Jane Friedman

The Hallmarks of a Bad Argument

Image: a woman sits at a laptop computer with her hands in the air and a look of confused frustration on her face.

Note from Jane: Today’s post is somewhat tangential to the usual focus of this site, but I’d argue—for nonfiction writers anyway—knowing how to make a decent argument is fundamental to persuasive writing, op-ed writing, and overall literary citizenship. It’s something that I taught in writing classes, in fact, because the students needed the information. Desperately.

Last month, when I was writing and commenting on the AI fraud situation, I encountered some of the most voluble debate of my career—along with some of the most egregious straw-man arguments I’ve ever seen. Sometimes I wondered if people were serious about the points they were making or just really confused. In any event, I often wished for more good-faith arguments from people interested in thoughtful debate.

I have been a subscriber to a newsletter called Tangle for the better part of a year now. It looks at political issues and current events in the US and summarizes what people on both sides are saying. I greatly appreciate how it engages in thoughtful and reasoned debate. Recently, I recommended it in my free newsletter, Electric Speed , and the people at Tangle reached out to me to see if I’d be interested in cross-posting one of their articles on how to make better arguments—by avoiding really bad ones. I immediately said yes.

Because Tangle mainly covers political news and events, the examples you’ll find here are drawn from the political arena. It is probably the first and last time you’ll ever find overtly political content at this site. Keep in mind it’s to illustrate the hallmarks of bad argument and not meant to invite everyone into a political debate. For that reason, I’m turning off comments on this post due to the inevitability of that happening.

If you do wish to comment on this article (in a non-political fashion), you can reach out to me directly through my contact form, or you can comment on social media where I will be sharing this post (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn). Political comments will be deleted swiftly.

This post is by Isaac Saul , founder of Tangle —and adapted from a Tangle article published on June 23, 2023 .

We need more debate.

I’m a firm believer that one of the biggest issues in our society—especially politically—is that people who disagree spend a lot less time talking to each other than they should.

Earlier in June, I wrote about how the two major political candidates are dodging debates . The next week I wrote about how a well known scientist (or someone like him) should actually engage Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on his views about vaccines.

In both cases, I received a lot of pushback. There are, simply put, many millions of Americans who believe that some minority views—whether it’s that the 2020 election was stolen or vaccines can be dangerous or climate change is going to imminently destroy the planet or there are more than two genders—are not worth discussing with the many people who hold those viewpoints. Many of these same people believe influential voices are not worth airing and are too dangerous to be on podcasts or in public libraries or in front of our children.

On the whole, I think this is wrongheaded. I’ve written a lot about why. But something I hadn’t considered is that people are skeptical about the value of debate because there are so many dishonest ways to have a debate. People aren’t so much afraid of a good idea losing to a bad idea; they are afraid that, because of bad-faith tactics, reasonable people will be fooled into believing the bad idea.

Because of that, I thought it would be a good idea to talk about all the dishonest ways of making arguments.

The nature of this job means not only that I get to immerse myself in politics, data, punditry, and research, but that I get a chance to develop a keen understanding of how people argue—for better, and for worse.

Let me give you an example.

Recently, we covered Donald Trump’s fourth indictment, when a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, indicted former President Donald Trump and 18 others over allegations of a sprawling conspiracy to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory in Georgia. As usual, we got some feedback and criticism from our readers—which we welcome. A couple people asked why Hillary Clinton isn’t also getting indicted, since she also has disputed that she lost a fair and open election.

This, of course, got me talking about the differences in these cases. Clinton conceded the election the night it was called, Trump didn’t. Clinton’s supporters didn’t swarm the Capitol hoping to overturn the results while she—as president—was silent. Trump’s supporters did, and he was .

Then we started having a conversation about what Hillary Clinton did do. She did say that the election was illegitimate and that Russia tampered, and continues to. She did use a private email server…

And now the topic of conversation has changed, from “did Trump deserve to be indicted” to “should Hillary Clinton have been indicted?”

This is an example of “whataboutism,” where the person you’re talking to or arguing with asks you about a different but similar circumstance, and in doing so changes the subject.

Whataboutism

This is probably the argument style I get from readers the most often. There is a good chance you are familiar with it. This argument is usually signaled by the phrase, “What about…?” For instance, anytime I write about Hunter Biden’s shady business deals , someone writes in and says, “What about the Trump children?” My answer is usually, “They also have some shady deals.”

The curse of whataboutism is that we can often do it forever. If you want to talk about White House nepotism, it’d take weeks (or years) to properly adjudicate all the instances in American history, and it would get us nowhere but to excuse the behavior of our own team. That is, of course, typically how this tactic is employed. Liberals aren’t invoking Jared Kushner to make the case that profiting off your family’s time in the White House is okay, they are doing it to excuse the sins of their preferred president’s kid—to make the case that it isn’t that bad, isn’t uncommon, or isn’t worth addressing until the other person gets held accountable first.

Now, there are times when this kind of argument is useful, and sometimes even enlightening. If we are truly asking where the line for prosecutable conduct is for a presidential candidate, it’s useful to find precedent and see where it is being applied inconsistently. If we’re asking “is the government consistent,” comparing Clinton, Trump, Biden, Nixon—it’s all on the table. The same is true if we’re asking about the bias of media organizations, and seeing if they cover similar stories differently, if the subject of the story is the major element that’s changing.

But if I write a story that says your favorite political candidate answered a question in a very poor way, and you respond by saying, “Well, this other politician said something bad, too—I think even worse. What about that statement?” That wouldn’t be helpful, or enlightening.

Furthermore, context is important. If I’m writing about Hunter Biden’s business deals I may reference how other similar situations were addressed or spoken about in the past. But when the topic of discussion is whether one person’s behavior was bad, saying that someone else did something bad does nothing to address the subject at hand. It just changes the subject.

Straw man arguments

This is another common tactic, and it’s one you have probably heard of. A straw man argument is when you build an argument that looks like, but is different than, the one the other person is making—like a straw man of their argument. You then easily defeat that argument, because it’s a weaker version.

For instance, in a debate on immigration, I recently made the argument that we should pair more agents at the border with more legal opportunities to immigrate here, a pretty standard moderate position on immigration. I was arguing with someone who was on the very left side of the immigration debate, and they responded by saying something along the lines of, “The last thing we need is more border agents shooting migrants on the border.”

Of course, my argument isn’t for border agents to shoot migrants trying to cross into the U.S., which is a reprehensible idea that I abhor. This is a straw man argument: Distorting an opposing argument to make it weaker and thus easier to defeat.

Unfortunately, straw man arguments are often effective as a rhetorical tactic. They either derail a conversation or get people so off-track that their actual stance on an issue becomes unclear. For the purposes of getting clarity on anyone’s position or having an actual debate, though, they are useless.

The weak man

There are different terms for this but none of them have ever really stuck. I like Scott Alexander’s term, the weak man, which he describes this way : “The straw man is a terrible argument nobody really holds, which was only invented so your side had something easy to defeat. The weak man is a terrible argument that only a few unrepresentative people hold, which was only brought to prominence so your side had something easy to defeat.”

The weak man is best exemplified by the prominence of certain people. For instance, have you ever heard of Ben Cline? What about Marjorie Taylor Greene? I’d wager that most of my readers know quite a few things about Greene, and very few have ever even heard of Ben Cline. Both are Republican representatives in Congress. One is a household name, and the other is an under-the-radar member of the Problem Solvers Caucus. Why is that?

Because Greene is an easy target as “the weak man.” Democrats like to use her to portray the Republican party as captured by QAnon, conspiracy theories, and absurd beliefs because they found social media posts where she spouted ridiculous ideas about space lasers and pedophilia rings.

The weak man is largely responsible for the perception gap , the reality in our country where most Democrats vastly misunderstand Republicans and vice versa. For instance, more than 80% of Democrats disagree with the statement “most police are bad people.” But if you ask Republicans to guess how Democrats feel about that statement, they guess less than 50% disagree; because the weak man is used so effectively that it distorts our understanding of the other side’s position.

Anecdotal reasoning

An anecdote is a short story about something that really happened. Anecdotal reasoning is using that real event to project it as the norm, and then make an argument that your lived experience is representative.

Frankly, I’m hesitant to include this one in the context of today’s post, because I do think politics are personal—and personal experiences should be shared and considered. They are often enlightening, and anyone who reads Tangle knows I regularly lean into personal experience. But they can also be a trap. Anecdotal arguments are dangerous because they can prevent people from seeing that their experience might be the exception rather than the rule.

We actually just had a great example of this, too. As you may have heard, our economy is—by most traditional measures—doing well right now. Unemployment, for instance, is near an all-time low. At the same time, though, the tech sector (which is a fraction of the economy) has been experiencing a lot of layoffs and downsizing. This has left many people in tech concluding that the job numbers are somehow wrong or being fudged. Take a look at this exchange on X/Twitter:

Screenshot of a Twitter exchange. On June 20, 2023, Dr. Benjamin Braddock (@GraduatedBen) tweeted “The gap between the economic stats and the actual economy is wild. I'm now fully convinced that the jobs numbers, GDP calculations, all of it...it's all completely fake.” On June 21, Elon Musk (@elonmusk) replied “The numbers don't make sense. Something is off kilter.” The same day, Dr. Benjamin Braddock replied “At my work we have lots of job postings...but we aren't actually hiring. Instead we're actively cutting our workforce, freezing pay, and narrowing scope to cut costs. Hearing similar info from many others across multiple industries.”

This is a classic example of an anecdotal argument. Because personal experiences are so powerful, we struggle to see beyond them. While anecdotes can add color or create context, they shouldn’t be used to extract broad conclusions. 

Circular reasoning

I would never make one of these bad arguments. And because I wouldn’t make a bad argument, this argument I’m making isn’t a bad argument. And I am not a person who makes bad arguments, as evidenced by this argument I’m making, which isn’t a bad argument.

Exhausting, right? That’s an example of circular reasoning, which uses two claims to support one another rather than using evidence to support a claim. This style of argument is pretty common in supporting broad-brush beliefs. Here are a few examples:

  • Women make bad leaders. That’s why there aren’t a lot of female CEOs. That there are not a lot of female CEOs proves that women are bad leaders.
  • People who listen to Joe Rogan’s podcast are all anti-vaccine. I know this because RFK Jr. was recently on the podcast spreading lies about vaccines, which proves that his anti-vaccine audience wants to hear lies about vaccines.
  • The media is lying to us about the election in 2020 getting stolen. If the media were honest, they’d tell us that the election had been stolen. And the fact that the dishonest media isn’t telling us that is more proof that the election was stolen.

Circular arguments are usually a lot harder to identify than this, and because they’re self-enforcing are often incredibly difficult to argue against. In practice, there are usually a lot more bases to cover that reinforce a worldview, and it’s difficult to address one claim at a time when someone is making a circular argument.

Of course, these aren’t all the ways to make dishonest arguments. There are a lot of others.

There is the “just asking questions” rhetorical trick, where someone asks something that sounds a lot like an outlandish assertion, and then defends themselves by suggesting they don’t actually believe this thing—they’re just asking if maybe it’s worth considering.

There is “black and white” arguing, where an issue becomes binary this or that (is Daniel Penny a good samaritan or a killer?) rather than a complex issue with subtleties, as most things actually are. There’s ad hominem argument, when someone attacks the person (“RFK Jr. is a crackpot!”) rather than addressing the ideas (“RFK Jr. is wrong about vaccine safety because…”). There is post hoc—the classic correlation equals causation equation fallacy (“The economy grew while I was president, therefore my policies caused it to grow.”). There are slippery slope arguments (“If we allow gay marriage to be legal, what’s next? Marrying an animal?”) and false dichotomy arguments (like when Biden argued that withdrawing from Afghanistan was a choice between staying indefinitely or pulling out in the manner that he did). There is also the “firehose” trick, or the Gish Gallop , which essentially amounts to saying so many untrue things in such a short period of time that refuting them all is nearly impossible.

In reality, a lot of the time we’re just talking past each other. There is one particularly annoying example of this I run into a lot, which is when people interpret what you said as something that you didn’t (close to a straw man argument), or ignore something you did say and then repeat it back to you as if you didn’t say it. This happened to me the morning I wrote this article on X/Twitter (of course).

It started when news broke recently about an IRS whistleblower testifying on damning text messages from Hunter Biden that were obtained through a subpoena. I tweeted out a transcript of the message Hunter Biden purportedly sent to a potential Chinese business partner. In the message, Hunter insists his father is in the room with him , and they are awaiting the call from the potential partner. Obviously, this would undercut President Biden’s frequent claims that he had nothing to do with Hunter’s business dealings.

I tweeted this:

Screenshot of a Tweet from Isaac Saul (@Ike_Saul): “These texts from Hunter Biden insisting his dad was in the room are very, very bad. Hard to know if he was being honest or just bluffing, but Joe was just barely out of office and it looks extremely gross.” His tweet is in reference to a screenshot showing the following text from a House Ways and Means committee report: For example, we obtained a July 30th, 2017, WhatsApp message from Hunter Biden to Henry Zhao, where Hunter Biden wrote: “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”

“It’s a WhatsApp message, whose to say Joe was even in the room?” one user responded.

“Addicts tend to lie a lot, don’t they? Steal from grandma and such?” another person said.

“Hunter was a crack addict at the time. A crack addict lying for money??? No!!” someone else wrote.

Of course, I aired this possibility right there in my tweet. Again, emphasis mine, I said: “These texts from Hunter Biden insisting his dad was in the room are very, very bad. Hard to know if he was being honest or just bluffing, but Joe was just barely out of office and it looks extremely gross.”

But as people, we often come into conversations already knowing what point we want to make, and we’ll try to make it regardless of what the other person said. In one case, when I pointed out that I had literally suggested this very thing in my tweet, someone responded that it buttressed their point—as if I had never said it all.

Screenshot of a Twitter exchange. In response to the tweet from Isaac Saul (@Ike_Saul) seen earlier in this article, a user (whose name and profile image have been redacted for privacy) replied: “How do we know that Hunter Biden wasn't lying about his father being there with him? It's certainly possible that he used that line to put pressure on the individual to push the deal thru. We need more evidence than that.” When Saul reiterated that his original Tweet included the wording “Hard to know if he was being honest or just bluffing,” the user replied “Supports my comment.”

Of course, just as important as spotting these rhetorical tricks is being sure you are not committing them yourselves. Dunking on bad ideas, styling ideas few people believe as popular, or using anecdotes to make broad claims are easy ways to “win” an argument. Much more difficult, for all of us, is to engage the best ideas you disagree with, think about them honestly, and explain clearly why you don’t agree. And even more difficult is to debate honestly, discover that the other person has made stronger arguments, adapt your position and grow. Because of the current media landscape, arguments that don’t contain these bad-faith tactics aren’t always the ones that end up in my newsletter, Tangle—but they are the kind of arguments I aspire to employ myself, and the ones I think we should all strive to make.

Isaac Saul

Isaac Saul is the Executive Editor of Tangle, a non-partisan news organization covering American politics. Want to read more from him? You can sign up at readtangle.com to receive newsletters straight to your inbox every week from Monday to Thursday for free, or pay to receive special editions on Fridays.

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Argument and Argumentation

Argument is a central concept for philosophy. Philosophers rely heavily on arguments to justify claims, and these practices have been motivating reflections on what arguments and argumentation are for millennia. Moreover, argumentative practices are also pervasive elsewhere; they permeate scientific inquiry, legal procedures, education, and political institutions. The study of argumentation is an inter-disciplinary field of inquiry, involving philosophers, language theorists, legal scholars, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, and political scientists, among many others. This entry provides an overview of the literature on argumentation drawing primarily on philosophical sources, but also engaging extensively with relevant sources from other disciplines.

1. Terminological Clarifications

2.1 deduction, 2.2 induction, 2.3 abduction, 2.4 analogy, 2.5 fallacies, 3.1 adversarial and cooperative argumentation, 3.2 argumentation as an epistemic practice, 3.3 consensus-oriented argumentation, 3.4 argumentation and conflict management, 3.5 conclusion, 4.1 argumentation theory, 4.2 artificial intelligence and computer science, 4.3 cognitive science and psychology, 4.4 language and communication, 4.5 argumentation in specific social practices, 5.1 argumentative injustice and virtuous argumentation, 5.2 emotions and argumentation, 5.3 cross-cultural perspectives on argumentation, 5.4 argumentation and the internet, 6. conclusion, references for the main text, references for the historical supplement, other internet resources, related entries.

An argument can be defined as a complex symbolic structure where some parts, known as the premises, offer support to another part, the conclusion. Alternatively, an argument can be viewed as a complex speech act consisting of one or more acts of premising (which assert propositions in favor of the conclusion), an act of concluding, and a stated or implicit marker (“hence”, “therefore”) that indicates that the conclusion follows from the premises (Hitchcock 2007). [ 1 ] The relation of support between premises and conclusion can be cashed out in different ways: the premises may guarantee the truth of the conclusion, or make its truth more probable; the premises may imply the conclusion; the premises may make the conclusion more acceptable (or assertible).

For theoretical purposes, arguments may be considered as freestanding entities, abstracted from their contexts of use in actual human activities. But depending on one’s explanatory goals, there is also much to be gained from considering arguments as they in fact occur in human communicative practices. The term generally used for instances of exchange of arguments is argumentation . In what follows, the convention of using “argument” to refer to structures of premises and conclusion, and “argumentation” to refer to human practices and activities where arguments occur as communicative actions will be adopted.

Argumentation can be defined as the communicative activity of producing and exchanging reasons in order to support claims or defend/challenge positions, especially in situations of doubt or disagreement (Lewiński & Mohammed 2016). It is arguably best conceived as a kind of dialogue , even if one can also “argue” with oneself, in long speeches or in writing (in articles or books) for an intended but silent audience, or in groups rather than in dyads (Lewiński & Aakhus 2014). But argumentation is a special kind of dialogue: indeed, most of the dialogues we engage in are not instances of argumentation, for example when asking someone if they know what time it is, or when someone shares details about their vacation. Argumentation only occurs when, upon making a claim, someone receives a request for further support for the claim in the form of reasons, or estimates herself that further justification is required (Jackson & Jacobs 1980; Jackson, 2019). In such cases, dialogues of “giving and asking for reasons” ensue (Brandom, 1994; Bermejo Luque 2011). Since most of what we know we learn from others, argumentation seems to be an important mechanism to filter the information we receive, instead of accepting what others tell us uncritically (Sperber, Clément, et al. 2010).

The study of arguments and argumentation is also closely connected to the study of reasoning , understood as the process of reaching conclusions on the basis of careful, reflective consideration of the available information, i.e., by an examination of reasons . According to a widespread view, reasoning and argumentation are related (as both concern reasons) but fundamentally different phenomena: reasoning would belong to the mental realm of thinking—an individual inferring new information from the available information by means of careful consideration of reasons—whereas argumentation would belong to the public realm of the exchange of reasons, expressed in language or other symbolic media and intended for an audience. However, a number of authors have argued for a different view, namely that reasoning and argumentation are in fact two sides of the same coin, and that what is known as reasoning is by and large the internalization of practices of argumentation (MacKenzie 1989; Mercier & Sperber 2017; Mercier 2018). For the purposes of this entry, we can assume a close connection between reasoning and argumentation so that relevant research on reasoning can be suitably included in the discussions to come.

2. Types of Arguments

Arguments come in many kinds. In some of them, the truth of the premises is supposed to guarantee the truth of the conclusion, and these are known as deductive arguments. In others, the truth of the premises should make the truth of the conclusion more likely while not ensuring complete certainty; two well-known classes of such arguments are inductive and abductive arguments (a distinction introduced by Peirce, see entry on C.S. Peirce ). Unlike deduction, induction and abduction are thought to be ampliative: the conclusion goes beyond what is (logically) contained in the premises. Moreover, a type of argument that features prominently across different philosophical traditions, and yet does not fit neatly into any of the categories so far discussed, are analogical arguments. In this section, these four kinds of arguments are presented. The section closes with a discussion of fallacious arguments, that is, arguments that seem legitimate and “good”, but in fact are not. [ 2 ]

Valid deductive arguments are those where the truth of the premises necessitates the truth of the conclusion: the conclusion cannot but be true if the premises are true. Arguments having this property are said to be deductively valid . A valid argument whose premises are also true is said to be sound . Examples of valid deductive arguments are the familiar syllogisms, such as:

All humans are living beings. All living beings are mortal. Therefore, all humans are mortal.

In a deductively valid argument, the conclusion will be true in all situations where the premises are true, with no exceptions. A slightly more technical gloss of this idea goes as follows: in all possible worlds where the premises hold, the conclusion will also hold. This means that, if I know the premises of a deductively valid argument to be true of a given situation, then I can conclude with absolute certainty that the conclusion is also true of that situation. An important property typically associated with deductive arguments (but with exceptions, such as in relevant logic), and which differentiates them from inductive and abductive arguments, is the property of monotonicity : if premises A and B deductively imply conclusion C , then the addition of any arbitrary premise D will not invalidate the argument. In other words, if the argument “ A and B ; therefore C ” is deductively valid, then the argument “ A , B and D ; therefore C ” is equally deductively valid.

