. There are circumstances in which all of these (and many others) are great choices—I think it’s an impoverishment of our understanding of discourse to say that only one of those approaches is the right one under all circumstances.

We also inhibit our ability to use rhetoric to deliberate when we assume that only one approach is right.

I’ll explain this point with two extremes.

At one extreme is the model of discourse that has been called “the salesman’s stance,” the “compliance-gaining” model, rhetorical Machiavellianism, and various other terms. This model says that you are right, and your only goal in discourse is to get others to adopt your position, and any means is justified. So, if I’m trying to convert you to a position I believe is right, then all methods of tricking or even forcing you to agree with me are morally good or morally neutral.

From within this model, we assess the effectiveness of a rhetoric purely on the basis of whether it gains compliance. For instance, in an article about lying, Matthew Hutson ends with advice from someone who has studied that lying to yourself makes you a more persuasive liar.

“Von Hippel offers two pieces of wisdom regarding self-deception: “My Machiavellian advice is this is a tool that works,” he says. “If you need to convince somebody of something, if your career or social success depends on persuasion, then the first person who needs to be [convinced] is yourself.””

The problem with this model is clear in that example: if you’re wrong, then you aren’t going to hear about it. Alison Green, on her blog askamanager.org, talks about the assumption that a lot of people make about resumes, cover letters, and interviews—that you are selling yourself. People often approach a job search with exactly the approach that Von Hippel (and by implication, Hutson) recommend: going into the process willing to say or do whatever is necessary for you to get the job, being confident that you’ll get the job, lying about whether you have the required skills or experience (and persuading yourself you do).

Green says,

“The stress of job searching – and the financial anxieties that often accompany it – can lead a lot of people to get so focused on impressing their interviewer sthat they forget to use the time to find out if the job is right for them. If you get so focused on wanting a job offer at the end of the process, you’ll neglect to focus on determining if this is even a job you want and would be good at, which is how people end up in jobs that they’re miserable in or even get fired from.
And counterintuitively, you’ll actually be less impressive if it’s clear that you’re trying to sell yourself for the job. Most interviewers will find you a much more appealing candidate if you show that you’re gathering your own information about the job and thinking rigorously about whether it’s the right match or not.”

Van Hippel’s advice comes from a position of assuming that the liar is trying to get something from the other (compliance), and so only needs to listen enough to achieve that goal. The goal (get the person to give you a job, buy your product, go on a date) is determined prior to the conversation. Green’s advice comes from the position of assuming the a job interview is mutually informative, a situation in which all parties are trying to determine the best course of action.

If we’re trying to make a decision, then I need to hear what other people have to say, I need to be aware of the problems with my own argument, I need to be honest with myself at least and ideally with others. (If I’m trying to deliberate with people who aren’t arguing in good faith, and the stakes are high, then I can imagine using some somewhat Machiavellian approaches, but I need to be honest with myself in case they’re right in important ways.)

At the other extreme, there are people who argue that every conversation should come from a place of kindness, compassion, and gentleness. We shouldn’t directly contradict the other person, but try to empathize, even if we disagree completely. We should use no harsh words (including “but”). We might, kindly and gently, present our experience as a counterpoint. Learning how to have that kind of conversation is life-changing, and it is a great way to work through conflicts under some circumstances.

It (like many other models of disagreement) works on the conviviality model of democratic engagement: if we like each other, everything will be okay. As long as we care for one another, our policies cannot go so far wrong. And there’s something to that. I often praise projects like Hands Across the Hills or Divided We Fall that work on that model—our political discourse would be better if we understood that not all people who disagree with us are spit from the bowels of Satan. The problem is that some of them are.

That sort of project does important work in undermining the notion that our current political situation is a war of extermination between two groups because it reduces the dehumanization of the opposition. I think those sorts of projects should be encouraged and nurtured because they show how much the creation of community can dial down the fear-mongering about the other.

They are models for how genuinely patriotic leaders and media should treat politics—by continually emphasizing that disagreement is legitimate, that we are all Americans, that we should care for one another. But that approach to politics isn’t profitable for media to promote, and therefore isn’t a savvy choice for people who want to get a lot of attention from the media.

It also isn’t a great model for when a group is actually existentially threatened (as opposed to being worked into a panic by media). This model says, if we apply it to all situations, that, if I think genocide is wrong, and you think it’s right, I should try to empathize with you, find common ground, show my compassion for you. And somehow that will make you not support a genocidal set of policies? I do think that a lot of persuasion happens person to person, when it’s also face to face. I’ve seen people change their minds about whether LGBQT merit equal treatment by learning that someone they loved would be hurt by the policies they were advocating. I’ve also seen people not change their minds on those grounds. Derek Black described a long period of individuals being kind to him as part of his getting away from his father’s white supremacist belief system, but the guy went to New College; he was open to persuasion.

And I think it’s a mistake to think that kind of person-to-person, face-to-face kindness makes much difference when we are confronting evil. Survivors of the Bosnian genocides describe watching long-time friends rape their sister or kill their family. It isn’t as though Jews being nicer to and about Nazis would have prevented genocide. It wasn’t being nice to segregationists that ended the worst kind of de jure segregation. We have far too many videos that show being nice to police doesn’t guarantee a good outcome. People in abusive relationships can be as compassionate as an angel, and that compassion gets used against them. We will not end Nazism by being nice to Nazis.

That kindness, compassion, and non-conflictual rhetoric is sometimes the best choice doesn’t mean it’s always the only right choice. It can be (and often has been) a choice that enables and confirms extraordinary injustice. It’s often only a choice available to people not really hurt by the injustice. Machiavellian rhetoric is sometimes the best choice; it’s often not.