Deductive arguments are the objects of study of familiar logical systems such as (classical) propositional and predicate logic, as well as of subclassical systems such as intuitionistic and relevant logics (although in relevant logic the property of monotonicity does not hold, as it may lead to violations of criteria of relevance between premises and conclusion—see entry on relevance logic ). In each of these systems, the relation of logical consequence in question satisfies the property of necessary truth-preservation (see entry on logical consequence ). This is not surprising, as these systems were originally designed to capture arguments of a very specific kind, namely mathematical arguments (proofs), in the pioneering work of Frege, Russell, Hilbert, Gentzen, and others. Following a paradigm established in ancient Greek mathematics and famously captured in Euclid’s Elements , argumentative steps in mathematical proofs (in this tradition at least) must have the property of necessary truth preservation (Netz 1999). This paradigm remained influential for millennia, and still codifies what can be described as the “classical” conception of mathematical proof (Dutilh Novaes 2020a), even if practices of proof are ultimately also quite diverse. (In fact, there is much more to argumentation in mathematics than just deductive argumentation [Aberdein & Dove 2013].)

However, a number of philosophers have argued that deductive validity and necessary truth preservation in fact come apart. Some have reached this conclusion motivated by the familiar logical paradoxes such as the Liar or Curry’s paradox (Beall 2009; Field 2008; see entries on the Liar paradox and on Curry’s paradox ). Others have defended the idea that there are such things as contingent logical truths (Kaplan 1989; Nelson & Zalta 2012), which thus challenge the idea of necessary truth preservation. It has also been suggested that what is preserved in the transition from premises to conclusions in deductive arguments is in fact warrant or assertibility rather than truth (Restall 2004). Yet others, such as proponents of preservationist approaches to paraconsistent logic, posit that what is preserved by the deductive consequence relation is the coherence, or incoherence, of a set of premises (Schotch, Brown, & Jennings 2009; see entry on paraconsistent logic ). Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the view that deductive validity is to be understood primarily in terms of necessary truth preservation is still the received view.

Relatedly, there are a number of pressing philosophical issues pertaining to the justification of deduction, such as the exact nature of the necessity involved in deduction (metaphysical, logical, linguistic, epistemic; Shapiro 2005), and the possibility of offering a non-circular foundation for deduction (Dummett 1978). Furthermore, it is often remarked that the fact that a deductive argument is not ampliative may entail that it cannot be informative, which in turn would mean that its usefulness is quite limited; this problem has been described as “the scandal of deduction” (Sequoiah-Grayson 2008).

Be that as it may, deductive arguments have occupied a special place in philosophy and the sciences, ever since Aristotle presented the first fully-fledged theory of deductive argumentation and reasoning in the Prior Analytics (and the corresponding theory of scientific demonstration in the Posterior Analytics ; see Historical Supplement ). The fascination for deductive arguments is understandable, given their allure of certainty and indubitability. The more geometrico (a phrase introduced by Spinoza to describe the argumentative structure of his Ethics as following “a geometrical style”—see entry on Spinoza ) has been influential in many fields other than mathematics. However, the focus on deductive arguments at the expense of other types of arguments has arguably skewed investigations on argument and argumentation too much in one specific direction (see (Bermejo-Luque 2020) for a critique of deductivism in the study of argumentation).

In recent decades, the view that everyday reasoning and argumentation by and large do not follow the canons of deductive argumentation has been gaining traction. In psychology of reasoning, Oaksford and Chater were the first to argue already in the 1980s that human reasoning “in the wild” is essentially probabilistic, following the basic canons of Bayesian probabilities (Oaksford & Chater 2018; Elqayam 2018; see section 5.3 below). Computer scientists and artificial intelligence researchers have also developed a strong interest in non-monotonic reasoning and argumentation (Reiter 1980), recognizing that, outside specific scientific contexts, human reasoning tends to be deeply defeasible (Pollock 1987; see entries on non-monotonic logic and defeasible reasoning ). Thus seen, deductive argumentation might be considered as the exception rather than the rule in human argumentative practices taken as a whole (Dutilh Novaes 2020a). But there are others, especially philosophers, who still maintain that the use of deductive reasoning and argumentation is widespread and extends beyond niches of specialists (Shapiro 2014; Williamson 2018).

Inductive arguments are arguments where observations about past instances and regularities lead to conclusions about future instances and general principles. For example, the observation that the sun has risen in the east every single day until now leads to the conclusion that it will rise in the east tomorrow, and to the general principle “the sun always rises in the east”. Generally speaking, inductive arguments are based on statistical frequencies, which then lead to generalizations beyond the sample of cases initially under consideration: from the observed to the unobserved. In a good, i.e., cogent , inductive argument, the truth of the premises provides some degree of support for the truth of the conclusion. In contrast with a deductively valid argument, in an inductive argument the degree of support will never be maximal, as there is always the possibility of the conclusion being false given the truth of the premises. A gloss in terms of possible worlds might be that, while in a deductively valid argument the conclusion will hold in all possible worlds where the premises hold, in a good inductive argument the conclusion will hold in a significant proportion of the possible worlds where the premises hold. The proportion of such worlds may give a measure of the strength of support of the premises for the conclusion (see entry on inductive logic ).

Inductive arguments have been recognized and used in science and elsewhere for millennia. The concept of induction ( epagoge in Greek) was understood by Aristotle as a progression from particulars to a universal, and figured prominently both in his conception of the scientific method and in dialectical practices (see entry on Aristotle’s logic, section 3.1 ). However, a deductivist conception of the scientific method remained overall more influential in Aristotelian traditions, inspired by the theory of scientific demonstration of the Posterior Analytics . It is only with the so-called “scientific revolution” of the early modern period that experiments and observation of individual cases became one of the pillars of scientific methodology, a transition that is strongly associated with the figure of Francis Bacon (1561–1626; see entry on Francis Bacon ).

Inductive inferences/arguments are ubiquitous both in science and in everyday life, and for the most part quite reliable. The functioning of the world around us seems to display a fair amount of statistical regularity, and this is referred to as the “Uniformity Principle” in the literature on the problem of induction (to be discussed shortly). Moreover, it has been argued that generalizing from previously observed frequencies is the most basic principle of human cognition (Clark 2016).

However, it has long been recognized that inductive inferences/arguments are not unproblematic. Hume famously offered the first influential formulation of what became known as “the problem of induction” in his Treatise of Human Nature (see entries on David Hume and on the problem of induction ; Howson 2000). Hume raises the question of what grounds the correctness of inductive inferences/arguments, and posits that there must be an argument establishing the validity of the Uniformity Principle for inductive inferences to be truly justified. He goes on to argue that this argument cannot be deductive, as it is not inconceivable that the course of nature may change. But it cannot be probable either, as probable arguments already presuppose the validity of the Uniformity Principle; circularity would ensue. Since these are the only two options, he concludes that the Uniformity Principle cannot be established by rational argument, and hence that induction cannot be justified.

A more recent influential critique of inductive arguments is the one offered in (Harman 1965). Harman argues that either enumerative induction is not always warranted, or it is always warranted but constitutes an uninteresting special case of the more general category of inference to the best explanation (see next section). The upshot is that, for Harman, induction should not be considered a warranted form of inference in its own right.

Given the centrality of induction for scientific practice, there have been numerous attempts to respond to the critics of induction, with various degrees of success. Among those, an influential recent response to the problem of induction is Norton’s material theory of induction (Norton 2003). But the problem has not prevented scientists and laypeople alike from continuing to use induction widely. More recently, the use of statistical frequencies for social categories to draw conclusions about specific individuals has become a matter of contention, both at the individual level (see entry on implicit bias ) and at the institutional level (e.g., the use of predictive algorithms for law enforcement [Jorgensen Bolinger 2021]). These debates can be seen as reoccurrences of Hume’s problem of induction, now in the domain of social rather than of natural phenomena.

An abductive argument is one where, from the observation of a few relevant facts, a conclusion is drawn as to what could possibly explain the occurrence of these facts (see entry on abduction ). Abduction is widely thought to be ubiquitous both in science and in everyday life, as well as in other specific domains such as the law, medical diagnosis, and explainable artificial intelligence (Josephson & Josephson 1994). Indeed, a good example of abduction is the closing argument by a prosecutor in a court of law who, after summarizing the available evidence, concludes that the most plausible explanation for it is that the defendant must have committed the crime they are accused of.

Like induction, and unlike deduction, abduction is not necessarily truth-preserving: in the example above, it is still possible that the defendant is not guilty after all, and that some other, unexpected phenomena caused the evidence to emerge. But abduction is significantly different from induction in that it does not only concern the generalization of prior observation for prediction (though it may also involve statistical data): rather, abduction is often backward-looking in that it seeks to explain something that has already happened. The key notion is that of bringing together apparently independent phenomena or events as explanatorily and/or causally connected to each other, something that is absent from a purely inductive argument that only appeals to observed frequencies. Cognitively, abduction taps into the well-known human tendency to seek (causal) explanations for phenomena (Keil 2006).

As noted, deduction and induction have been recognized as important classes of arguments for millennia; the concept of abduction is by comparison a latecomer. It is important to notice though that explanatory arguments as such are not latecomers; indeed, Aristotle’s very conception of scientific demonstration is based on the concept of explaining causes (see entry on Aristotle ). What is recent is the conceptualization of abduction as a special class of arguments, and the term itself. The term was introduced by Peirce as a third class of inferences distinct from deduction and induction: for Peirce, abduction is understood as the process of forming explanatory hypotheses, thus leading to new ideas and concepts (whereas for him deduction and induction could not lead to new ideas or theories; see the entry on Peirce ). Thus seen, abduction pertains to contexts of discovery , in which case it is not clear that it corresponds to instances of arguments, properly speaking. In its modern meaning, however, abduction pertains to contexts of justification , and thus to speak of abductive arguments becomes appropriate. An abductive argument is now typically understood as an inference to the best explanation (Lipton 1971 [2003]), although some authors contend that there are good reasons to distinguish the two concepts (Campos 2011).

While the main ideas behind abduction may seem simple enough, cashing out more precisely how exactly abduction works is a complex matter (see entry on abduction ). Moreover, it is not clear that abductive arguments are always or even generally reliable and cogent. Humans seem to have a tendency to overshoot in their quest for causal explanations, and often look for simplicity where there is none to be found (Lombrozo 2007; but see Sober 2015 on the significance of parsimony in scientific reasoning). There are also a number of philosophical worries pertaining to the justification of abduction, especially in scientific contexts; one influential critique of abduction/inference to the best explanation is the one articulated by van Fraassen (Fraassen 1989). A frequent concern pertains to the connection between explanatory superiority and truth: are we entitled to conclude that the conclusion of an abductive argument is true solely on the basis of it being a good (or even the best) explanation for the phenomena in question? It seems that no amount of philosophical a priori theorizing will provide justification for the leap from explanatory superiority to truth. Instead, defenders of abduction tend to offer empirical arguments showing that abduction tends to be a reliable rule of inference. In this sense, abduction and induction are comparable: they are widely used, grounded in very basic human cognitive tendencies, but they give rise to a number of difficult philosophical problems.

Arguments by analogy are based on the idea that, if two things are similar, what is true of one of them is likely to be true of the other as well (see entry on analogy and analogical reasoning ). Analogical arguments are widely used across different domains of human activity, for example in legal contexts (see entry on precedent and analogy in legal reasoning ). As an example, take an argument for the wrongness of farming non-human animals for food consumption: if an alien species farmed humans for food, that would be wrong; so, by analogy, it is wrong for us humans to farm non-human animals for food. The general idea is captured in the following schema (adapted from the entry on analogy and analogical reasoning ; S is the source domain and T the target domain of the analogy):

  • S is similar to T in certain (known) respects.
  • S has some further feature Q .
  • Therefore, T also has the feature Q , or some feature Q * similar to Q .

The first premise establishes the analogy between two situations, objects, phenomena etc. The second premise states that the source domain has a given property. The conclusion is then that the target domain also has this property, or a suitable counterpart thereof. While informative, this schema does not differentiate between good and bad analogical arguments, and so does not offer much by way of explaining what grounds (good) analogical arguments. Indeed, contentious cases usually pertain to premise 1, and in particular to whether S and T are sufficiently similar in a way that is relevant for having or not having feature Q .

Analogical arguments are widely present in all known philosophical traditions, including three major ancient traditions: Greek, Chinese, and Indian (see Historical Supplement ). Analogies abound in ancient Greek philosophical texts, for example in Plato’s dialogues. In the Gorgias , for instance, the knack of rhetoric is compared to pastry-baking—seductive but ultimately unhealthy—whereas philosophy would correspond to medicine—potentially painful and unpleasant but good for the soul/body (Irani 2017). Aristotle discussed analogy extensively in the Prior Analytics and in the Topics (see section 3.2 of the entry on analogy and analogical reasoning ). In ancient Chinese philosophy, analogy occupies a very prominent position; indeed, it is perhaps the main form of argumentation for Chinese thinkers. Mohist thinkers were particularly interested in analogical arguments (see entries on logic and language in early Chinese philosophy , Mohism and the Mohist canons ). In the Latin medieval tradition too analogy received sustained attention, in particular in the domains of logic, theology and metaphysics (see entry on medieval theories of analogy ).

Analogical arguments continue to occupy a central position in philosophical discussions, and a number of the most prominent philosophical arguments of the last decades are analogical arguments, e.g., Jarvis Thomson’s violinist argument purportedly showing the permissibility of abortion (Thomson 1971), and Searle’s Chinese Room argument purportedly showing that computers cannot display real understanding (see entry on the Chinese Room argument ). (Notice that these two arguments are often described as thought experiments [see entry on thought experiments ], but thought experiments are often based on analogical principles when seeking to make a point that transcends the thought experiment as such.) The Achilles’ heel of analogical arguments can be illustrated by these two examples: both arguments have been criticized on the grounds that the purported similarity between the source and the target domains is not sufficient to extrapolate the property of the source domain (the permissibility of disconnecting from the violinist; the absence of understanding in the Chinese room) to the target domain (abortion; digital computers and artificial intelligence).

In sum, while analogical arguments in general perhaps confer a lesser degree of conviction than the other three kinds of arguments discussed, they are widely used both in professional circles and in everyday life. They have rightly attracted a fair amount of attention from scholars in different disciplines, and remain an important object of study (see entry on analogy and analogical reasoning ).

One of the most extensively studied types of arguments throughout the centuries are, perhaps surprisingly, arguments that appear legitimate but are not, known as fallacious arguments . From early on, the investigation of such arguments occupied a prominent position in Aristotelian logical traditions, inspired in particular by his book Sophistical Refutations (see Historical Supplement ). The thought is that, to argue well, it is not sufficient to be able to produce and recognize good arguments; it is equally (or perhaps even more) important to be able to recognize bad arguments by others, and to avoid producing bad arguments oneself. This is particularly true of the tricky cases, namely arguments that appear legitimate but are not, i.e., fallacies.

Some well-know types of fallacies include (see entry on fallacies for a more extensive discussion):

  • The fallacy of equivocation, which occurs when an arguer exploits the ambiguity of a term or phrase which has occurred at least twice in an argument to draw an unwarranted conclusion.
  • The fallacy of begging the question, when one of the premises and the conclusion of an argument are the same proposition, but differently formulated.
  • The fallacy of appeal to authority, when a claim is supported by reference to an authority instead of offering reasons to support it.
  • The ad hominem fallacy, which involves bringing negative aspects of an arguer, or their situation, to argue against the view they are advancing.
  • The fallacy of faulty analogy, when an analogy is used as an argument but there is not sufficient relevant similarity between the source domain and the target domain (as discussed above).

Beyond their (presumed?) usefulness in teaching argumentative skills, the literature on fallacies raises a number of important philosophical discussions, such as: What determines when an argument is fallacious or rather a legitimate argument? (See section 4.3 below on Bayesian accounts of fallacies) What causes certain arguments to be fallacious? Is the focus on fallacies a useful approach to arguments at all? (Massey 1981) Despite the occasional criticism, the concept of fallacies remains central in the study of arguments and argumentation.

3. Types of Argumentation

Just as there are different types of arguments, there are different types of argumentative situations, depending on the communicative goals of the persons involved and background conditions. Argumentation may occur when people are trying to reach consensus in a situation of dissent, but it may also occur when scientists discuss their findings with each other (to name but two examples). Specific rules of argumentative engagement may vary depending on these different types of argumentation.

A related point extensively discussed in the recent literature pertains to the function(s) of argumentation. [ 3 ] What’s the point of arguing? While it is often recognized that argumentation may have multiple functions, different authors tend to emphasize specific functions for argumentation at the expense of others. This section offers an overview of discussions on types of argumentation and its functions, demonstrating that argumentation is a multifaceted phenomenon that has different applications in different circumstances.

A question that has received much attention in the literature of the past decades pertains to whether the activity of argumentation is primarily adversarial or primarily cooperative. This question in fact corresponds to two sub-questions: the descriptive question of whether instances of argumentation are on the whole primarily adversarial or cooperative; and the normative question of whether argumentation should be (primarily) adversarial or cooperative. A number of authors have answered “adversarial” to the descriptive question and “cooperative” to the normative question, thus identifying a discrepancy between practices and normative ideals that must be remedied (or so they claim; Cohen 1995).

A case in point: recently, a number of far-right Internet personalities have advocated the idea that argumentation can be used to overpower one’s opponents, as described in the book The Art of the Argument: Western Civilization’s Last Stand (2017) by the white supremacist S. Molyneux. Such aggressive practices reflect a vision of argumentation as a kind of competition or battle, where the goal is to “score points” and “beat the opponent”. Authors who have criticized (overly) adversarial practices of argumentation include (Moulton 1983; Gilbert 1994; Rooney 2012; Hundleby 2013; Bailin & Battersby 2016). Many (but not all) of these authors formulated their criticism specifically from a feminist perspective (see entry on feminist perspectives on argumentation ).

Feminist critiques of adversarial argumentation challenge ideals of argumentation as a form of competition, where masculine-coded values of aggression and violence prevail (Kidd 2020). For these authors, such ideals encourage argumentative performances where excessive use of forcefulness is on display. Instances of aggressive argumentation in turn have a number of problematic consequences: epistemic consequences—the pursuit of truth is not best served by adversarial argumentation—as well as moral/ethical/political consequences—these practices exclude a number of people from participating in argumentative encounters, namely those for whom displays of aggression do not constitute socially acceptable behavior (women and other socially disadvantaged groups in particular). These authors defend alternative conceptions of argumentation as a cooperative, nurturing activity (Gilbert 1994; Bailin & Battersby 2016), which are traditionally feminine-coded values. Crucially, they view adversarial conceptions of argumentation as optional , maintaining that the alternatives are equally legitimate and that cooperative conceptions should be adopted and cultivated.

By contrast, others have argued that adversariality, when suitably understood, can be seen as an integral and in fact desirable component of argumentation (Govier 1999; Aikin 2011; Casey 2020; but notice that these authors each develop different accounts of adversariality in argumentation). Such authors answer “adversarial” both to the descriptive and to the normative questions stated above. One overall theme is the need to draw a distinction between (excessive) aggressiveness and adversariality as such. Govier, for example, distinguishes between ancillary (negative) adversariality and minimal adversariality (Govier 1999). The thought is that, while the feminist critique of excessive aggression in argumentation is well taken, adversariality conceived and practiced in different ways need not have the detrimental consequences of more extreme versions of belligerent argumentation. Moreover, for these authors, adversariality in argumentation is simply not optional: it is an intrinsic feature of argumentative practices, but these practices also require a background of cooperation and agreement regarding, e.g., the accepted rules of inference.

But ultimately, the presumed opposition between adversarial and cooperative conceptions of argumentation may well be merely apparent. It may be argued for example that actual argumentative encounters ought to be adversarial or cooperative to different degrees, as different types of argumentation are required for different situations (Dutilh Novaes forthcoming). Indeed, perhaps we should not look for a one-fits-all model of how argumentation ought to be conducted across different contexts and situation, given the diversity of uses of argumentation.

We speak of argumentation as an epistemic practice when we take its primary purpose to be that of improving our beliefs and increasing knowledge, or of fostering understanding. To engage in argumentation can be a way to acquire more accurate beliefs: by examining critically reasons for and against a given position, we would be able to weed out weaker, poorly justified beliefs (likely to be false) and end up with stronger, suitably justified beliefs (likely to be true). From this perspective, the goal of engaging in argumentation is to learn , i.e., to improve one’s epistemic position (as opposed to argumentation “to win” (Fisher & Keil 2016)). Indeed, argumentation is often said to be truth-conducive (Betz 2013).

The idea that argumentation can be an epistemically beneficial process is as old as philosophy itself. In every major historical philosophical tradition, argumentation is viewed as an essential component of philosophical reflection precisely because it may be used to aim at the truth (indeed this is the core of Plato’s critique of the Sophists and their excessive focus on persuasion at the expense of truth (Irani 2017; see Historical Supplement ). Recent proponents of an epistemological approach to argumentation include (Goldman 2004; Lumer 2005; Biro & Siegel 2006). Alvin Goldman captures this general idea in the following terms:

Norms of good argumentation are substantially dedicated to the promotion of truthful speech and the exposure of falsehood, whether intentional or unintentional. […] Norms of good argumentation are part of a practice to encourage the exchange of truths through sincere, non-negligent, and mutually corrective speech. (Goldman 1994: 30)

Of course, it is at least in theory possible to engage in argumentation with oneself along these lines, solitarily weighing the pros and cons of a position. But a number of philosophers, most notably John Stuart Mill, maintain that interpersonal argumentative situations, involving people who truly disagree with each other, work best to realize the epistemic potential of argumentation to improve our beliefs (a point he developed in On Liberty (1859; see entry on John Stuart Mill ). When our ideas are challenged by engagement with those who disagree with us, we are forced to consider our own beliefs more thoroughly and critically. The result is that the remaining beliefs, those that have survived critical challenge, will be better grounded than those we held before such encounters. Dissenters thus force us to stay epistemically alert instead of becoming too comfortable with existing, entrenched beliefs. On this conception, arguers cooperate with each other precisely by being adversarial, i.e., by adopting a critical stance towards the positions one disagrees with.

The view that argumentation aims at epistemic improvement is in many senses appealing, but it is doubtful that it reflects the actual outcomes of argumentation in many real-life situations. Indeed, it seems that, more often than not, we are not Millians when arguing: we do not tend to engage with dissenting opinions with an open mind. Indeed, there is quite some evidence suggesting that arguments are in fact not a very efficient means to change minds in most real-life situations (Gordon-Smith 2019). People typically do not like to change their minds about firmly entrenched beliefs, and so when confronted with arguments or evidence that contradict these beliefs, they tend to either look away or to discredit the source of the argument as unreliable (Dutilh Novaes 2020c)—a phenomenon also known as “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998).

In particular, arguments that threaten our core beliefs and our sense of belonging to a group (e.g., political beliefs) typically trigger all kinds of motivated reasoning (Taber & Lodge 2006; Kahan 2017) whereby one outright rejects those arguments without properly engaging with their content. Relatedly, when choosing among a vast supply of options, people tend to gravitate towards content and sources that confirm their existing opinions, thus giving rise to so-called “echo chambers” and “epistemic bubbles” (Nguyen 2020). Furthermore, some arguments can be deceptively convincing in that they look valid but are not (Tindale 2007; see entry on fallacies ). Because most of us are arguably not very good at spotting fallacious arguments, especially if they are arguments that lend support to the beliefs we already hold, engaging in argumentation may in fact decrease the accuracy of our beliefs by persuading us of false conclusions with incorrect arguments (Fantl 2018).

In sum, despite the optimism of Mill and many others, it seems that engaging in argumentation will not automatically improve our beliefs (even if this may occur in some circumstances). [ 4 ] However, it may still be argued that an epistemological approach to argumentation can serve the purpose of providing a normative ideal for argumentative practices, even if it is not always a descriptively accurate account of these practices in the messy real world. Moreover, at least some concrete instances of argumentation, in particular argumentation in science (see section 4.5 below) seem to offer successful examples of epistemic-oriented argumentative practices.

Another important strand in the literature on argumentation are theories that view consensus as the primary goal of argumentative processes: to eliminate or resolve a difference of (expressed) opinion. The tradition of pragma-dialectics is a prominent recent exponent of this strand (Eemeren & Grootendorst 2004). These consensus-oriented approaches are motivated by the social complexity of human life, and the attribution of a role of social coordination to argumentation. Because humans are social animals who must often cooperate with other humans to successfully accomplish certain tasks, they must have mechanisms to align their beliefs and intentions, and subsequently their actions (Tomasello 2014). The thought is that argumentation would be a particularly suitable mechanism for such alignment, as an exchange of reasons would make it more likely that differences of opinion would decrease (Norman 2016). This may happen precisely because argumentation would be a good way to track truths and avoid falsehoods, as discussed in the previous section; by being involved in the same epistemic process of exchanging reasons, the participants in an argumentative situation would all come to converge towards the truth, and thus the upshot would be that they also come to agree with each other. However, consensus-oriented views need not presuppose that argumentation is truth-conducive: the ultimate goal of such instances of argumentation is that of social coordination, and for this tracking truth is not a requirement (Patterson 2011).

In particular, the very notion of deliberative democracy is viewed as resting crucially on argumentative practices that aim for consensus (Fishkin 2016; see entry on democracy ). (For present purposes, “deliberation” and “argumentation” can be treated as roughly synonymous). In a deliberative democracy, for a decision to be legitimate, it must be preceded by authentic public deliberation—a discussion of the pros and cons of the different options—not merely the aggregation of preferences that occurs in voting. Moreover, in democratic deliberation, when full consensus does not emerge, the parties involved may opt for a compromise solution, e.g., a coalition-based political system.

A prominent theorist of deliberative democracy thus understood is Jürgen Habermas, whose “discourse theory of law and democracy” relies heavily on practices of political justification and argumentation taking place in what he calls “the public sphere” (Habermas 1992 [1996]; 1981 [1984]; see entry on Habermas ). He starts from the idea that politics allows for the collective organization of people’s lives, including the common rules they will live by. Political argumentation is a form of communicative practice, so general assumptions for communicative practices in general apply. However, additional assumptions apply as well (Olson 2011 [2014]). In particular, deliberating participants must accept that anyone can participate in these discursive practices (democratic deliberation should be inclusive), and that anyone can introduce and challenge claims that are made in the public sphere (democratic deliberation should be free). They must also see one another as having equal status, at least for the purposes of deliberation (democratic deliberation should be equal). In turn, critics of Habermas’s account view it as unrealistic, as it presupposes an ideal situation where all citizens are treated equally and engage in public debates in good faith (Mouffe 1999; Geuss 2019).

More generally, it seems that it is only under quite specific conditions that argumentation reliably leads to consensus (as also suggested by formal modeling of argumentative situations (Betz 2013; Olsson 2013; Mäs & Flache 2013)). Consensus-oriented argumentation seems to work well in cooperative contexts, but not so much in situations of conflict (Dutilh Novaes forthcoming). In particular, the discussing parties must already have a significant amount of background agreement—especially agreement on what counts as a legitimate argument or compelling evidence—for argumentation and deliberation to lead to consensus. Especially in situations of deep disagreement (Fogelin 1985), it seems that the potential of argumentation to lead to consensus is quite limited. Instead, in many real-life situations, argumentation often leads to the opposite result; people disagree with each other even more after engaging in argumentation (Sunstein 2002). This is the well-documented phenomenon of group polarization , which occurs when an initial position or tendency of individual members of a group becomes more extreme after group discussion (Isenberg 1986).

In fact, it may be argued that argumentation will often create or exacerbate conflict and adversariality, rather than leading to the resolution of differences of opinions. Furthermore, a focus on consensus may end up reinforcing and perpetuating existing unequal power relations in a society.

In an unjust society, what purports to be a cooperative exchange of reasons really perpetuates patterns of oppression. (Goodwin 2007: 77)

This general point has been made by a number of political thinkers (e.g., Young 2000), who have highlighted the exclusionary implications of consensus-oriented political deliberation. The upshot is that consensus may not only be an unrealistic goal for argumentation; it may not even be a desirable goal for argumentation in a number of situations (e.g., when there is great power imbalance). Despite these concerns, the view that the primary goal of argumentation is to aim for consensus remains influential in the literature.

Finally, a number of authors have attributed to argumentation the potential to manage (pre-existing) conflict. In a sense, the consensus-oriented view of argumentation just discussed is a special case of conflict management argumentation, based on the assumption that the best way to manage conflict and disagreement is to aim for consensus and thus eliminate conflict. But conflict can be managed in different ways, not all of them leading to consensus; indeed, some authors maintain that argumentation may help mitigate conflict even when the explicit aim is not that of reaching consensus. Importantly, authors who identify conflict management (or variations thereof) as a function for argumentation differ in their overall appreciation of the value of argumentation: some take it to be at best futile and at worst destructive, [ 5 ] while others attribute a more positive role to argumentation in conflict management.

To this category also belong the conceptualizations of argumentation-as-war discussed (and criticized) by a number of authors (Cohen 1995; Bailin & Battersby 2016); in such cases, conflict is not so much managed but rather enacted (and possibly exacerbated) by means of argumentation. Thus seen, the function of argumentation would not be fundamentally different from the function of organized competitive activities such as sports or even war (with suitable rules of engagement; Aikin 2011).

When conflict emerges, people have various options: they may choose not to engage and instead prefer to flee; they may go into full-blown fighting mode, which may include physical aggression; or they may opt for approaches somewhere in between the fight-or-flee extremes of the spectrum. Argumentation can be plausibly classified as an intermediary response:

[A]rgument literally is a form of pacifism—we are using words instead of swords to settle our disputes. With argument, we settle our disputes in ways that are most respectful of those who disagree—we do not buy them off, we do not threaten them, and we do not beat them into submission. Instead, we give them reasons that bear on the truth or falsity of their beliefs. However adversarial argument may be, it isn’t bombing. […] argument is a pacifistic replacement for truly violent solutions to disagreements…. (Aikin 2011: 256)

This is not to say that argumentation will always or even typically be the best approach to handle conflict and disagreement; the point is rather that argumentation at least has the potential to do so, provided that the background conditions are suitable and that provisions to mitigate escalation are in place (Aikin 2011). Versions of this view can be found in the work of proponents of agonistic conceptions of democracy and political deliberation (Wenman 2013; see entry on feminist political philosophy ). For agonist thinkers, conflict and strife are inevitable features of human lives, and so cannot be eliminated; but they can be managed. One of them is Chantal Mouffe (Mouffe 2000), for whom democratic practices, including argumentation/deliberation, can serve to contain hostility and transform it into more constructive forms of contest. However, it is far from obvious that argumentation by itself will suffice to manage conflict; typically, other kinds of intervention must be involved (Young 2000), as the risk of argumentation being used to exercise power rather than as a tool to manage conflict always looms large (van Laar & Krabbe 2019).

From these observations on different types of argumentation, a pluralistic picture emerges: argumentation, understood as the exchange of reasons to justify claims, seems to have different applications in different situations. However, it is not clear that some of the goals often attributed to argumentation such as epistemic improvement and reaching consensus can in fact be reliably achieved in many real life situations. Does this mean that argumentation is useless and futile? Not necessarily, but it may mean that engaging in argumentation will not always be the optimal response in a number of contexts.

4. Argumentation Across Fields of Inquiry and Social Practices

Argumentation is practiced and studied in many fields of inquiry; philosophers interested in argumentation have much to benefit from engaging with these bodies of research as well.

To understand the emergence of argumentation theory as a specific field of research in the twentieth century, a brief discussion of preceding events is necessary. In the nineteenth century, a number of textbooks aiming to improve everyday reasoning via public education emphasized logical and rhetorical concerns, such as those by Richard Whately (see entry on fallacies ). As noted in section 3.2 , John Stuart Mill also had a keen interest in argumentation and its role in public discourse (Mill 1859), as well as an interest in logic and reasoning (see entries on Mill and on fallacies ). But with the advent of mathematical logic in the final decades of the nineteenth century, logic and the study of ordinary, everyday argumentation came apart, as logicians such as Frege, Hilbert, Russell etc. were primarily interested in mathematical reasoning and argumentation. As a result, their logical systems are not particularly suitable to study everyday argumentation, as this is simply not what they were designed to do. [ 6 ]

Nevertheless, in the twentieth century a number of authors took inspiration from developments in formal logic and expanded the use of logical tools to the analysis of ordinary argumentation. A pioneer in this tradition is Susan Stebbing, who wrote what can be seen as the first textbook in analytic philosophy, and then went on to write a number of books aimed at a general audience addressing everyday and public discourse from a philosophical/logical perspective (see entry on Susan Stebbing ). Her 1939 book Thinking to Some Purpose , which can be considered as one of the first textbooks in critical thinking, was widely read at the time, but did not become particularly influential for the development of argumentation theory in the decades to follow.

By contrast, Stephen Toulmin’s 1958 book The Uses of Argument has been tremendously influential in a wide range of fields, including critical thinking education, rhetoric, speech communication, and computer science (perhaps even more so than in Toulmin’s own original field, philosophy). Toulmin’s aim was to criticize the assumption (widely held by Anglo-American philosophers at the time) that any significant argument can be formulated in purely formal, deductive terms, using the formal logical systems that had emerged in the preceding decades (see (Eemeren, Garssen, et al. 2014: ch. 4). While this critique was met with much hostility among fellow philosophers, it eventually gave rise to an alternative way of approaching argumentation, which is often described as “informal logic” (see entry on informal logic ). This approach seeks to engage and analyze instances of argumentation in everyday life; it recognizes that, while useful, the tools of deductive logic alone do not suffice to investigate argumentation in all its complexity and pragmatic import. In a similar vein, Charles Hamblin’s 1970 book Fallacies reinvigorated the study of fallacies in the context of argumentation by re-emphasizing (following Aristotle) the importance of a dialectical-dialogical background when reflecting on fallacies in argumentation (see entry on fallacies ).

Around the same time as Toulmin, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca were developing an approach to argumentation that emphasized its persuasive component. To this end, they turned to classical theories of rhetoric, and adapted them to give rise to what they described as the “New Rhetoric”. Their book Traité de l’argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique was published in 1958 in French, and translated into English in 1969. Its key idea:

since argumentation aims at securing the adherence of those to whom it is addressed, it is, in its entirety, relative to the audience to be influenced. (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1958 [1969: 19])

They introduced the influential distinction between universal and particular audiences: while every argument is directed at a specific individual or group, the concept of a universal audience serves as a normative ideal encapsulating shared standards of agreement on what counts as legitimate argumentation (see Eemeren, Garssen, et al. 2014: ch. 5).

The work of these pioneers provided the foundations for subsequent research in argumentation theory. One approach that became influential in the following decades is the pragma-dialectics tradition developed by Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst (Eemeren & Grootendorst 1984, 2004). They also founded the journal Argumentation , one of the flagship journals in argumentation theory. Pragma-dialectics was developed to study argumentation as a discourse activity, a complex speech act that occurs as part of interactional linguistic activities with specific communicative goals (“pragma” refers to the functional perspective of goals, and “dialectic” to the interactive component). For these authors, argumentative discourse is primarily directed at the reasonable resolution of a difference of opinion. Pragma-dialectics has a descriptive as well as a normative component, thus offering tools both for the analysis of concrete instances of argumentation and for the evaluation of argumentation correctness and success (see Eemeren, Garssen, et al. 2014: ch. 10).

Another leading author in argumentation theory is Douglas Walton, who pioneered the argument schemes approach to argumentation that borrows tools from formal logic but expands them so as to treat a wider range of arguments than those covered by traditional logical systems (Walton, Reed, & Macagno 2008). Walton also formulated an influential account of argumentation in dialogue in collaboration with Erik Krabbe (Walton & Krabbe 1995). Ralph Johnson and Anthony Blair further helped to consolidate the field of argumentation theory and informal logic by founding the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric in Windsor (Ontario, Canada), and by initiating the journal Informal Logic . Their textbook Logical Self-Defense (Johnson & Blair 1977) has also been particularly influential.

The study of argumentation within computer science and artificial intelligence is a thriving field of research, with dedicated journals such as Argument and Computation and regular conference series such as COMMA (International Conference on Computational Models of Argument; see Rahwan & Simari 2009 and Eemeren, Garssen, et al. 2014: ch. 11 for overviews).

The historical roots of argumentation research in artificial intelligence can be traced back to work on non-monotonic logics (see entry on non-monotonic logics ) and defeasible reasoning (see entry on defeasible reasoning ). Since then, three main different perspectives have emerged (Eemeren, Garssen, et al. 2014: ch. 11): the theoretical systems perspective, where the focus is on theoretical and formal models of argumentation (following the tradition of philosophical and formal logic); the artificial systems perspective, where the aim is to build computer programs that model or support argumentative tasks, for instance, in online dialogue games or in expert systems; the natural systems perspective, which investigates argumentation in its natural form with the help of computational tools (e.g., argumentation mining [Peldszus & Stede 2013; Habernal & Gurevych 2017], where computational methods are used to identify argumentative structures in large corpora of texts).

An influential approach in this research tradition is that of abstract argumentation frameworks , initiated by the pioneering work of Dung (1995). Before that, argumentation in AI was studied mostly under the inspiration of concepts coming from informal logic such as argumentation schemes, context, stages of dialogues and argument moves. By contrast, the key notion in the framework proposed by Dung is that of argument attack , understood as an abstract formal relation roughly intended to capture the idea that it is possible to challenge an argument by means of another argument (assertions are understood as a special case of arguments with zero premises). Arguments can then be represented in networks of attacks and defenses: an argument A can attack an argument B , and B in turn may attack further arguments C and D (the connection with the notion of defeaters is a natural one, which Dung also addresses).

Besides abstract argumentation, three other important lines of research in AI are: the (internal) structure of arguments; argumentation in multi-agent systems; applications to specific tasks and domains (Rahwan & Siwari 2009). The structural approach investigates formally features such as argument strength/force (e.g., a conclusive argument is stronger than a defeasible argument), argument schemes (Bex, Prakken, Reed, & Walton 2003) etc. Argumentation in multi-agent systems is a thriving subfield with its own dedicated conference series (ArgMAS), based on the recognition that argumentation is a particularly suitable vehicle to facilitate interaction in the artificial environments studied by AI researchers working on multi-agent systems (see a special issue of the journal Argument & Computation [Atkinson, Cerutti, et al. 2016]). Finally, computational approaches in argumentation have also thrived with respect to specific domains and applications, such as legal argumentation (Prakken & Sartor 2015). Recently, as a reaction to the machine-learning paradigm, the idea of explainable AI has gotten traction, and the concept of argumentation is thought to play a fundamental role for explainable AI (Sklar & Azhar 2018).

Argumentation is also an important topic of investigation within cognitive science and psychology. Researchers in these fields are predominantly interested in the descriptive question of how people in fact engage in argumentation, rather than in the normative question of how they ought to do it (although some of them have also drawn normative conclusions, e.g., Hahn & Oaksford 2006; Hahn & Hornikx, 2016). Controlled experiments are one of the ways in which the descriptive question can be investigated.

Systematic research specifically on argumentation within cognitive science and psychology has significantly increased over the last 10 years. Before that, there had been extensive research on reasoning conceived as an individual, internal process, much of which had been conducted using task materials such as syllogistic arguments (Dutilh Novaes 2020b). But due to what may be described as an individualist bias in cognitive science and psychology (Mercier 2018), these researchers did not draw explicit connections between their findings and the public acts of “giving and asking for reasons”. It is only somewhat recently that argumentation began to receive sustained attention from these researchers. The investigations of Hugo Mercier and colleagues (Mercier & Sperber 2017; Mercier 2018) and of Ulrike Hahn and colleagues (Hahn & Oaksford 2007; Hornikx & Hahn 2012; Collins & Hahn 2018) have been particularly influential. (See also Paglieri, Bonelli, & Felletti 2016, an edited volume containing a representative overview of research on the psychology of argumentation.) Another interesting line of research has been the study of the development of reasoning and argumentative skills in young children (Köymen, Mammen, & Tomasello 2016; Köymen & Tomasello 2020).

Mercier and Sperber defend an interactionist account of reasoning, according to which the primary function of reasoning is for social interactions, where reasons are exchanged and receivers of reasons decide whether they find them convincing—in other words, for argumentation (Mercier & Sperber 2017). They review a wealth of evidence suggesting that reasoning is rather flawed when it comes to drawing conclusions from premises in order to expand one’s knowledge. From this they conclude, on the basis of evolutionary arguments, that the function of reasoning must be a different one, indeed one that responds to features of human sociality and the need to exercise epistemic vigilance when receiving information from others. This account has inaugurated a rich research program which they have been pursuing with colleagues for over a decade now, and which has delivered some interesting results—for example, that we seem to be better at evaluating the quality of arguments proposed by others than at formulating high-quality arguments ourselves (Mercier 2018).

In the context of the Bayesian (see entry on Bayes’ theorem ) approach to reasoning that was first developed by Mike Oaksford and Nick Chater in the 1980s (Oaksford & Chater 2018), Hahn and colleagues have extended the Bayesian framework to the investigation of argumentation. They claim that Bayesian probabilities offer an accurate descriptive model of how people evaluate the strength of arguments (Hahn & Oaksford 2007) as well as a solid perspective to address normative questions pertaining to argument strength (Hahn & Oaksford 2006; Hahn & Hornikx 2016). The Bayesian approach allows for the formulation of probabilistic measures of argument strength, showing that many so-called “fallacies” may nevertheless be good arguments in the sense that they considerably raise the probability of the conclusion. For example, deductively invalid argument schemes (such as affirming the consequent (AC) and denying the antecedent (DA)) can also provide considerable support for a conclusion, depending on the contents in question. The extent to which this is the case depends primarily on the specific informational context, captured by the prior probability distribution, not on the structure of the argument. This means that some instances of, say, AC, may offer support to a conclusion while others may fail to do so (Eva & Hartmann 2018). Thus seen, Bayesian argumentation represents a significantly different approach to argumentation from those inspired by logic (e.g., argument schemes), but they are not necessarily incompatible; they may well be complementary perspectives (see also [Zenker 2013]).

Argumentation is primarily (though not exclusively) a linguistic phenomenon. Accordingly, argumentation is extensively studied in fields dedicated to the study of language, such as rhetoric, linguistics, discourse analysis, communication, and pragmatics, among others (see Eemeren, Garssen, et al. 2014: chs 8 and 9). Researchers in these areas develop general theoretical models of argumentation and investigate concrete instances of argumentation in specific domains on the basis of linguistic corpora, discourse analysis, and other methods used in the language sciences (see the edited volume Oswald, Herman, & Jacquin [2018] for a sample of the different lines of research). Overall, research on argumentation within the language sciences tends to focus primarily on concrete occurrences of arguments in a variety of domains, adopting a largely descriptive rather than normative perspective (though some of these researchers also tackle normative considerations).

Some of these analyses approach arguments and argumentation primarily as text or self-contained speeches, while others emphasize the interpersonal, communicative nature of “face-to-face” argumentation (see Eemeren, Garssen, et al. 2014: section 8.9). One prominent approach in this tradition is due to communication scholars Sally Jackson and Scott Jacobs. They have drawn on speech act theory and conversation analysis to investigate argumentation as a disagreement-relevant expansion of speech acts that, through mutually recognized reasons, allows us to manage disagreements despite the challenges they pose for communication and coordination of activities (Jackson & Jacobs 1980; Jackson 2019). Moreover, they perceive institutionalized practices of argumentation and concrete “argumentation designs”—such as for example randomized controlled trials in medicine—as interventions aimed at improving methods of disagreement management through argumentation.

Another communication scholar, Dale Hample, has further argued for the importance of approaching argumentation as an essentially interpersonal communicative activity (Hample 2006, 2018). This perspective allows for the consideration of a broader range of factors, not only the arguments themselves but also (and primarily) the people involved in those processes: their motivations, psychological processes, and emotions. It also allows for the formulation of questions pertaining to individual as well as cultural differences in argumentative styles (see section 5.3 below).

Another illuminating perspective views argumentative practices as inherently tied to broader socio-cultural contexts (Amossy 2009). The Journal of Argumentation in Context was founded in 2012 precisely to promote a contextual approach to argumentation. Once argumentation is no longer only considered in abstraction from concrete instances taking place in real-life situations, it becomes imperative to recognize that argumentation does not take place in a vacuum; typically, argumentative practices are embedded in other kinds of practices and institutions, against the background of specific socio-cultural, political structures. The method of discourse analysis is particularly suitable for a broader perspective on argumentation, as shown by the work of Ruth Amossy (2002) and Marianne Doury (2009), among others.

Argumentation is crucial in a number of specific organized social practices, in particular in politics, science, law, and education. The relevant argumentative practices are studied in each of the corresponding knowledge domains; indeed, while some general principles may govern argumentative practices across the board, some may be specific to particular applications and domains.

As already mentioned, argumentation is typically viewed as an essential component of political democratic practices, and as such it is of great interest to political scientists and political theorists (Habermas 1992 [1996]; Young 2000; Landemore 2013; Fishkin 2016; see entry on democracy ). (The term typically used in this context is “deliberation” instead of “argumentation”, but these can be viewed as roughly synonymous for our purposes.) General theories of argumentation such as pragma-dialectic and the Toulmin model can be applied to political argumentation with illuminating results (Wodak 2016; Mohammed 2016). More generally, political discourse seems to have a strong argumentative component, in particular if argumentation is understood more broadly as not only pertaining to rational discourse ( logos ) but as also including what rhetoricians refer to as pathos and ethos (Zarefsky 2014; Amossy 2018). But critics of argumentation and deliberation in political contexts also point out the limitations of the classical deliberative model (Sanders 1997; Talisse 2019).

Moreover, scientific communities seem to offer good examples of (largely) well-functioning argumentative practices. These are disciplined systems of collective epistemic activity, with tacit but widely endorsed norms for argumentative engagement for each domain (which does not mean that there are not disagreements on these very norms). The case of mathematics has already been mentioned above: practices of mathematical proof are quite naturally understood as argumentative practices (Dutilh Novaes 2020a). Furthermore, when a scientist presents a new scientific claim, it must be backed by arguments and evidence that her peers are likely to find convincing, as they follow from the application of widely agreed-upon scientific methods (Longino 1990; Weinstein 1990; Rehg 2008; see entry on the social dimensions of scientific knowledge ). Other scientists will in turn critically examine the evidence and arguments provided, and will voice objections or concerns if they find aspects of the theory to be insufficiently convincing. Thus seen, science may be viewed as a “game of giving and asking for reasons” (Zamora Bonilla 2006). Certain features of scientific argumentation seem to ensure its success: scientists see other scientists as prima facie peers, and so (typically at least) place a fair amount of trust in other scientists by default; science is based on the principle of “organized skepticism” (a term introduced by the pioneer sociologist of science Robert Merton [Merton, 1942]), which means that asking for further reasons should not be perceived as a personal attack. These are arguably aspects that distinguish argumentation in science from argumentation in other domains in virtue of these institutional factors (Mercier & Heintz 2014). But ultimately, scientists are part of society as a whole, and thus the question of how scientific and political argumentation intersect becomes particularly relevant (Kitcher 2001).

Another area where argumentation is essential is the law, which also corresponds to disciplined systems of collective activity with rules and principles for what counts as acceptable arguments and evidence. legal reasoning ).--> In litigation (in particular in adversarial justice systems), there are typically two sides disagreeing on what is lawful or just, and the basic idea is that each side will present its strongest arguments; it is the comparison between the two sets of arguments that should lead to the best judgment (Walton 2002). Legal reasoning and argumentation have been extensively studied within jurisprudence for decades, in particular since Ronald Dworkin’s (1977) and Neil MacCormick’s (1978) responses to HLA Hart’s highly influential The Concept of Law (1961). A number of other views and approaches have been developed, in particular from the perspectives of natural law theory, legal positivism, common law, and rhetoric (see Feteris 2017 for an overview). Overall, legal argumentation is characterized by extensive uses of analogies (Lamond 2014), abduction (Askeland 2020), and defeasible/non-monotonic reasoning (Bex & Verheij 2013). An interesting question is whether argumentation in law is fundamentally different from argumentation in other domains, or whether it follows the same overall canons and norms but applied to legal topics (Raz 2001).

Finally, the development of argumentative skills is arguably a fundamental aspect of (formal) education (Muller Mirza & Perret-Clermont 2009). Ideally, when presented with arguments, a learner should not simply accept what is being said at face value, but should instead reflect on the reasons offered and come to her own conclusions. Argumentation thus fosters independent, critical thinking, which is viewed as an important goal for education (Siegel 1995; see entry on critical thinking ). A number of education theorists and developmental psychologists have empirically investigated the effects of emphasizing argumentative skills in educational settings, with encouraging results (Kuhn & Crowell 2011). There has been in particular much emphasis on argumentation specifically in science education, based on the assumption that argumentation is a key component of scientific practice (as noted above); the thought is that this feature of scientific practice should be reflected in science education (Driver, Newton, & Osborne 2000; Erduran & Jiménez-Aleixandre 2007).

5. Further Topics

Argumentation is a multi-faceted phenomenon, and the literature on arguments and argumentation is massive and varied. This entry can only scratch the surface of the richness of this material, and many interesting, relevant topics must be left out for reasons of space. In this final section, a selection of topics that are likely to attract considerable interest in future research are discussed.

In recent years, the concept of epistemic injustice has received much attention among philosophers (Fricker 2007; McKinnon 2016). Epistemic injustice occurs when a person is unfairly treated qua knower on the basis of prejudices pertaining to social categories such as gender, race, class, ability etc. (see entry on feminist epistemology and philosophy of science ). One of the main categories of epistemic injustice discussed in the literature pertains to testimony and is known as testimonial injustice : this occurs when a testifier is not given a degree of credibility commensurate to their actual expertise on the relevant topic, as a result of prejudice. (Whether credibility excess is also a form of testimonial injustice is a moot point in the literature [Medina 2011].)

Since argumentation can be viewed as an important mechanism for sharing knowledge and information, i.e., as having significant epistemic import (Goldman 2004), the question arises whether there might be instances of epistemic injustice pertaining specifically to argumentation, which may be described as argumentative injustice , and which would be notably different from other recognized forms of epistemic injustice such as testimonial injustice. Bondy (Bondy 2010) presented a first articulation of the notion of argumentative injustice, modeled after Fricker’s notion of epistemic injustice and relying on a broadly epistemological conception of argumentation. However, Bondy’s analysis does not take into account some of the structural elements that have become central to the analysis of epistemic injustice since Fricker’s influential work, so it seems further discussion of epistemic injustice in argumentation is still needed. For example, in situations of disagreement, epistemic injustice can give rise to further obstacles to rational argumentation, leading to deep disagreement (Lagewaard 2021).

Moreover, as often noted by critics of adversarial approaches, argumentation can also be used as an instrument of domination and oppression used to overpower and denigrate an interlocutor (Nozick 1981), especially an interlocutor of “lower” status in the context in question (Moulton 1983; see entry on feminist approaches to argumentation ). From this perspective, it is clear that argumentation may also be used to reinforce and exacerbate injustice, inequalities and power differentials (Goodwin 2007). Given this possibility, and in response to the perennial risk of excessive aggressiveness in argumentative situations, a normative account of how argumentation ought to be conducted so as to avoid these problematic outcomes seem to be required.

One such approach is virtue argumentation theory . Drawing on virtue ethics and virtue epistemology (see entries on virtue ethics and virtue epistemology ), virtue argumentation theory seeks to theorize how to argue well in terms of the dispositions and character of arguers rather than, for example, in terms of properties of arguments considered in abstraction from arguers (Aberdein & Cohen 2016). Some of the argumentative virtues identified in the literature are: willingness to listen to others (Cohen 2019), willingness to take a novel viewpoint seriously (Kwong 2016), humility (Kidd 2016), and open-mindedness (Tanesini 2020).

By the same token, defective argumentation is conceptualized not (only) in terms of structural properties of arguments (e.g., fallacious argument patterns), but in terms of the vices displayed by arguers such as arrogance and narrow-mindedness, among others (Aberdein 2016). Virtue argumentation theory now constitutes a vibrant research program, as attested by a special issue of Topoi dedicated to the topic (see [Aberdein & Cohen 2016] for its Introduction). It allows for a reconceptualization of classical themes within argumentation theory while also promising to provide concrete recommendations on how to argue better. Whether it can fully counter the risk of epistemic injustice and oppressive uses of argumentation is however debatable, at least as long as broader structural factors related to power dynamics are not sufficiently taken into account (Kukla 2014).

On some idealized construals, argumentation is conceived as a purely rational, emotionless endeavor. But the strong connection between argumentative activities and emotional responses has also long been recognized (in particular in rhetorical analyses of argumentation), and more recently has become the object of extensive research (Walton 1992; Gilbert 2004; Hample 2006: ch. 5). Importantly, the recognition of a role for emotions in argumentation does not entail a complete rejection of the “rationality” of argumentation; rather, it is based on the rejection of a strict dichotomy between reason and emotion (see entry on emotion ), and on a more encompassing conception of argumentation as a multi-layered human activity.

Rather than dispassionate exchanges of reasons, instances of argumentation typically start against the background of existing emotional relations, and give rise to further affective responses—often, though not necessarily, negative responses of aggression and hostility. Indeed, it has been noted that, by itself, argumentation can give rise to conflict and friction where there was none to be found prior to the argumentative engagement (Aikin 2011). This occurs in particular because critical engagement and requests for reasons are at odds with default norms of credulity in most mundane dialogical interactions, thus creating a perception of antagonism. But argumentation may also give rise to positive affective responses if the focus is on coalescence and cooperation rather than on hostility (Gilbert 1997).

The descriptive claim that instances of argumentation are typically emotionally charged is not particularly controversial, though it deserves to be further investigated; the details of affective responses during instances of argumentation and how to deal with them are non-trivial (Krabbe & van Laar 2015). What is potentially more controversial is the normative claim that instances of argumentation may or should be emotionally charged, i.e., that emotions may or ought to be involved in argumentative processes, even if it may be necessary to regulate them in such situations rather than giving them free rein (González, Gómez, & Lemos 2019). The significance of emotions for persuasion has been recognized for millennia (see entry on Aristotle’s rhetoric ), but more recently it has become clear that emotions also have a fundamental role to play for choices of what to focus on and what to care about (Sinhababu 2017). This general point seems to apply to instances of argumentation as well. For example, Howes and Hundleby (Howes & Hundleby 2018) argue that, contrary to what is often thought, anger can in fact make a positive contribution to argumentative encounters. Indeed, anger may have an important epistemological role in such encounters by drawing attention to relevant premises and information that may otherwise go unnoticed. (They recognize that anger may also derail argumentation when the encounter becomes a full-on confrontation.)

In sum, the study of the role of emotions for argumentation, both descriptively and normatively speaking, has attracted the interest of a number of scholars, traditionally in connection with rhetoric and more recently also from the perspective of argumentation as interpersonal communication (Hample 2006). And yet, much work remains to be done on the significance of emotions for argumentation, in particular given that the view that argumentation should be a purely rational, dispassionate endeavor remains widely (even if tacitly) endorsed.

Once we adopt the perspective of argumentation as a communicative practice, the question of the influence of cultural factors on argumentative practices naturally arises. Is there significant variability in how people engage in argumentation depending on their sociocultural backgrounds? Or is argumentation largely the same phenomenon across different cultures? Actually, we may even ask ourselves whether argumentation in fact occurs in all human cultures, or whether it is the product of specific, contingent background conditions, thus not being a human universal. For comparison: it had long been assumed that practices of counting were present in all human cultures, even if with different degrees of complexity. But in recent decades it has been shown that some cultures do not engage systematically in practices of counting and basic arithmetic at all, such as the Pirahã in the Amazon (Gordon 2004; see entry on culture and cognitive science ). By analogy, it seems that the purported universality of argumentative practices should not be taken for granted, but rather be treated as a legitimate empirical question. (Incidentally, there is some anecdotal evidence that the Pirahã themselves engage in argumentative exchanges [Everett 2008], but to date their argumentative skills have not been investigated systematically, as is the case with their numerical skills.)

Of course, how widespread argumentative practices will be also depends on how the concept of “argumentative practices” is defined and operationalized in the first place. If it is narrowly defined as corresponding to regimented practices of reason-giving requiring clear markers and explicit criteria for what counts as premises, conclusions and relations of support between them, then argumentation may well be restricted to cultures and subcultures where such practices have been explicitly codified. By contrast, if argumentation is defined more loosely, then a wider range of communicative practices will be considered as instances of argumentation, and thus presumably more cultures will be found to engage in (what is thus viewed as) argumentation. This means that the spread of argumentative practices across cultures is not only an empirical question; it also requires significant conceptual input to be addressed.

But if (as appears to be the case) argumentation is not a strictly WEIRD phenomenon, restricted to Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan 2010), then the issue of cross-cultural variability in argumentative practices gives rise to a host of research questions, again both at the descriptive and at the normative level. Indeed, even if at the descriptive level considerable variability in argumentative practices is identified, the normative question of whether there should be universally valid canons for argumentation, or instead specific norms for specific contexts, remains pressing. At the descriptive level, a number of researchers have investigated argumentative practices in different WEIRD as well as non-WEIRD cultures, also addressing questions of cultural variability (Hornikx & Hoeken 2007; Hornikx & de Best 2011).

A foundational work in this context is Edwin Hutchins’ 1980 book Culture and Inference , a study of the Trobriand Islanders’ system of land tenure in Papua New Guinea (Hutchins 1980). While presented as a study of inference and reasoning among the Trobriand Islanders, what Hutchins in fact investigated were instances of legal argumentation in land courts by means of ethnographic observation and interviews with litigants. This led to the formulation of a set of twelve basic propositions codifying knowledge about land tenure, as well as transfer formulas governing how this knowledge can be applied to new disputes. Hutchins’ analysis showed that the Trobriand Islanders had a sophisticated argumentation system to resolve issues pertaining to land tenure, in many senses resembling argumentation and reasoning in so-called WEIRD societies in that it seemed to recognize as valid simple logical structures such as modus ponens and modus tollens .

More recently, Hugo Mercier and colleagues have been conducting studies in countries such as Japan (Mercier, Deguchi, Van der Henst, & Yama 2016) and Guatemala (Castelain, Girotto, Jamet, & Mercier 2016). While recognizing the significance and interest of cultural differences (Mercier 2013), Mercier maintains that argumentation is a human universal, as argumentative capacities and tendencies are a result of natural selection, genetically encoded in human cognition (Mercier 2011; Mercier & Sperber 2017). He takes the results of the cross-cultural studies conducted so far as confirming the universality of argumentation, even considering cultural differences (Mercier 2018).

Another scholar who has been carrying out an extensive research program on cultural differences in argumentation is communication theorist Dale Hample. With different sets of colleagues, he has conducted studies by means of surveys where participants (typically, university undergraduates) self-report on their argumentative practices in countries such as China, Japan, Turkey, Chile, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United States (among others; Hample 2018: ch. 7). His results overall show a number of similarities, which may be partially explained by the specific demographic (university students) from which participants are usually recruited. But interesting differences have also been identified, for example different levels of willingness to engage in argumentative encounters.

In a recent book (Tindale 2021), philosopher Chris Tindale adopts an anthropological perspective to investigate how argumentative practices emerge from the experiences of peoples with diverse backgrounds. He emphasizes the argumentative roles of place, orality, myth, narrative, and audience, also assessing the impacts of colonialism on the study of argumentation. Tindale reviews a wealth of anthropological and ethnographic studies on argumentative practices in different cultures, thus providing what is to date perhaps the most comprehensive study on argumentation from an anthropological perspective.

On the whole, the study of differences and commonalities in argumentative practices across cultures is an established line of research on argumentation, but arguably much work remains to be done to investigate these complex phenomena more thoroughly.

So far we have not yet considered the question of the different media through which argumentation can take place. Naturally, argumentation can unfold orally in face-to-face encounters—discussions in parliament, political debates, in a court of law—as well as in writing—in scientific articles, on the Internet, in newspaper editorials. Moreover, it can happen synchronically, with real-time exchanges of reasons, or asynchronically. While it is reasonable to expect that there will be some commonalities across these different media and environments, it is also plausible that specific features of different environments may significantly influence how argumentation is conducted: different environments present different kinds of affordances for arguers (Halpern & Gibbs 2013; Weger & Aakhus 2003; see entry on embodied cognition for the concept of affordance). Indeed, if the Internet represents a fundamentally novel cognitive ecology (Smart, Heersmink, & Clowes 2017), then it will likely give rise to different forms of argumentative engagement (Lewiński 2010). Whether these new forms will represent progress (according to some suitable metric) is however a moot point.

In the early days of the Internet in the 1990s, there was much hope that online spaces would finally realize the Habermasian ideal of a public sphere for political deliberation (Hindman 2009). The Internet was supposed to act as the great equalizer in the worldwide marketplace of ideas, finally attaining the Millian ideal of free exchange of ideas (Mill 1859). Online, everyone’s voice would have an equal chance of being heard, everyone could contribute to the conversation, and everyone could simultaneously be a journalist, news consumer, engaged citizen, advocate, and activist.

A few decades later, these hopes have not really materialized. It is probably true that most people now argue more —in social media, blogs, chat rooms, discussion boards etc.—but it is much less obvious that they argue better . Indeed, rather than enhancing democratic ideals, some have gone as far as claiming that instead, the Internet is “killing democracy” (Bartlett 2018). There is very little oversight when it comes to the spreading of propaganda and disinformation online (Benkler, Faris, & Roberts 2018), which means that citizens are often being fed faulty information and arguments. Moreover, it seems that online environments may lead to increased polarization when polemic topics are being discussed (Yardi & Boyd 2010), and to “intellectual arrogance” (Lynch 2019). Some have argued that online discussions lead to more overly emotional engagement when compared to other forms of debate (Kramer, Guillory, & Hancock 2014). But not everyone is convinced that the Internet has only made things worse when it comes to argumentation, or in any case that it cannot be suitably redesigned so as to foster rather than destroy democratic ideals and deliberation (Sunstein 2017).

Be that as it may, the Internet is here to stay, and online argumentation is a pervasive phenomenon that argumentation theorists have been studying and will continue to study for years to come. In fact, if anything, online argumentation is now more often investigated empirically than other forms of argumentation, among other reasons thanks to the development of argument mining techniques (see section 4.2 above) which greatly facilitate the study of large corpora of textual material such as those produced by online discussions. Beyond the very numerous specific case studies available in the literature, there have been also attempts to reflect on the phenomenon of online argumentation in general, for example in journal special issues dedicated to argumentation in digital media such as in Argumentation and Advocacy (Volume 47(2), 2010) and Philosophy & Technology (Volume 30(2), 2017). However, a systematic analysis of online argumentation and how it differs from other forms of argumentation remains to be produced.

Argument and argumentation are multifaceted phenomena that have attracted the interest of philosophers as well as scholars in other fields for millennia, and continue to be studied extensively in various domains. This entry presents an overview of the main strands in these discussions, while acknowledging the impossibility of fully doing justice to the enormous literature on the topic. But the literature references below should at least provide a useful starting point for the interested reader.

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  • Aberdein, Andrew and Ian J Dove (eds.), 2013, The Argument of Mathematics , Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. doi:10.1007/978-94-007-6534-4
  • Aikin, Scott, 2011, “A Defense of War and Sport Metaphors in Argument”, Philosophy & Rhetoric , 44(3): 250–272.
  • Amossy, Ruth, 2002, “How to Do Things with Doxa: Toward an Analysis of Argumentation in Discourse”, Poetics Today , 23(3): 465–487. doi:10.1215/03335372-23-3-465
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  • –––, 2018, “Understanding Political Issues through Argumentation Analysis”, in The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics , Ruth Wodak and Bernard Forchtner (eds.), New York: Routledge, pp. 135–149.
  • Askeland, Bjarte, 2020, “The Potential of Abductive Legal Reasoning”, Ratio Juris , 33(1): 66–81. doi:10.1111/raju.12268
  • Atkinson, Katie, Federico Cerutti, Peter McBurney, Simon Parsons, and Iyad Rahwan (eds), 2016, Special Issue on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems , of Argument & Computation , 7(2–3).
  • Bailin, Sharon and Mark Battersby, 2016, “DAMed If You Do; DAMed If You Don’t: Cohen’s ‘Missed Opportunities’”, in Proceedings of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation Conference , Vol. 11. [ Bailin and Battersby 2016 available online ]
  • Ball, Linden J and Valerie A. Thompson (eds.), 2018, International Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning , London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315725697
  • Bartlett, Jamie, 2018, The People vs Tech: How the Internet is Killing Democracy (and How We Can Save It) , London: Ebury Press.
  • Beall, Jc, 2009, Spandrels of Truth , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199268733.001.0001
  • Benkler, Yochai, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, 2018, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics , New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780190923624.001.0001
  • Bermejo Luque, Lilian, 2011, Giving Reasons: A Linguistic-Pragmatic Approach to Argumentation Theory (Argumentation Library 20), Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. doi:10.1007/978-94-007-1761-9
  • –––, 2020, “What Is Wrong with Deductivism?”, Informal Logic , 40(3): 295–316. doi:10.22329/il.v40i30.6214
  • Betz, Gregor, 2013, Debate Dynamics: How Controversy Improves Our Beliefs , Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. doi:10.1007/978-94-007-4599-5
  • Bex, Floris, Henry Prakken, Chris Reed, and Douglas Walton, 2003, “Towards a Formal Account of Reasoning about Evidence: Argumentation Schemes and Generalisations”, Artificial Intelligence and Law , 11(2/3): 125–165. doi:10.1023/B:ARTI.0000046007.11806.9a
  • Bex, Floris and Bart Verheij, 2013, “Legal Stories and the Process of Proof”, Artificial Intelligence and Law , 21(3): 253–278. doi:10.1007/s10506-012-9137-4
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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Merel Talbi, Elias Anttila, César dos Santos, Hein Duijf, Silvia Ivani, Caglar Dede, Colin Rittberg, Marcin Lewiński, Andrew Aberdein, Malcolm Keating, Maksymillian Del Mar, and an anonymous referee for suggestions and/or comments on earlier drafts. This research was supported by H2020 European Research Council [771074-SEA].

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2 Evaluating Arguments

Nathan Smith

One particularly relevant application of logic is assessing the relative strength of philosophical claims. While the topics covered by philosophers are fascinating, it is often difficult to determine which positions on these topics are the right ones. Many students are led to think that philosophy is just a matter of opinion. After all, who could claim to know the final answer to philosophical questions?

It’s not likely that anyone will ever know the final answer to deep philosophical questions. Yet there are clearly better and worse answers; and philosophy can help us distinguish them. This chapter will give you some tools to begin to distinguish which positions on philosophical topics are well-founded and which are not. When a person makes a claim about a philosophical subject, you should ask, “What are the arguments to support that claim?” Once you have identified an argument, you can use these tools to assess whether it’s a good or bad one, whether the evidence and reasoning really support the claim or not.

In broad terms, there are two features of arguments that make them good: (1) the structure of the argument and (2) the truth of the evidence provided by the argument. Logic deals more directly with the structure of arguments. When we examine the logic of arguments, we are interested in whether the arguments have the right architecture, whether the evidence provided is the right sort of evidence to support the conclusion drawn. However, once we try to evaluate the truth of the conclusion, we need to know whether the evidence is true. We’ll look at both of these considerations in what follows.

Inference and Implication: Why Conclusions Follow from Premises

An argument is a connected series of propositions, some of which are called premises and at least one of which is a conclusion. The premises provide the reasons or evidence that supports the conclusion. From the point of view of the reader, an argument is meant to persuade the reader that, once the premises are accepted as true, the conclusion follows from them. If the reader accepts the premises, then she ought to accept the conclusion. The act of reasoning that connects the premises to the conclusion is called an inference . A good argument supports a rational inference to the conclusion, a bad argument supports no rational inference to the conclusion. [1]

Consider the following example:

  • All human beings are mortal.
  • Socrates is a human being.
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] Socrates is mortal.

This argument asserts that Socrates is mortal. It does so by appealing to the fact that Socrates is a human being, together with the idea that all human beings are mortal. There is clearly a strong connection between the premises and conclusion. Imagine a reader who accepts both premises but denies the conclusion. This person would have to believe that Socrates is a human being and that all human beings are mortal, but still deny that Socrates is mortal. How could such a person maintain that belief? It just doesn’t seem rational to believe the premises but deny the conclusion!

Now consider the following argument:

  • I saw a black cat today.
  • My knee is aching.
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] It is going to rain.

Suppose that it does, in fact, rain and the person who advances this argument believes that it is going to rain. Is that person justified in their belief that it will rain? Not based on the argument presented here! In this argument, there is a very weak connection between the premises and the conclusion. So, even if the conclusion turns out to be true, there is no reason why a reader ought to accept the conclusion given these premises (there may be other reasons for thinking it is going to rain that are not provided here, of course). The point is that these premises do not provide the right sort of evidence to justify the conclusion.

So far, I have described the connection between premises and conclusion in terms of the psychological demand placed on a reader of the argument. However, we can describe this connection from another perspective. We can say that the premises of an argument logically imply a conclusion. Either way of speaking is correct. What they assert is that good arguments present a strong connection between the truth of the premises and the truth of the conclusion. In the next few sections, we will examine three different types of logical connection, each with its own rules for evaluation. Sometimes logical implication is guaranteed (as in the case of deductive arguments ), sometimes the logical connection only ensures the conclusion is probable (as with inductive and abductive arguments ).

Deductive Arguments

Deductive arguments are the most common type of argument in philosophy, and for good reason. Deductive arguments attempt to demonstrate that the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. As long as the premises of a good deductive argument are true, the conclusion is true as a matter of logic. This means that if I know the premises are true, I know with one-hundred percent certainty that the conclusion is also true! This may be hard to believe; after all, how can we be absolutely certain about anything? But notice what I am saying: I am not saying that we know the conclusion is true with one-hundred percent certainty. I am saying that we can be one-hundred percent certain the conclusion is true, on the condition that the premises are true. If one of the premises is false, then the conclusion is not guaranteed.

Here are two examples of good deductive arguments. They are both valid and have true premises. A valid argument is an argument whose premises guarantee the truth of the conclusion. That is, if the premises are true, then it is impossible for the conclusion to be false. A valid deductive argument whose premises are all true is called a sound argument .

  • If it rained outside, then the streets will be wet.
  • It rained outside.
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] The streets are wet.
  •  Either the world ended on December 12, 2012 or it continues today.
  • The world did not end on December 12, 2012.
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] The world continues today.

Hopefully, you can see that these arguments present a close connection between the premises and conclusion. It seems impossible to deny the conclusion while accepting that the premises are all true. This is what makes them valid deductive arguments. To show what happens when similar arguments employ false premises, consider the following examples:

  •  If Russia wins the 2018 FIFA World Cup, then Russia is the reigning FIFA world champion [in 2019].
  • Russia won the 2018 FIFA World Cup.
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] Russia is the reigning FIFA world champion [in 2019].
  • Either snow is cold or snow is dry.
  • Snow is not cold.
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] Snow is dry.

You may recognize that these arguments have the same structure as the previous two arguments. That is, each expresses the same connection between the premises and conclusion, and they are all deductively valid. However, these latter two arguments have at least one false premise and this false premise is the reason why these otherwise valid arguments reach a false conclusion. In the case of these arguments, the structure is good, but the evidence is bad.

Deductive arguments are either valid or invalid because of the form or structure of the argument. They are sound or unsound based on the form, plus the content. You might become familiar with some of the common forms of arguments (many of them have names) and once you do, you will be able to tell when a deductive argument is invalid.

Now let’s look at some invalid deductive arguments. These are arguments that have the wrong structure or form. Perhaps you have heard a playful argument like the following:

  • Grass is green.
  • Money is green.
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] Grass is money.

Here is another example of the same argument:

  • All tigers are felines.
  • All lions are felines.
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] All tigers are lions.

These arguments are examples of the fallacy of the undistributed middle term . The name is not important, but you may recognize what is going on here. The two types of objects in each conclusion are each a member of some third type, but they are not members of each other. So, the premises are all true, but the conclusions are false. If you encounter an argument with this structure, you will know that it is invalid.

But what do you do if you cannot immediately recognize when an argument is invalid? Philosophers look for counterexamples. A counterexample is a scenario in which the premises of the argument are true while the conclusion is clearly false. This automatically shows that it is possible for the argument’s premises to be true and the conclusion false. So, a counterexample demonstrates that the argument is invalid. After all, validity requires that if the premises are all true, the conclusion cannot possibly be false. Consider the following argument, which is an example of a fallacy called affirming the consequent :

  • The streets are wet.
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] It rained outside.

Can you imagine a scenario where the premises are true, but the conclusion is false?

What if a water main broke and flooded the streets? Then the streets would be wet, but it may not have rained. It would still remain true that if it had rained, the streets would be wet, but in this scenario even if it didn’t rain, the streets would still be wet. So, the scenario where a water main breaks demonstrates this argument is invalid.

The counterexample method can also be applied to arguments where there is no clear scenario that makes the premises true and the conclusion false, but we will have to apply it a little differently. In these cases, we need to imagine another argument that has exactly the same structure as the argument in question but uses propositions that more easily produce a counterexample. Suppose I made the following argument:

  • Most people who live near the coast know how to swim.
  • Mary lives near the coast.
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] Mary knows how to swim.

I don’t know if Mary knows how to swim, but I do know that this argument does not provide sufficient reasons for us to know that Mary knows how to swim. I can demonstrate this by imagining another argument with the same structure as this argument, but the premises of this argument are clearly true while its conclusion is false:

  • Most months in the calendar year have at least 30 days.
  • February is a month in the calendar year.
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] February has at least 30 days.

To review, deductive arguments purport to lead to a conclusion that must be true if all the premises are true. But there are many ways a deductive argument can go wrong. In order to evaluate a deductive argument, we must answer the following questions:

  • Are the premises true? If the premises are not true, then even if the argument is valid, the conclusion is not guaranteed to be true.
  • Is the form of the argument a valid form? Does this argument have the exact same structure as one of the invalid arguments noted in this chapter or elsewhere in this book? [2]
  • Can you come up with a counterexample for the argument? If you can imagine a case in which the premises are true but the conclusion is false, then you have demonstrated that the argument is invalid.

Inductive Arguments

Almost all of the formal logic taught to philosophy students is deductive. This is because we have a very well-established formal system, called first-order logic, that explains deductive validity. [3] Conversely, most of the inferences we make on a daily basis are inductive or abductive. The problem is that the logic governing inductive and abductive inferences is significantly more complex and more difficult to formalize than deductive inferences.

The chief difference between deductive arguments and inductive or abductive arguments is that while the former arguments aim to guarantee the truth of the conclusion, the latter arguments only aim to ensure that the conclusion is more probable . Even the conclusions of the best inductive and abductive arguments may still turn out to be false. Consequently, we do not refer to these arguments as valid or invalid. Instead, arguments with good inductive and abductive inferences are strong ; bad ones are weak . Similarly, strong inductive or abductive arguments with true premises are called cogent .

Here’s a table to help you remember these distinctions:

Inductive inferences typically involve an appeal to past experience in order to infer some further claim directly related to that experience. In its classic formulation, inductive inferences move from observed instances to unobserved instances, reasoning that what is not yet observed will resemble what has been observed before. Generalizations, statistical inferences, and forecasts about the future are all examples of inductive inference. [4] A classic example is the following:

  • The Sun rose today.
  • The Sun rose yesterday.
  • The Sun has risen every day of human history.
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] The Sun will rise tomorrow.

You might wonder why this conclusion is merely probable. Is there anything more certain than the fact that the Sun will rise tomorrow? Well, not much. But at some point in the future, the Sun, like all other stars, will die out and its light will become so faint that there will be no sunrise on the Earth. More radically, imagine an asteroid disrupting the Earth’s rotation so that it fails to spin in coordination with our 24-hour clocks—in this case, the Sun would also fail to rise tomorrow. Finally, any inference about the future must always contain a degree of uncertainty because we cannot be certain that the future will resemble the past. So, even though the inference is very strong, it does not provide us with one-hundred percent certainty.

Consider the following, very similar inference, from the perspective of a chicken:

  • When the farmer came to the coop yesterday, he brought us food.
  • When the farmer came to the coop the day before, he brought us food.
  • Every day that I can remember, the farmer has come to the coop to bring us food.
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] When the farmer comes today, he will bring food.

From a chicken’s perspective, this inference looks equally as strong as the previous one. But this chicken will be surprised on that fateful day when the farmer comes to the coop with a hatchet to butcher her! From the chicken’s perspective, the inference may appear strong, but from the farmer’s perspective, it’s fatally flawed. The chicken’s inference shares some similarities with the following example:

  • A recent poll of over 5,000 people in the USA found that 85% of them are members of the National Rifle Association.
  • The poll found that 98% of respondents were strongly or very strongly opposed to any firearms regulation.
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] Support of gun rights is very strong in the USA.

While the conclusion of this argument may be true and certainly appears to be supported by the premises, there is a key weakness that undermines the argument. You may suspect that these polling numbers present unusually high support for guns, even in the USA. [5] So, you may suspect that something is wrong with the data. But if I tell you that this poll was taken outside of a gun show, then you should realize that data may be correct, but the sample is clearly flawed. This reveals something important about inductive inferences. Inductive inferences depend on whether the sample set of experiences from which the conclusion is inferred are representative of the whole population described in the conclusion. In the cases of the chicken and gun rights, we are provided with a sample of experiences that are not representative of the populations in the conclusion. If we want to generalize about chicken farmer behavior, we need to sample the range of behaviors a farmer engages in. One chicken may not have enough data points to make a generalization about farmer behavior. Similarly, if we want to make a claim about the gun control preferences in the USA, we need to have a sample that represents all Americans, not just those who attend gun shows. The sample of experiences in a strong inductive argument must be representative of the conclusion that is drawn from it.

To review, strong inductive inferences lead to conclusions that are made more likely by the premises, but not guaranteed to be true. They are typically used to make generalizations, infer statistical probabilities, and make forecasts about the future. To evaluate an inductive inference, you should use the following guidelines:

  • Are the premises true? Just like deductive arguments, inductive arguments require true premises to infer that the conclusion is likely to be true.
  • Are the examples cited in the premises a large enough sample? The larger the sample, the greater the likelihood it is representative of the population as a whole, and thus the more likely inductive inferences made on the basis of it will be strong.

Abductive Arguments

Abductive arguments produce conclusions that attempt to explain the phenomena found in the premises. From a commonsense point of view, we can think of abductive inferences as “reading between the lines,” “using context clues,” or “putting two and two together.” We typically use these phrases to describe an inference to an explanation that is not explicitly provided. This is why abductive arguments are often called an “inference to the best explanation.” From a scientific perspective, abduction is a critical part of hypothesis formation. Whereas the classic “scientific method” teaches that science is deductive and that the purpose of experimentation is to test a hypothesis (by confirming or disconfirming the hypothesis), it is not always clear how scientists arrive at a hypothesis. Abduction provides an explanation for how scientists generate likely hypotheses for experimental testing.

Even though Sherlock Holmes is famous for declaring, in the course of his investigations, “Deduction, my dear Watson,” he probably should have said “Abduction”! Consider the following inference:

  • The victim’s body has multiple stab wounds on its right side.
  • There was evidence of a struggle between the murderer and the victim.
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] The murderer was left-handed.

You should recognize that the conclusion is not guaranteed by the premises, and so it is not a deductive argument. Additionally, the argument is not inductive, because the conclusion isn’t simply an extension from past experiences. This argument attempts to provide the best explanation for the evidence in the premises. In a struggle, two people are most likely to be standing face to face. Also, the killer probably attacked with his or her dominant hand. It would be unnatural for a right-handed person to stab with their left hand or to stab a person facing them on that person’s right side. So, the fact that the murderer is left-handed provides the most likely explanation for the stab wounds.

You use these sorts of inferences regularly. For instance, suppose that when you come home from work, you notice that the door to your apartment is unlocked and various items from the refrigerator are out on the counter. You might infer that your roommate is home. Of course, this explanation is not guaranteed to be true. For instance, you may have forgotten to lock the door and put away your food in your haste to get out the door. Abductive inferences attempt to reason to the most likely conclusion, not one that is guaranteed to be true.

What makes an abductive inference strong or weak? Good explanations ought to take account of all the available evidence. If the conclusion leaves some evidence unexplained, then it is probably not a strong argument. Additionally, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If an explanation requires belief in some entirely novel or supernatural entity, or generally requires us to revise deeply held beliefs, then we ought to demand that the evidence for this explanation is very solid. Finally, when assessing alternative explanations, we should heed the advice of “Ockham’s Razor.” William of Ockham argued that given any two explanations, the simpler one is more likely to be true. In other words, we should be skeptical of explanations that require complex mechanics, extensive caveats and exceptions, or an extremely precise set of circumstances, in order to be true. [6]

Consider the following arguments with identical premises:

  •  There have been hundreds of stories about strange objects in the night sky.
  • There is some video evidence of these strange objects.
  • Some people have recalled encounters with extraterrestrial life forms.
  • There are no peer-reviewed scientific accounts of extraterrestrial life forms visiting earth.
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] There must be a vast conspiracy denying the existence of aliens.
  • There have been hundreds of stories about strange objects in the night sky.
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] The stories, videos, and recollections are probably the result of confusion, confabulation or exaggeration, or are outright falsifications.

Which is the more likely explanation?

To review, abductive inferences assert a conclusion that the premises do not guarantee, but which aims to provide the most likely explanation for the phenomena detailed in the premises. To assess the strength of an abductive inference, use the following guidelines:

  • Is all the relevant evidence provided? If critical pieces of information are missing, then it may not be possible to know what the right explanation is.
  • Does the conclusion explain all of the evidence provided? If the conclusion fails to account for some of the evidence, then it may not be the best explanation.
  • Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence! If the conclusion asserts something novel, surprising, or contrary to standard explanations, then the evidence should be equally compelling.
  • Use Ockham’s Razor; recognize that the simpler of two explanations is likely the correct one.

Exercise One

For each argument decide whether it is deductive, inductive or abductive. If it contains more than one type of inference, indicate which.

  • Every human being has a heart,
  • If something has a heart, then it has a liver
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] Every human being has a liver

Answer: This is a deductive argument because it is attempting to show that it’s impossible for the conclusion to be false if the premises are true.

  • Chickens from my farm have gone missing,
  • My farm is in the British countryside,
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] There are foxes killing my chickens
  • All flamingos are pink birds,
  • All flamingos are fire breathing creatures,
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] Some pink birds are fire breathing creatures
  • Every Friday so far this year the cafeteria has served fish and chips,
  • If the cafeteria’s serving fish and chips and I want fish and chips then I should bring in £4,
  • If the cafeteria isn’t serving fish and chips then I shouldn’t bring in £4,
  • I always want fish and chips,
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] I should bring in £4 next Friday
  • If Bob Dylan or Italo Calvino were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, then the choices made by the Swedish Academy would be respectable,
  • The choices made by the Swedish Academy are not respectable,
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] Neither Bob Dylan nor Italo Calvino have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
  • In all the games that the Boston Red Sox have played so far this season they have been better than their opposition,
  • If a team plays better than their opposition in every game then they win the World Series
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] The Boston Red Sox will win the league
  • There are lights on in the front room and there are noises coming from upstairs,
  • If there are noises coming from upstairs then Emma is in the house,
  • [latex]/ \therefore[/latex] Emma is in the house

Exercise Two

Give examples of arguments that have each of the following properties:

  • Valid, and has at least one false premise and a false conclusion
  • Valid, and has at least one false premise and a true conclusion
  • Invalid, and has at least one false premise and a false conclusion
  • Invalid, and has at least one false premise and a true conclusion
  • Invalid, and has true premises and a true conclusion
  • Invalid, and has true premises and a false conclusion
  • Strong, but invalid [Hint: Think about inductive arguments.]
  • This does not mean that bad arguments cannot be psychologically persuasive. In fact, people are often persuaded by bad arguments. However, a good philosophical assessment of an argument ought to rely purely on the rationality of its inferences. ↵
  • Chapters 3 and 4 of this Introduction address types of fallacies. Fallacies are just systematic mistakes made within arguments. You can learn more examples of invalid argument forms in these chapters. ↵
  • Chapter 3 introduces formal logic. ↵
  • You may notice that the inference from the previous section about Mary being able to swim could be rephrased as a kind of inductive argument. If it is true that most people who live near the coast can swim and Mary lives near the coast, then it follows that Mary probably can swim. This demonstrates an important difference between deductive and inductive arguments. ↵
  • See, for instance, recent Gallup polling: 2019. “Guns.” http://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx. ↵
  • While Ockham’s Razor is a good rule of thumb in evaluating explanations, there is considerable debate among philosophers of science about whether simplicity it is a feature of good scientific explanations or not. ↵

A psychological act that links premises to a conclusion in an argument.

One proposition P logically implies another Q if whenever P is true, Q is also true. Arguments in which the premises logically imply the conclusion are known as valid arguments.

An argument that aims to be valid.

An argument that moves from observed instances of a certain phenomenon to unobserved instances of the same phenomenon.

An argument that attempts to provide the best explanation possible of certain other phenomena as its conclusion. Also known as inference to the best explanation .

An argument in which it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false.

A valid argument with actually true premises . Thus, if an argument is sound, its conclusion must be true.

A counterexample is a scenario in which the premises of the argument are true while the conclusion is false. If an argument has a counterexample, it is not valid.

An inductive or abductive argument in which the premises make the conclusion likely to be true.

An inductive or abductive argument in which the premises fail to make the conclusion likely to be true.

A strong inductive or abductive argument with true premises. If an argument is cogent, then its conclusion is likely to be true.

Evaluating Arguments Copyright © 2020 by Nathan Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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How to Win Every Argument

Win Argument Conversation Mutual Respect Understanding

I n his 1936 work How to Win Friends and Influence People , now one of the bestselling books of all time, Dale Carnegie wrote: “I have come to the conclusion that there is only one way under high heaven to get the best of an argument — and that is to avoid it. Avoid it as you would avoid rattlesnakes and earthquakes.” This aversion to arguments is common, but it depends on a mistaken view of arguments that causes profound problems for our personal and social lives — and in many ways misses the point of arguing in the first place.

Carnegie would be right if arguments were fights, which is how we often think of them. Like physical fights, verbal fights can leave both sides bloodied . Even when you win, you end up no better off. Your prospects would be almost as dismal if arguments were even just competitions — like, say, tennis tournaments. Pairs of opponents hit the ball back and forth until one victor emerges from all who entered. Everybody else loses. This kind of thinking is why so many people try to avoid arguments, especially about politics and religion.

These views of arguments also undermine reason. If you see a conversation as a fight or competition, you can win by cheating as long as you don’t get caught. You will be happy to convince people with bad arguments . You don’t mind interrupting them. You can call their views crazy, stupid, silly or ridiculous, or you can joke about how ignorant they are, how short they are or how small their hands are. None of these tricks will help you understand them, their positions or the issues that divide you, but they can help you win — in one way.

There is a better way to win arguments . Imagine that you favor increasing the minimum wage in our state, and I do not. If you yell, “Yes,” and I yell, “No,” then you see me as selfish, and I see you as thoughtless. Neither of us learns anything, so we neither understand nor respect each other, and we have no basis for compromise or cooperation. In contrast, suppose you give a reasonable argument: that full-time workers should not have to live in poverty. Then I counter with another reasonable argument: that a higher minimum wage will force businesses to employ less people for less time. Now we can understand each other’s positions and recognize our shared values, since we both care about needy workers.

What if, in the end, you convince me that we should increase the minimum wage because there are ways to do so without creating unemployment or underemployment? Who won? You ended up in exactly the position where you started, so you did not “win” anything, except perhaps some minor fleeting joy at beating me. On the other side, I gained a lot: more accurate beliefs, stronger evidence and deeper understanding of the issues, of you and of myself. If what I wanted was truth, reason and understanding, then I got what I wanted. In that way, I won. Instead of resenting you for beating me, I should thank you for helping me. That positive reaction undermines the common view of arguments as fights or competitions, while enhancing our personal relationships.

Of course, many discussions are not so successful. We cannot learn from our interlocutors if we do not listen to them patiently or do not trust them to express their real values. Constructive conversation becomes impossible —or at least much more difficult—if neither side gives any arguments or reasons for their positions. The mistaken tendency to avoid arguments, as Carnegie did, results from misunderstanding the point of argument, which is to appreciate each other and work together. The growing political polarization in the United States and around the world can, to this extent, be traced to a failure to give, expect and appreciate arguments.

Admittedly, many arguments are bad. They pretend to give reasons without really presenting anything worthy of the name. When someone argues simply, “You must be wrong because you are stupid (or liberal or conservative),” they do not really give any reason for their conclusion. Still, we need to be careful not to accuse opponents of such fallacies too quickly. Nobody benefits if I misrepresent your position and then attack it viciously, or if I interrupt you so that you never finish your thought. We need to learn how to spell out arguments charitably and thoroughly step-by-step from premises to conclusion. Then we need to learn how to evaluate them properly — how to tell good arguments from bad. A large part of evaluation is calling out bad arguments, but we also need to admit good arguments by opponents and to apply the same critical standards to ourselves. ( Why do I believe my premises? Is my argument valid or strong? Does my argument beg the question? What is the strongest objection to my view? ) And when someone else tells you how bad your arguments were, it doesn’t help to get defensive. Humility requires you to recognize weaknesses in your own arguments and sometimes also to accept reasons on the opposite side. You still might hold on to your convictions, but you will have learned a great deal about the issues, about your opponents and about yourself.

None of this will be easy, but you can start even if others remain recalcitrant. Next time you state your position, formulate an argument for what you claim and honestly ask yourself whether your argument is any good. Next time you talk with someone who takes a stand, ask them to give you a reason for their view. Spell out their argument fully and charitably. Assess its strength impartially. Raise objections and listen carefully to their replies. This method will require effort, but practice will make you better at it.

These tools can help you win every argument—not in the unhelpful sense of beating your opponents but in the better sense of learning about the issues that divide people, learning why they disagree with us and learning to talk and work together with them. If we readjust our view of arguments—from a verbal fight or tennis game to a reasoned exchange through which we all gain mutual respect and understanding—then we change the very nature of what it means to “win” an argument.

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  • 9 Ways to Construct a Compelling Argument

a bad argument

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But especially in the circumstances that we’re deeply convinced of the rightness of our points, putting them across in a compelling way that will change other people’s mind is a challenge. If you feel that your opinion is obviously right, it’s hard work even to understand why other people might disagree. Some people reach this point and don’t bother to try, instead concluding that those who disagree with them must be stupid, misled or just plain immoral. And it’s almost impossible to construct an argument that will persuade someone if you’re starting from the perspective that they’re either dim or evil. In the opposite set of circumstances – when you only weakly believe your perspective to be right – it can also be tricky to construct a good argument. In the absence of conviction, arguments tend to lack coherence or force. In this article, we take a look at how you can put together an argument, whether for an essay, debate speech or social media post, that is forceful, cogent and – if you’re lucky – might just change someone’s mind.

1. Keep it simple

a bad argument

Almost all good essays focus on a single powerful idea, drawing in every point made back to that same idea so that even someone skim-reading will soon pick up the author’s thesis. But when you care passionately about something, it’s easy to let this go. If you can see twenty different reasons why you’re right, it’s tempting to put all of them into your argument, because it feels as if the sheer weight of twenty reasons will be much more persuasive than just focusing on one or two; after all, someone may be able rebut a couple of reasons, but can they rebut all twenty? Yet from the outside, an argument with endless different reasons is much less persuasive than one with focus and precision on a small number of reasons. The debate in the UK about whether or not to stay in the EU was a great example of this. The Remain campaign had dozens of different reasons. Car manufacturing! Overfishing! Cleaner beaches! Key workers for the NHS! Medical research links! Economic opportunities! The difficulty of overcoming trade barriers! The Northern Irish border! Meanwhile, the Leave campaign boiled their argument down to just one: membership of the EU means relinquishing control. Leaving it means taking back control. And despite most expectations and the advice of most experts, the simple, straightforward message won. Voters struggled to remember the many different messages put out by the Remain campaign, as compelling as each of those reasons might have been; but they remembered the message about taking back control.

2. Be fair on your opponent

a bad argument

One of the most commonly used rhetorical fallacies is the Strawman Fallacy. This involves constructing a version of your opponent’s argument that is much weaker than the arguments they might use themselves, in order than you can defeat it more easily. For instance, in the area of crime and punishment, you might be arguing in favour of harsher prison sentences, while your opponent argues in favour of early release where possible. A Strawman would be to say that your opponent is weak on crime, wanting violent criminals to be let out on to the streets without adequate punishment or deterrence, to commit the same crimes again. In reality, your opponent’s idea might exclude violent criminals, and focus on community-based restorative justice that could lead to lower rates of recidivism. To anyone who knows the topic well, if your argument includes a Strawman, then you will immediately have lost credibility by demonstrating that either you don’t really understand the opposing point of view, or that you simply don’t care about rebutting it properly. Neither is persuasive. Instead, you should be fair to your opponent and represent their argument honestly, and your readers will take you seriously as a result

3. Avoid other common fallacies

a bad argument

It’s worth taking the time to read about logical fallacies and making sure that you’re not making them, as argument that rest of fallacious foundations can be more easily demolished. (This may not apply on social media, but it does in formal debating and in writing essays). Some fallacies are straightforward to understand, such as the appeal to popularity (roughly “everyone agrees with me, so I must be right!”), but others are a little trickier. Take “begging the question”, which is often misunderstood. It gets used to mean “raises the question” (e.g. “this politician has defended terrorists, which raises the question – can we trust her?”), but the fallacy it refers to is a bit more complicated. It’s when an argument rests on the assumption that its conclusions are true. For example, someone might argue that fizzy drinks shouldn’t be banned in schools, on the grounds that they’re not bad for students’ health. How can we know that they’re not bad for students’ health? Why, if they were, they would be banned in schools! When put in a condensed form like this example, the flaw in this approach is obvious, but you can imagine how you might fall for it over the course of a whole essay – for instance, paragraphs arguing that teachers would have objected to hyperactive students, parents would have complained, and we can see that none of this has happened because they haven’t yet been banned. With more verbosity, a bad argument can be hidden, so check that you’re not falling prey to it in your own writing.

4. Make your assumptions clear

a bad argument

Every argument rests on assumptions. Some of these assumptions are so obvious that you’re not going to be aware that you’re making them – for instance, you might make an argument about different economic systems that rests on the assumption that reducing global poverty is a good thing. While very few people would disagree with you on that, in general, if your assumption can be proven false, then the entire basis of your argument is undermined. A more controversial example might be an argument that rests on the assumption that everyone can trust the police force – for instance, if you’re arguing for tougher enforcement of minor offences in order to prevent them from mounting into major ones. But in countries where the police are frequently bribed, or where policing has obvious biases, such enforcement could be counterproductive. If you’re aware of such assumptions underpinning your argument, tackle them head on by making them clear and explaining why they are valid; so you could argue that your law enforcement proposal is valid in the particular circumstances that you’re suggesting because the police force there can be relied on, even if it wouldn’t work everywhere.

5. Rest your argument on solid foundations

a bad argument

If you think that you’re right in your argument, you should also be able to assemble a good amount of evidence that you’re right. That means putting the effort in and finding something that genuinely backs up what you’re saying; don’t fall back on dubious statistics or fake news . Doing the research to ensure that your evidence is solid can be time-consuming, but it’s worthwhile, as then you’ve removed another basis on which your argument could be challenged. What happens if you can’t find any evidence for your argument? The first thing to consider is whether you might be wrong! If you find lots of evidence against your position, and minimal evidence for it, it would be logical to change your mind. But if you’re struggling to find evidence either way, it may simply be that the area is under-researched. Prove what you can, including your assumptions, and work from there.

6. Use evidence your readers will believe

a bad argument

So far we’ve focused on how to construct an argument that is solid and hard to challenge; from this point onward, we focus on what it takes to make an argument persuasive. One thing you can do is to choose your evidence with your audience in mind. For instance, if you’re writing about current affairs, a left-wing audience will find an article from the Guardian to be more persuasive (as they’re more likely to trust its reporting), while a right-wing audience might be more swayed by the Telegraph. This principle doesn’t just hold in terms of politics. It can also be useful in terms of sides in an academic debate, for instance. You can similarly bear in mind the demographics of your likely audience – it may be that an older audience is more skeptical of footnotes that consist solely of web addresses. And it isn’t just about statistics and references. The focus of your evidence as a whole can take your probable audience into account; for example, if you were arguing that a particular drug should be banned on health grounds and your main audience was teenagers, you might want to focus more on the immediate health risks, rather than ones that might only appear years or decades later.

7. Avoid platitudes and generalisations, and be specific

a bad argument

A platitude is a phrase used to the point of meaninglessness – and it may not have had that much meaning to begin with. If you find yourself writing something like “because family life is all-important” to support one of your claims, you’ve slipped into using platitudes. Platitudes are likely to annoy your readers without helping to persuade them. Because they’re meaningless and uncontroversial statements, using them doesn’t tell your reader anything new. If you say that working hours need to be restricted because family ought to come first, you haven’t really given your reader any new information. Instead, bring the importance of family to life for your reader, and then explain just how long hours are interrupting it. Similarly, being specific can demonstrate the grasp you have on your subject, and can bring it to life for your reader. Imagine that you were arguing in favour of nationalising the railways, and one of your points was that the service now was of low quality. Saying “many commuter trains are frequently delayed” is much less impactful than if you have the full facts to hand, e.g. “in Letchworth Garden City, one key commuter hub, half of all peak-time trains to London were delayed by ten minutes or more.”

8. Understand the opposing point of view

a bad argument

As we noted in the introduction, you can’t construct a compelling argument unless you understand why someone might think you were wrong, and you can come up with reasons other than them being mistaken or stupid. After all, we almost all target them same end goals, whether that’s wanting to increase our understanding of the world in academia, or increase people’s opportunities to flourish and seek happiness in politics. Yet we come to divergent conclusions. In his book The Righteous Mind , Jonathan Haidt explores the different perspectives of people who are politically right or left-wing. He summarises the different ideals people might value, namely justice, equality, authority, sanctity and loyalty, and concludes that while most people see that these things have some value, different political persuasions value them to different degrees. For instance, someone who opposes equal marriage might argue that they don’t oppose equality – but they do feel that on balance, sanctity is more important. An argument that focuses solely on equality won’t sway them, but an argument that addresses sanctity might.

9. Make it easy for your opponent to change their mind

a bad argument

It’s tricky to think of the last time you changed your mind about something really important. Perhaps to preserve our pride, we frequently forget that we ever believed something different. This survey of British voters’ attitudes to the Iraq war demonstrates the point beautifully. 54% of people supporting invading Iraq in 2003; but twelve years on, with the war a demonstrable failure, only 37% were still willing to admit that they had supported it at the time. The effect in the USA was even more dramatic. It would be tempting for anyone who genuinely did oppose the war at the time to be quite smug towards anyone who changed their mind, especially those who won’t admit it. But if changing your mind comes with additional consequences (e.g. the implication that you were daft ever to have believed something, even if you’ve since come to a different conclusion), then the incentive to do so is reduced. Your argument needs to avoid vilifying people who have only recently come around to your point of view; instead, to be truly persuasive, you should welcome them.

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a bad argument

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The Rules of Logic Part 2: Good vs. Bad Arguments

The core of any debate is the arguments being used. To win a debate, you must show that your arguments are good, and your opponents arguments are bad. It sounds simple, but most people struggle to distinguish good and bad arguments. More often than not, these terms are used subjectively, resulting in widespread disagreement about whether an argument is good or bad. In reality, these terms are completely objective, and it is possible to know and demonstrate for sure whether an argument is good or bad.

There are three criteria for an argument to be good (note: I am dealing with deductive arguments here).

  • It contains only true premises.
  • It does not contain any logical fallacies.
  • The conclusion follows necessarily from the premises (technically, if #3 is violated, it’s a non-sequitur fallacy , so its redundant with #2, but it’s such an important point that I included it as its own criterion).

Any argument which does not meet all three criteria is a bad argument. If an argument is good, then you MUST accept its conclusion . If an argument is bad, then you MUST reject the argument . This is an important distinction. If the argument is good, then the conclusion must be true, but if the argument is bad, the conclusion may or may not true, all that you can conclude is that the argument itself does not work. For example:

  •  All men are mortals
  • Socrates is a man
  • Therefore, Socrates is a mortal.

This is a good argument. All the premises are true, there are no logical fallacies, and the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. Socrates MUST be a mortal, there are no other possibilities. This is not an opinion, it’s a logical certainty. The following argument is, however, bad:

  • All men are mortals
  • Socrates is a mortal
  • Therefore, Socrates is a man.

This argument doesn’t work, because the conclusion does not follow necessarily from the premises (in technical terms this argument commits a fallacy known as affirming the consequent ). The fact that Socrates is a mortal does not automatically mean that he is a man. Notice, however, that even though the argument does not work, the conclusion is actually true, we just can’t use this argument to get to that conclusion. That isn’t always the case, however. Consider:

  • Trogdor (my pet gecko) is a mortal
  • Therefore, Trogdor is a man.

Now the problem with the argument is even more obvious because the conclusion is not true. This brings me to the restatement of a very important point. If someone demonstrates that one of your arguments is bad, you MUST reject the argument. From this example, it should be obvious that a bad argument tells you nothing about the conclusion, and continuing to use an argument that you know is bad is ridiculously foolish.

There is one and only exception to the rule that you reject a bad argument, not its conclusion. This occurs when the argument is absolutely essential to your opponents position. Under that condition, demonstrating that the argument is bad also demonstrates that the conclusion is wrong, but that is a fairly rare occurrence.

Note: what I have just described applies only to deductive arguments. These are the most common and most powerful types of arguments because they show what absolutely must be true. Other types of arguments, like inductive arguments , show what is probably true, not what must be true. So for an inductive argument to be good, it must contain only true premises, have no logical fallacies, and the conclusion must be the most likely outcome of the premises. So for inductive arguments, you accept the conclusion as the most likely answer, not as the definite answer. However, it is still logically invalid to reject that conclusion unless you can demonstrate that a premise is false, a fallacy has been committed, or another answer is more likely.

Other posts on the rules of logic:

  • The Rules of Logic Part 1: Why Logic Always Works
  • The Rules of Logic Part 3: Logical Fallacies
  • The Rules of Logic Part 4: The Laws of Noncontradiction and Transitive Properties
  • The Rules of Logic Part 5: Occam’s Razor and the Burden of Proof
  • The Rules of Logic Part 6: Appealing to Authority vs. Deferring to Experts
  • The Rules of Logic Part 7: Using Consistent Reasoning to Compare Apples and Oranges

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1 response to the rules of logic part 2: good vs. bad arguments.

Thank you for helping me to waste time and procrastinate. I should be studying for the bar, but your blog is way more interesting. Thanks for posting these great discussions!

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A Field Guide to Bad Faith Arguments

A Field Guide to Bad Faith Arguments

Bad faith arguments are common in politics. And while they’ve always been part of political culture, they’re much more rampant on social media. It’s easy to fall prey to bad faith arguments and waste time engaging someone on points that obscure rather than shed light on how we’re all affected by policy and politics.

So with that in mind, here’s a field guide for spotting and responding to bad faith arguments and staying focused on the real-world issues that matter.

What’s a bad faith argument?

The hallmark of a bad-faith argument is that it disguises the core point of a debate rather than addressing issues, beliefs, and values head-on.

Bad faith arguments aren’t “real” positions; they’re proxy positions people take for rhetorical purposes. In some cases, a bad faith position can be intentional. For instance, Sen. Mitch McConnell made up a “Biden rule” to justify stealing a Supreme Court seat. Instead of arguing about the merits of refusing to hold a vote on President Barack Obama’s justice nominee Merrick Garland, McConnell made a proxy argument about Democrats being hypocrites for complaining about his power grab. And indeed, many Republicans and independents came to believe that the “Biden rule” was real and that McConnell was simply playing hardball politics just like the Democrats.

a bad argument

But most bad faith arguments aren’t from wily, professional politicians like McConnell. They simply come from a place of not wanting to confront the actual arguments someone else is making.

For instance, climate policy advocates point to scientific evidence that burning fossil fuels and increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is causing seas to rise, more wildfires, and disruptions to rainfall patterns on which we rely. They argue these risks are severe enough to warrant dramatically reducing fossil fuel use and switching to clean energy.

But anti-climate-action groups will often say the science is not certain enough to justify action. Climate advocates will respond by citing more and more scientific evidence demonstrating climate risks. But there’s a problem: The advocates are responding to a bad faith argument because anti-climate action groups never say what level of scientific certainty would be necessary to justify climate policy.

Indeed, if you ask them to name the level of certainty they need or the type of evidence that would win them over, they’ll never do it. Although their argument is premised on the idea that more science could justify climate action, they can’t actually define a world where that’s true. Instead, they tend to oppose climate policy for ideological reasons—including an ideological commitment to exploiting fossil fuels—but they choose to fight policy in bad faith on scientific grounds.

Similarly, many anti-climate action groups have evolved from outright climate denial to acknowledging that climate change is real and a problem but say they’re against “climate alarmism” and don’t believe in “catastrophic global warming.” But what do these terms mean? Again, they never say. If I think business as usual means the Earth is going to warm 4 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, am I an alarmist? How about 10 degrees?

Don’t waste time responding to these arguments on their own merits — they have none.

Their actual operating definition is that “catastrophic global warming” is the precise amount needed to justify policy action, and, by definition, we will always fall short of it. An alarmist, meanwhile, is anyone who says we need to act on climate change.

There’s an important distinction between types of bad faith arguments worth making here: Not all anti-climate action advocates are making these arguments intentionally. They’re not consciously thinking, “I’m going to pretend to say one thing but really mean another.” Indeed, many sincerely believe that climate alarmism is terrible and must be combatted even though they have not bothered to form a coherent definition of what the term means.

In this case, these bad faith arguments are often best described as a form of “agnotology,” a term historian Robert Proctor has popularized to describe the cultivation of ignorance. Proctor studied how tobacco companies spread doubt about the link between smoking and cancer. Rather than directly criticizing the science, they spread messages about uncertainty and doubt to cloud policymakers’ judgment. They say maybe something else was causing the cancer… or maybe the scientific links were there but weren’t, uh, direct enough… or maybe people who are more likely to get cancer are actually more likely to smoke.

Agnotology—and the popularization of political ignorance—cuts across a variety of issues, not just scientific ones. Indeed, I’ve come to see it as the most common form of bad faith argument in political debates.

For instance, why are NFL players taking a knee? To protest police violence. They’ve been absolutely clear about this for years. But here’s Fox News telling its millions of viewers that no one knows why they’re protesting.

. @TomiLahren on NFL anthem protests: “I would like to ask these players: What exactly are you kneeling for?” @foxandfriends pic.twitter.com/SZAiQVcE6l — Fox News (@FoxNews) October 18, 2017

With that in mind, here are some other types of bad faith arguments we run into every day online and in public policy debates. Don’t waste time responding to these arguments on their own merits — they have none. They exist to distract from core policy issues and the actual effect they have on our lives, our rights, and our planet.

The cartoon strawmanner

a bad argument

The cartoon strawmanner has no need to ask you what you believe; he already knows. How does he know? Because he already has a number of counterarguments to your position. Not your actual position, of course, but the one that his favorite propaganda outlets have told him you have.

For instance, many scholars have pointed out that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm , which is optimized to push people to more and more intensive information about consumer products, has the unintended effect of pushing a minority of conservative viewers further and further down the rabbit hole to white nationalism. This is a problem because it seems to be playing a key role in helping a small but committed number of young white men to become violent reactionaries .

But conservative YouTubers and their defenders will often make two arguments in response to this:

  • Not everyone who watches these videos becomes a Nazi. (No one is claiming that they are.)
  • You can’t just call everyone a Nazi. (No one is doing this.)

These bad-faith arguments mean to distract from the core point, which is that bad actors are abusing YouTube’s platform to promote racist ideologies and encourage political violence.

We can have a debate about how these new platforms and the people who use them respond. Are companies like YouTube more like utilities or television stations in what they owe to their audiences? If there’s no such thing as a politically neutral algorithm, how should companies consider the political consequences of altering recommendation algorithms? What, if any, role should the government play in regulating social media platforms? Do conservatives whose videos get remixed by people even further to their right have a responsibility to take them down ? Is debating a fascist ever useful , or does it merely mainstream their ideas?

But bad faith responses avoid these points entirely by cartoon strawmanning the people bringing them up instead. The best way to respond to these strawman arguments is simply to inform someone that no one is making that argument and point them to a book or long report to read (they will never read it).

Eventually, the cartoon strawmanner evolves, like a shitty, annoying Pokémon, to become the lie detector.

The lie detector

The lie detector knows what you really mean. After all, they already know what your position is. But when you say your actual beliefs are something else entirely, they have a choice — accept that they have not accounted for the full spectrum of human belief about a topic or accuse you of lying.

The lie detector knows The Truth. Do not challenge the lie detector on any of these points: They know more about your beliefs, your life, and your work history than you ever will. You should ask the lie detector what you’re having for dinner this evening.

The freeze peach advocate

a bad argument

The “freeze peach” advocate is a fake free speech advocate. They confuse disagreement with silencing, delegitimization, and censorship. While they believe in “free speech,” it turns out what that really means in practice is promoting their speech and the speech of people they agree with.

Jordan Peterson, who came to fame for picking an imaginary free speech fight over transgender pronouns in Canada, for instance, recently sued two professors for criticizing him and his views and even sued another university to boot.

Additionally, climate deniers might say they’re shut out of the debate because scientists won’t sit around discussing their ideas with them for hours and hours. But flat-Earthers are shut out of debates with geologists, too. The truth is that you don’t have to meet someone in an online or IRL structured debate to grapple with their arguments. Indeed, scientists have cataloged and numbered bad climate denial arguments for easy reference.

Further, free speech and platforming arguments are often used as proxies for actual arguments. “These cowards won’t debate me!” is an easier sell than “Let me tell you about why I think 200 years of science is wrong even though I can’t get my ideas published in a scientific journal.”

Freeze peach advocates think that they and their peers deserve a platform, but they never recognize that platform space is actually limited and contested. In fighting for airtime or seats at congressional hearings, they shut out other voices just as their voices can get shut out, too. The truth is that no one is entitled to a stage, a TV spot, or a book deal.

Or as Alex Pareene hilariously said in response to the New York Times covering another stop on the freeze peach college campus moral panic tour: “ If You Truly Care About Speech, You Will Invite Me to Your Office to Personally Call You a Dipshit .”

Even when supposed free speech and civil debate advocates go on to run their own platforms, they rarely talk to people to their left. Instead, free speech and fears of suppression are used as marketing tactics, not core moral values. That’s why you never hear them advocate for lefty protestors who are unjustly jailed, students who face expulsion penalties for their free speech, or government scientists who face routine censorship of their research.

a bad argument

(As an aside, there are plenty of civil libertarian groups that do a ton of great work on actual free speech and academic freedom issues . When fake free speech advocates don’t show up to these fights, they show that they’re in it for their speech, not anyone else’s.)

The freeze peach advocate should be reminded that no one is entitled to a platform and no one is actually preventing them from speaking. More importantly, their attention should be refocused to the actual policy debates at hand.

The purity tester

The purity tester would like you to know that Al Gore uses airplanes ( so troubling for an environmentalist! ) and that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez wore a nice outfit for a photo shoot once ( what kind of socialism is that?! ). The purity tester isn’t here to tell you a policy agenda is wrong; they’re here to tell you those are bad spokespeople for their cause.

If Gore swore off flying, would the Koch brothers suddenly come to Jesus on climate policy? Nope. And if Ocasio Cortez pledged to only wear thrift store chic on the House floor, would people like Charlie Kirk finally accept the need for universal health care? No way.

These are goofy bad faith arguments that attempt to take the focus off policy and put it on advocates instead. They’re a form of concern trolling that should be dismissed out of hand, although asking the purity tester to name an advocate whose arguments they’d be willing to listen to can be amusing. It’s rare that they’ve ever considered the idea of a good advocate before, which demonstrates that it’s just agnotology at work.

The logic nerd

The logic nerd has a very clear argument. The argument has multiple parts, each of which is impeccable and internally consistent. The logic nerd has his facts straight, too, and has a number of counterarguments ready to deploy should you try to poke holes. In fact, the logic nerd has three rhetorical questions ready to go to expose your fallacious reasoning and will ask them, in turn, regardless of what you say or do.

I have some love for the logic nerd. If I had less empathy and less of a sense of just how much damage shitty public policy does to people, I too could have grown up to be a logic nerd, dear reader.

But I came to realize that politics isn’t a dispute over which facts are true or whether your logic is valid. It’s a dispute over which facts are the most relevant to a debate and what logic we should follow when setting and enforcing laws.

Responding to the logic nerd is a joy because if you fail to play along with their game, they will ad hominem the shit out of you.

For instance, a logic nerd would love to debate you about the pay gap: Are women really paid less than men? If so, by how much, and in which industries? But what about this industry where some women are paid more? Should we not examine the data? Okay, look at my data! Do you deny my data, sir? It is the best and only data! Sir, by your own logic…

What the logic nerd fails to realize is that equal pay laws give people the right to sue individual companies and institutions for pay discrimination. You can make all the societal-level arguments about the pay gap you want, but the actual law (and lawsuits) exist alongside that discussion, which is much closer to the reality that people live with every day when fighting discrimination.

Responding to the logic nerd is a joy because if you fail to play along with their game, they will ad hominem the shit out of you. Failure to answer rhetorical questions, even by pointing out why the questions are not relevant, will result in persistent sea-lioning .

There’s only one way to truly defeat the logic nerd. You must introduce him to the Fallacy Man . (Read the whole thing, please.)

The tone police and persuasion pundits

a bad argument

When people have truly bad positions to defend, they often attempt to make a meta-argument about tone and persuasive power instead. This is endemic in Washington.

For instance, a Daily Caller editor went to a progressive rally and was shocked — shocked — to find that people there were angry about politics. Well, yeah, a lot of people who show up to political events are upset about something and want to change and fix it. But instead of responding to what they were upset about (sinking wages and crappy health care), the editor focused on their tone.

Not surprisingly, the same publication would never be shocked at right-wing anger, such as Tea Party rallies condemning Obama. That’s because their anger is always justified, but yours never is.

Similarly, conservatives will routinely criticize NFL players for how they’re protesting police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem . But they’ll never suggest an alternative means of protesting. No tone is the only tone they want to hear.

Meanwhile, many #NeverTrump conservatives are often trapped in persuasion punditry when they argue with liberals. “Medicare for all? Don’t you know Midwesterners are skeptical of big government? That’s not gonna play well in Trump country,” they say.

When people are really making an argument about persuading someone, they actually try to persuade them. If not, it’s just more bad faith.

Well, that’s certainly an easier argument to make than saying millions of people should suffer from a lack of health care and that you’re fundamentally okay with that. But in removing themselves one layer from actual policy, pundits can appear savvy without actually committing themselves to a real position, even as they justify the status quo.

Bret Stephens, a conservative New York Times writer, wrote a column about how climate advocates should be more persuasive to him and other conservatives by not being so strident and certain about climate change being bad. But when another writer asked him which climate policies he might ever support, he couldn’t say . When people are really making an argument about persuading someone, they actually try to persuade them. If not, it’s just more bad faith.

The solution to tone policing and bad punditry is just focusing on the issues. If someone wants to keep distracting from that with what’s fundamentally a political tactics discussion, ask them to help get your preferred policy passed. If they say no, congrats: You’ve found their real position.

The both siderist

The both siderist is very reasonable. So reasonable, in fact, that people who care about politics actually look very unreasonable by comparison: Did you hear about the bad thing Republicans did? Well, Democrats did a bad thing too once, and it’s all quite unfortunate that everyone can’t be as reasonable as me.

Has the both siderist ever taken any actions to try to improve the political system? Well, it’s funny that you ask; no, they haven’t. What they have done is ask everyone, very nicely, to be civil and take it easy and not get too political with all that politics.

But in insisting on being the most reasonable person in the room, the both siderist has failed to read the room. Their postured reasonableness obscures the political realities we’re dealing with: rampant Republican gerrymandering, voter suppression, human rights abuses, and anti-democratic power grabs from people like McConnell and Trump.

a bad argument

The both siderist has a lot of political opinions, but their most important opinion is that both sides are bad — even if one side is doing objectively terrible shit to millions of people. It’s because the both siderist desperately wants to be off the hook for having to actually do anything to improve our political system. (The both siderist, coincidentally, also has a book to sell and needs to get on as many media outlets as possible to sell it. But they can’t afford to alienate anyone by being — gasp — partisan.)

As the Republican Party has gone off the rails in the Obama era, this has led to a deeper and deeper stretch of both siderism logic. For instance, Amy Chua , writing in The Atlantic about the decline of democracy, equates Trump threatening to revoke people’s citizenship and strip them of their voting rights with college students asking a university to stop venerating a slave-owning Founding Father. But one of these fundamentally alters the realities of American political life for decades; the other is a campus debate over a statue.

The committed both siderist must never admit that one party or one side in a debate is worse than the other. If they did, they might have to do something about it.

Debating in good faith

It’s worth remembering that the people who respond to you online are usually less than 1 percent of 1 percent, and the reason they’re writing is that they virulently disagree. In the broader public sphere, it would be good to see fact-checkers, pundits, magazine editors, and TV hosts actually try to pin people down on real positions.

As Matt Bruenig has noted , political debates often function in two different universes. There’s a “take universe” with columns, opinion pieces, and think tank reports. Some of them are hot takes. Others are lukewarm, and if you dig into them, they’re just the same circle of people citing themselves as the source of The Truth on a given topic. Then there’s the real universe of actual data, actual outcomes for people and actual structures of power in society. In Bruenig’s case, he introduces hard data about public ownership of industries and worker control over businesses into fuzzy ideologically rigid “take universe” debates about capital, labor, and socialism.

I’ve loved working with scientists because reality is real and scientists are responsive to it. The political class should be too. We’re drifting further from that precisely because conservative authoritarians attack sources of information that help us see reality: an independent press, science and academia, and public employees who work for all of us. They cultivate ignorance as surely as the tobacco companies did. It’s the only way they can hold onto power.

They exploit the proliferation of online media to make the world too hard to understand. They make agnotology a certainty to obscure obvious realities like the fact that countries with universal health care have better health outcomes and the obvious ethical argument that no one has to die from lack of medical care in the richest country on Earth.

Some of the best writing on arguments deals with the overwhelming amount of bullshit and uninformative information available in the modern media system. Neil Postman, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death , argued in his later books that we must become “loving resistance fighters” who focus on our lived reality and core humanist values rather than media representations that can never truly stand in for our world.

Even though I work in communications and media, I’ve tried to live up to that. I go to organizing meetings. I canvass and knock on doors. I show up for protests and direct actions. I’m a member of two unions. This stuff matters; real people matter. The real consequences of policy are life and death for millions of us.

So we should focus on that relentlessly and never get distracted by bullshit, bad faith arguments.

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16 Common Logical Fallacies and How to Spot Them

Karla Hesterberg

Published: July 26, 2022

Logical fallacies — those logical gaps that invalidate arguments — aren't always easy to spot.

logical fallacies trying to fool a brain that's too smart to fall for it

While some come in the form of loud, glaring inconsistencies, others can easily fly under the radar, sneaking into everyday meetings and conversations undetected.

Our guide on logical fallacies will help you build better arguments and identify logical missteps.

  • What a logical fallacy is
  • Formal vs. informal fallacies
  • Straw man fallacy
  • Correlation/causation fallacy
  • Ad hominem fallacy

You can also listen to the top 10 below.

What is a logical fallacy?

Logical fallacies are deceptive or false arguments that may seem stronger than they actually are due to psychological persuasion, but are proven wrong with reasoning and further examination.

These mistakes in reasoning typically consist of an argument and a premise that does not support the conclusion. There are two types of fallacies: formal and informal.

  • Formal : Formal fallacies are arguments that have invalid structure, form, or context errors.
  • Informal : Informal fallacies are arguments that have irrelevant or incorrect premises.

Having an understanding of basic logical fallacies can help you more confidently parse the arguments and claims you participate in and witness on a daily basis — separating fact from sharply dressed fiction.

15 Common Logical Fallacies

1. the straw man fallacy.

This fallacy occurs when your opponent over-simplifies or misrepresents your argument (i.e., setting up a "straw man") to make it easier to attack or refute. Instead of fully addressing your actual argument, speakers relying on this fallacy present a superficially similar — but ultimately not equal — version of your real stance, helping them create the illusion of easily defeating you.

John: I think we should hire someone to redesign our website.

Lola: You're saying we should throw our money away on external resources instead of building up our in-house design team? That's going to hurt our company in the long run.

2. The Bandwagon Fallacy

Just because a significant population of people believe a proposition is true, doesn't automatically make it true. Popularity alone is not enough to validate an argument, though it's often used as a standalone justification of validity. Arguments in this style don't take into account whether or not the population validating the argument is actually qualified to do so, or if contrary evidence exists.

While most of us expect to see bandwagon arguments in advertising (e.g., "three out of four people think X brand toothpaste cleans teeth best"), this fallacy can easily sneak its way into everyday meetings and conversations.

The majority of people believe advertisers should spend more money on billboards, so billboards are objectively the best form of advertisement.

a bad argument

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3. the appeal to authority fallacy.

While appeals to authority are by no means always fallacious, they can quickly become dangerous when you rely too heavily on the opinion of a single person — especially if that person is attempting to validate something outside of their expertise.

Getting an authority figure to back your proposition can be a powerful addition to an existing argument, but it can't be the pillar your entire argument rests on. Just because someone in a position of power believes something to be true, doesn't make it true.

Despite the fact that our Q4 numbers are much lower than usual, we should push forward using the same strategy because our CEO Barbara says this is the best approach.

4. The False Dilemma Fallacy

This common fallacy misleads by presenting complex issues in terms of two inherently opposed sides. Instead of acknowledging that most (if not all) issues can be thought of on a spectrum of possibilities and stances, the false dilemma fallacy asserts that there are only two mutually exclusive outcomes.

This fallacy is particularly problematic because it can lend false credence to extreme stances, ignoring opportunities for compromise or chances to re-frame the issue in a new way.

We can either agree with Barbara's plan, or just let the project fail. There is no other option.

5. The Hasty Generalization Fallacy

This fallacy occurs when someone draws expansive conclusions based on inadequate or insufficient evidence. In other words, they jump to conclusions about the validity of a proposition with some — but not enough — evidence to back it up, and overlook potential counterarguments.

Two members of my team have become more engaged employees after taking public speaking classes. That proves we should have mandatory public speaking classes for the whole company to improve employee engagement.

6. The Slothful Induction Fallacy

Slothful induction is the exact inverse of the hasty generalization fallacy above. This fallacy occurs when sufficient logical evidence strongly indicates a particular conclusion is true, but someone fails to acknowledge it, instead attributing the outcome to coincidence or something unrelated entirely.

Even though every project Brad has managed in the last two years has run way behind schedule, I still think we can chalk it up to unfortunate circumstances, not his project management skills.

7. The Correlation/Causation Fallacy

If two things appear to be correlated, this doesn't necessarily indicate that one of those things irrefutably caused the other thing.

This might seem like an obvious fallacy to spot, but it can be challenging to catch in practice — particularly when you really want to find a correlation between two points of data to prove your point.

Our blog views were down in April. We also changed the color of our blog header in April. This means that changing the color of the blog header led to fewer views in April.

8. The Anecdotal Evidence Fallacy

In place of logical evidence, this fallacy substitutes examples from someone's personal experience.

Arguments that rely heavily on anecdotal evidence tend to overlook the fact that one (possibly isolated) example can't stand alone as definitive proof of a greater premise.

One of our clients doubled their conversions after changing all their landing page text to bright red. Therefore, changing all text to red is a proven way to double conversions.

9. The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy

This fallacy gets its colorful name from an anecdote about a Texan who fires his gun at a barn wall, and then proceeds to paint a target around the closest cluster of bullet holes. He then points at the bullet-riddled target as evidence of his expert marksmanship.

Speakers who rely on the Texas sharpshooter fallacy tend to cherry-pick data clusters based on a predetermined conclusion.

Instead of letting a full spectrum of evidence lead them to a logical conclusion, they find patterns and correlations in support of their goals, and ignore evidence that contradicts them or suggests the clusters weren't actually statistically significant.

Lisa sold her first startup to an influential tech company, so she must be a successful entrepreneur. (She ignores the fact that four of her startups have failed since then.)

10. The Middle Ground Fallacy

This fallacy assumes that a compromise between two extreme conflicting points is always true. Arguments of this style ignore the possibility that one or both of the extremes could be completely true or false — rendering any form of compromise between the two invalid as well.

Lola thinks the best way to improve conversions is to redesign the entire company website, but John is firmly against making any changes to the website. Therefore, the best approach is to redesign some portions of the website.

11. The Burden of Proof Fallacy

If a person claims that X is true, it is their responsibility to provide evidence in support of that assertion. It is invalid to claim that X is true until someone else can prove that X is not true. Similarly, it is also invalid to claim that X is true because it's impossible to prove that X is false.

In other words, just because there is no evidence presented against something, that doesn't automatically make that thing true.

Barbara believes the marketing agency's office is haunted, since no one has ever proven that it isn't haunted.

12. The Personal Incredulity Fallacy

If you have difficulty understanding how or why something is true, that doesn't automatically mean the thing in question is false. A personal or collective lack of understanding isn't enough to render a claim invalid.

I don't understand how redesigning our website resulted in more conversions, so there must have been another factor at play.

13. The "No True Scotsman" Fallacy

Often used to protect assertions that rely on universal generalizations (like "all Marketers love pie") this fallacy inaccurately deflects counterexamples to a claim by changing the positioning or conditions of the original claim to exclude the counterexample.

In other words, instead of acknowledging that a counterexample to their original claim exists, the speaker amends the terms of the claim. In the example below, when Barabara presents a valid counterexample to John's claim, John changes the terms of his claim to exclude Barbara's counterexample.

John: No marketer would ever put two call-to-actions on a single landing page.

Barbara: Lola, a marketer, actually found great success putting two call-to-actions on a single landing page for our last campaign.

John: Well, no true marketer would put two call-to-actions on a single landing page, so Lola must not be a true marketer.

14. The Ad Hominem Fallacy

An ad hominem fallacy occurs when you attack someone personally rather than using logic to refute their argument.

Instead they’ll attack physical appearance, personal traits, or other irrelevant characteristics to criticize the other’s point of view. These attacks can also be leveled at institutions or groups.

logical fallacy examples: Ad Hominem Fallacy

Barbara: We should review these data sets again just to be sure they’re accurate.

Tim: I figured you would suggest that since you’re a bit slow when it comes to math.

15. The Tu Quoque Fallacy

The tu quoque fallacy (Latin for "you also") is an invalid attempt to discredit an opponent by answering criticism with criticism — but never actually presenting a counterargument to the original disputed claim.

In the example below, Lola makes a claim. Instead of presenting evidence against Lola's claim, John levels a claim against Lola. This attack doesn't actually help John succeed in proving Lola wrong, since he doesn't address her original claim in any capacity.

Lola: I don't think John would be a good fit to manage this project, because he doesn't have a lot of experience with project management.

John: But you don't have a lot of experience in project management either!

16. The Fallacy Fallacy

Here's something vital to keep in mind when sniffing out fallacies: just because someone's argument relies on a fallacy doesn't necessarily mean that their claim is inherently untrue.

Making a fallacy-riddled claim doesn't automatically invalidate the premise of the argument — it just means the argument doesn't actually validate their premise. In other words, their argument sucks, but they aren't necessarily wrong.

John's argument in favor of redesigning the company website clearly relied heavily on cherry-picked statistics in support of his claim, so Lola decided that redesigning the website must not be a good decision.

Recognize Logical Fallacies

Recognizing logical fallacies when they occur and learning how to combat them will prove useful for navigating disputes in both personal and professional settings. We hope the guide above will help you avoid some of the most common argument pitfals and utilize logic instead.

This article was published in July 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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a bad argument

This tiny print serves no purpose, but to make this book seem like an actual book. In printed books, one usually sees a large block of tiny print on the first or second page followed by terms like © 2013. All Rights Reserved. So and so. Printed in the United States of America. The publisher may also include prose to deter would-be pirates. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. That is typically followed by a line or two about the publisher, followed by a sequence of numbers. For more information, please contact JasperCollins Publishers, 99 St Marks Pl New York, NY 94105. 12 13 14 15 16 LP/SSRH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 But seriously, all you need to know is that this work is shared under a Creative Commons BY-NC license, which means that you can freely share and adapt it for non-commercial use with attribution. An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments by Ali Almossawi, bookofbadarguments.com, 2013 .--> Art direction: Ali Almossawi, Illustration: Alejandro Giraldo.

“Wow! It will be hard to match the standard you've set, but I'll try to say something quotable!”

—Marvin Minsky, Co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, Author of The Society of Mind

“ I love this illustrated book of bad arguments. A flawless compendium of flaws. ”

—Prof. Alice Roberts, Anatomist, Presenter of the BBC’s ‘The Incredible Human Journey’

“ A wonderfully digestible summary of the pitfalls and techniques of argumentation. I can't think of a better way to be taught or reintroduced to these fundamental notions of logical discourse. A delightful little book. ”

—Aaron Koblin, Creative Director of the Data Arts team at Google

For my daughter, a preemptive gift, to counter the

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This book is aimed at newcomers to the field of logical reasoning, particularly those who, to borrow a phrase from Pascal, are so made that they understand best through visuals. I have selected a small set of common errors in reasoning and visualized them using memorable illustrations that are supplemented with lots of examples. The hope is that the reader will learn from these pages some of the most common pitfalls in arguments and be able to identify and avoid them in practice.

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The literature on logic and logical fallacies is wide and exhaustive. This work's novelty is in its use of illustrations to describe a small set of common errors in reasoning that plague a lot of our present discourse.

The illustrations are partly inspired by allegories such as Orwell's Animal Farm and partly by the humorous nonsense of works such as Lewis Carroll's stories and poems. Unlike such works, there isn't a narrative that ties them together; they are discrete scenes, connected only through style and theme, which better affords adaptability and reuse. Each fallacy has just one page of exposition, and so the terseness of the prose is intentional.

Reading about things that one should not do is actually a useful learning experience. In his book, On Writing , Stephen King writes: “One learns most clearly what not to do by reading bad prose.” He describes his experience of reading a particularly terrible novel as, “the literary equivalent of a smallpox vaccination” [King]. The mathematician George Pólya is quoted as having said in a lecture on teaching the subject that in addition to understanding it well, one must also know how to misunderstand it [Pólya]. This work primarily talks about things that one should not do in arguments. 1

1 For a look at the converse, see T. Edward Damer's book on faulty reasoning.

Many years ago, I spent part of my time writing software specifications using first-order predicate logic. It was an intriguing way of reasoning about invariants using discrete mathematics rather than the usual notation—English. It brought precision where there was potential ambiguity and rigor where there was some hand-waving.

During the same time, I perused a few books on propositional logic, both modern and medieval, one of which was Robert Gula's A Handbook of Logical Fallacies . Gula's book reminded me of a list of heuristics that I had scribbled down in a notebook a decade ago about how to argue; they were the result of several years of arguing with strangers in online forums and had things like, “try not to make general claims about things without evidence.” That is obvious to me now, but to a schoolboy, it was an exciting realization.

It quickly became evident that formalizing one's reasoning could lead to useful benefits such as clarity of thought and expression, objectivity and greater confidence. The ability to analyze arguments also helped provide a yardstick for knowing when to withdraw from discussions that would most likely be futile.

Issues and events that affect our lives and the societies we live, such as civil liberties and presidential elections, usually cause people to debate policies and beliefs. By observing some of that discourse, one gets the feeling that a noticeable amount of it suffers from the

2 I later found out that Sun Tzu's The Art of War contains this and other lessons that can be useful in debate.

absence of good reasoning. The aim of some of the writing on logic is to help one realize the tools and paradigms that afford good reasoning and hence lead to more constructive debates.

Since persuasion is a function of not only logic, but other things as well, it is helpful to be cognizant of those things. Rhetoric likely tops the list, and precepts such as the principle of parsimony come to mind, as do concepts such as the “burden of proof” and where it lies all, none, always, never and so on-->. The interested reader may wish to refer to the wide literature on the topic.

In closing, the rules of logic are not laws of the natural world nor do they constitute all of human reasoning . As Marvin Minsky asserts, ordinary common sense reasoning is difficult to explain in terms of logical principles, as are analogies, adding, “Logic no more explains how we think than grammar explains how we speak” [Minsky]. Logic does not generate new truths, but allows one to verify the consistency and coherence of existing chains of thought. It is precisely for that reason that it proves an effective tool for the analysis and communication of ideas and arguments.

– A. A., San Francisco, July 2013

I put together this book for my daughter. I hope it is useful to all who come across it.

3 The adjective in this case is meant to restrict the definition of dogma rather than be a blanket description of all dogma. Indeed, there are some schools of thought that attempt to extract theology from dialectics.

3 Put differently, I have found that it is easier to have someone concede an irrational position by targeting their bad logic rather than the source of their convictions; the latter can be a more emotionally charged plane.

1 As it turns out, overusing the line I think you'll find that that's fallacious can quickly become annoying, as evidenced by a distant exchange with an acquaintance who finally snapped and countered with Yeah, well, your mom's fallacious ; fearing an infinite regress, prides were swallowed and annoying habits were quashed.

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“Wherever what is being debated is logical rather than factual, discussion is a good method of eliciting truth...Logical errors are, I think, of greater practical importance than many people believe; they enable their perpetrators to hold the comfortable opinion on every subject in turn.”

― Bertrand Russell

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

—Richard P. Feynman

The two of them felt K.'s nightshirt, and said he would now have to wear one that was of much lower quality, but that they would keep the nightshirt along with his other underclothes and return them to him if his case turned out well. "It's better for you if you give us the things than if you leave them in the storeroom," they said. "Things have a tendency to go missing in the storeroom - The Trial, F. Kafka

Arguing from consequences is speaking for or against the truth of a statement by appealing to the consequences of accepting or rejecting it. Just because a proposition leads to some unfavorable result does not mean that it is false. Similarly, just because a proposition has good consequences does not all of a sudden make it true. As David Hackett Fischer puts it, “it does not follow, that a quality which attaches to an effect is transferable to the cause.”

In the case of good consequences, an argument may appeal to an audience's hopes, which at times take the form of wishful thinking. In the case of bad consequences, such an argument may instead appeal to an audience's fears. Accepting the concept of an afterlife means that evil people will get punished. Therefore, there is an afterlife. It is certainly satisfying to know that evil people will ultimately not get away with their crimes. That, however, says nothing about whether or not there is an afterlife.--> For example, take Dostoevsky's line, “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.” Discussions of objective morality aside, the appeal to the apparent grim consequences of a purely materialistic world says nothing about whether or not the antecedent is true.

One should keep in mind that such arguments are fallacious only when they deal with propositions with objective truth values, and not when they deal with decisions or policies [Curtis], such as a politician opposing the raising of taxes for fear that it will adversely impact the lives of constituents, for example.

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Intentionally caricaturing a person's argument with the aim of attacking the caricature rather than the actual argument is what is meant by “putting up a straw man.” Misrepresenting, misquoting, misconstruing and oversimplifying are all means by which one commits this fallacy. A straw man argument is usually one that is more absurd than the actual argument, making it an easier target to attack and possibly luring a person towards defending the more ridiculous argument rather than the original one.

For example, My opponent is trying to convince you that we evolved from monkeys who were swinging from trees; a truly ludicrous claim . This is clearly a misrepresentation of what evolutionary biology claims, which is the idea that humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor several million years ago. Misrepresenting the idea is much easier than refuting the evidence for it.

On an episode of the topical British TV show Have I Got News For You , a panelist described a protest in London against corporate greed as being against capitalism and all that it provides. She then proceeded to attack the protesters' apparent hypocrisy by pointing out that while they appear to be against capitalism, they continue to use smartphones and buy coffee. You can watch that excerpt of it here: youtu.be/8WvAkhW-XNI .

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An appeal to authority is an appeal to one's sense of modesty [Engel], which is to say, an appeal to the feeling that others are more knowledgeable. While this is a comfortable and natural tendency for humans, such appeals cannot tell us which things are true and which are false. All appeals to authority are a type of genetic fallacy. Experts do not have the characteristic of producing absolute truth. To determine truth from untruth we must rely on evidence and reason.

However, appeals to relevant authority can tell us which things are likely to be true. This is the means by which we form beliefs. The overwhelming majority of the things that we believe in, such as atoms and the solar system, are on reliable authority, as are all historical statements, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis.

It is fallacious to form a belief when the appeal is to an authority who is not an expert on the issue at hand. A similar appeal worth noting is the appeal to vague authority, where an idea is attributed to a vague collective. For example, Professors in Germany showed such and such to be true. Another type of appeal to irrelevant authority is the appeal to ancient wisdom, where something is assumed to be true just because it was believed to be true some time ago. For example, Astrology was practiced by technologically advanced civilizations such as the Ancient Chinese. Therefore, it must be true. One might also appeal to ancient wisdom to support things that are idiosyncratic, or that may change with time. Such appeals need to weigh the evidence that is available to us in the present.

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'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean'... – Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

Equivocation exploits the ambiguity of language by changing the meaning of a word during the course of an argument and using the different meanings to support some conclusion. A word whose meaning is maintained throughout an argument is described as being used univocally. Consider the following argument: How can you be against faith when we take leaps of faith all the time, with friends and potential spouses and investments? Here, the meaning of the word “faith” is shifted from a spiritual belief in a creator to a risky undertaking.

A common invocation of this fallacy happens in discussions of science and religion, where the word “why” may be used in equivocal ways. In one context, it may be used as a word that seeks cause , which as it happens is the main driver of science, and in another it may be used as a word that seeks purpose and deals with morals and gaps, which science may well not have answers to. For example, one may argue: Science cannot tell us why things happen. Why do we exist? Why be moral? Thus, we need some other source to tell us why things happen.

Similarly, in discussions about morality, the words good and bad may be used equivocally, where they are sometimes used in a moral context, such as, killing is bad , and at other times in a non-moral context, such as, the evidence you rely on is bad .

2 The illustration is based on an exchange between Alice and the White Queen in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass .

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When I was in the second grade, my classmates were all black. One day, a white boy, Daniel, joined our class and it suddenly hit me that, contrary to general belief, I was not black – my skin color is beige. I turned to my fellow seven-year olds and said, “I'm not black; does that mean that I'm white?” Eugene replied, “Well, you're not white, so you must be black.”

A false dilemma is an argument that presents a set of two possible categories and assumes that everything in the scope of that which is being discussed must be an element of that set. If one of those categories is rejected, then one has to accept the other. For example, In the war on fanaticism, there are no sidelines; you are either with us or with the fanatics . In reality, there is a third option, one could very well be neutral; and a fourth option, one may be against both; and even a fifth option, one may empathize with elements of both.

In The Strangest Man , it is mentioned that physicist Ernest Rutherford once told his colleague Niels Bohr a parable about a man who bought a parrot from a store only to return it because it didn't talk. After several such visits, the store manager eventually says: “Oh, that's right! You wanted a parrot that talks. Please forgive me. I gave you the parrot that thinks.” Now clearly, Rutherford was using the parable to illustrate the genius of the silent Dirac, though one can imagine how someone might use such a line of reasoning to suggest that a person is either silent and a thinker or talkative and an imbecile.

3 This fallacy may also be referred to as the fallacy of the excluded middle, the black and white fallacy or a false dichotomy.

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The fallacy assumes a cause for an event where there is no evidence that one exists. Two events may occur one after the other or together because they are correlated, by accident or due to some other unknown event; one cannot conclude that they are causally connected without evidence. The recent earthquake was due to people disobeying the king is not a good argument.

The fallacy has two specific types: ‘after this, therefore because of this’ and ‘with this, therefore because of this.’ With the former, because an event precedes another, it is said to have caused it. With the latter, because an event happens at the same time as another, it is said to have caused it. In various disciplines, this is referred to as confusing correlation with causation. 4

For example: Every time I kiss my ring before a game, we win. Therefore, we won because I kissed my ring . Or, People who graduate from university are typically more successful. Therefore, going to university leads to success . The first example is clearly driven by superstition; the second one assumes that schooling alone leads to success, a claim easily falsified by pointing to successful college dropouts. Should evidence be provided, it would likely suggest that schooling, along with other factors, are collectively a partial predictor of success.

For example: Jerome did well on his job interview because he tied this piece of string around his wrist . Or, Jeff is successful because he has a doctorate degree . The first example is clearly driven by superstition; the second one assumes that a higher education degree caused Jeff's success, a claim easily falsified by pointing to successful people who never attended university 4 .

Here is an example paraphrased from comedian Stewart Lee: I can't say that because in 1976 I did a drawing of a robot and then Star Wars came out, then they must have copied the idea from me . Here is another one that I recently saw in an online forum: The attacker took down the railway company's website and when I checked the schedule of arriving trains, what do you know, they were all delayed! What the poster failed to realize is that those trains rarely arrive on time, and so without any kind of scientific control, the inference is unfounded.

4 As it turns out, eating chocolate and winning a Nobel Prize have been shown to be highly correlated , perhaps raising the hopes of many a chocolate eater. 5 If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One , 2010, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1756754/-->

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The fallacy plays on the fears of an audience by imagining a scary future that would be of their making if some proposition were accepted. Rather than provide evidence to show that a conclusion follows from a set of premisses, which may provide a legitimate cause for fear, such arguments rely on rhetoric, threats or outright lies. For example, I ask all employees to vote for my chosen candidate in the upcoming elections. If the other candidate wins, he will raise taxes and many of you will lose your jobs .

Here is another example, drawn from the novel, The Trial : You should give me all your valuables before the police get here. They will end up putting them in the storeroom and things tend to get lost in the storeroom . Here, although the argument is more likely a threat, albeit a subtle one, an attempt is made at reasoning. Blatant threats or orders that do not attempt to provide evidence should not be confused with this fallacy, even if they exploit one's sense of fear [Engel].

An appeal to fear may proceed to describe a set of terrifying events that would occur as a result of accepting a proposition, which has no clear causal links, making it reminiscent of a slippery slope. It may also provide one and only one alternative to the proposition being attacked, that of the attacker, in which case it would be reminiscent of a false dilemma.

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This fallacy is committed when one generalizes from a sample that is either too small or too special to be representative of a population. For example, asking ten people on the street what they think of the president's plan to reduce the deficit can in no way be said to represent the sentiment of the entire nation.

Although convenient, hasty generalizations can lead to costly and catastrophic results. For instance, it may be argued that the engineering assumptions that led to the explosion of the Ariane 5 during its first launch were the result of a hasty generalization: the set of test cases that were used for the Ariane 4 controller were not broad enough to cover the necessary set of use-cases in the Ariane 5 's controller. Signing off on such decisions typically comes down to engineers' and managers' ability to argue, hence the relevance of this and similar examples to our discussion of logical fallacies.

Here is another example from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland where Alice infers that since she is floating in a body of water, a railway station, and hence help, must be close by: “Alice had been to the seaside once in her life, and had come to the general conclusion, that wherever you go to on the English coast you find a number of bathing machines in the sea, some children digging in the sand with wooden spades, then a row of lodging houses, and behind them a railway station.” [Carroll]

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Such an argument assumes a proposition to be true simply because there is no evidence proving that it is not. Hence, absence of evidence is taken to mean evidence of absence. An example, due to Carl Sagan: “There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist.” Similarly, when we did not know how the pyramids were built, some concluded that, unless proven otherwise, they must have therefore been built by a supernatural power. The burden-of-proof always lies with the person making a claim.

Moreover, and as several others have put it, one must ask what is more likely and what is less likely based on evidence from past observations. Is it more likely that an object flying through space is a man-made artifact or a natural phenomenon, or is it more likely that it is aliens visiting from another planet? Since we have frequently observed the former and never the latter, it is therefore more reasonable to conclude that UFOs are unlikely to be aliens visiting from outer space.

A specific form of the appeal to ignorance is the argument from personal incredulity, where a person's inability to imagine something leads to a belief that the argument being presented is false. For example, It is impossible to imagine that we actually landed a man on the moon, therefore it never happened. Responses of this sort are sometimes wittily countered with, That's why you're not a physicist .

5 The illustration is inspired by Neil deGrasse Tyson's response to an audience member's question on UFOs: youtu.be/NSJElZwEI8o .

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A general claim may sometimes be made about a category of things. When faced with evidence challenging that claim, rather than accepting or rejecting the evidence, such an argument counters the challenge by arbitrarily redefining the criteria for membership into that category. 6

For example, one may posit that programmers are creatures with no social skills. If someone comes along and repudiates that claim by saying, “But John is a programmer, and he is not socially awkward at all” , it may provoke the response, “Yes, but John isn't a true programmer.” Here, it is not clear what the attributes of a programmer are, nor is the category of programmers as clearly defined as the category of, say, people with blue eyes. The ambiguity allows the stubborn mind to redefine things at will.

The fallacy was coined by Antony Flew in his book Thinking about Thinking . There, he gives the following example: Hamish is reading the newspaper and comes across a story about an Englishman who has committed a heinous crime, to which he reacts by saying, “No Scotsman would do such a thing.” The next day, he comes across a story about a Scotsman who has committed an even worse crime; instead of amending his claim about Scotsmen, he reacts by saying, “No true Scotsman would do such a thing.”

6 When an attacker maliciously redefines a category, knowing well that by doing so, he or she is intentionally misrepresenting it, the attack becomes reminiscent of the straw man fallacy.

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An argument's origins or the origins of the person making it have no effect whatsoever on the argument's validity. A genetic fallacy is committed when an argument is either devalued or defended solely because of its history. As T. Edward Damer points out, when one is emotionally attached to an idea's origins, it is not always easy to disregard the former when evaluating the latter.

Consider the following argument, Of course he supports the union workers on strike; he is after all from the same village. Here, rather than evaluating the argument based on its merits, it is dismissed because the person happens to come from the same village as the protesters. That piece of information is then used to infer that the person's argument is therefore worthless. Here is another example: As men and women living in the 21st century, we cannot continue to hold these Bronze Age beliefs . Why not, one may ask. Are we to dismiss all ideas that originated in the Bronze Age simply because they came about in that time period?

Conversely, one may also invoke the genetic fallacy in a positive sense, by saying, for example, Jack's views on art cannot be contested; he comes from a long line of eminent artists . Here, the evidence used for the inference is as lacking as in the previous examples.

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Guilt by association is discrediting an argument for proposing an idea that is shared by some socially demonized individual or group. For example, My opponent is calling for a healthcare system that would resemble that of socialist countries. Clearly, that would be unacceptable . Whether or not the proposed healthcare system resembles that of socialist countries has no bearing whatsoever on whether it is good or bad; it is a complete non sequitur.

Another type of argument, which has been repeated ad nauseam in some societies, is this: We cannot let women drive cars because people in godless countries let their women drive cars . Essentially, what this and previous examples try to argue is that some group of people is absolutely and categorically bad. Hence, sharing even a single attribute with said group would make one a member of it, which would then bestow on one all the evils associated with that group.

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One of several valid forms of argument is known as modus ponens (the mode of affirming by affirming) and takes the following form: If A then C, A; hence C. More formally:

A ⇒ C, A ⊢ C.

Here, we have three propositions: two premisses and a conclusion. A is called the antecedent and C the consequent. For example, If water is boiling at sea level, then its temperature is at least 100°C. This glass of water is boiling at sea level; hence its temperature is at least 100°C . Such an argument is valid in addition to being sound.

Affirming the consequent is a formal fallacy that takes the following form: If A then C, C; hence A.

The error it makes is in assuming that if the consequent is true, then the antecedent must also be true, which in reality need not be the case. For example, People who go to university are more successful in life. John is successful; hence he must have gone to university . Clearly, John's success could be a result of schooling, but it could also be a result of his upbringing, or perhaps his eagerness to overcome difficult circumstances. More generally, one cannot say that because schooling implies success, that if one is successful, then one must have received schooling.

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Also known by its Latin name, tu quoque , meaning you too , the fallacy involves countering a charge with a charge, rather than addressing the issue being raised, with the intention of diverting attention away from the original argument. For example, John says, “This man is wrong because he has no integrity; just ask him why he was fired from his last job,” to which Jack replies, “How about we talk about the fat bonus you took home last year despite half your company being downsized.” The appeal to hypocrisy may also be invoked when a person attacks another because what he or she is arguing for conflicts with his or her past actions [Engel].

On an episode of the topical British TV show, Have I Got News For You , a panelist objected to a protest in London against corporate greed because of the protesters' apparent hypocrisy, by pointing out that while they appear to be against capitalism, they continue to use smartphones and buy coffee. That excerpt is available here .

Here is another example from Jason Reitman's movie, Thank You for Smoking (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2005), where a tu quoque -laden exchange is ended by the smooth-talking tobacco lobbyist Nick Naylor: “I'm just tickled by the idea of the gentleman from Vermont calling me a hypocrite when this same man, in one day, held a press conference where he called for the American tobacco fields to be slashed and burned, then he jumped on a private jet and flew down to Farm Aid where he rode a tractor onstage as he bemoaned the downfall of the American farmer.”

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A slippery slope 7 attempts to discredit a proposition by arguing that its acceptance will undoubtedly lead to a sequence of events, one or more of which are undesirable. Though it may be the case that the sequence of events may happen, each transition occurring with some probability, this type of argument assumes that all transitions are inevitable, all the while providing no evidence in support of that. The fallacy plays on the fears of an audience and is related to a number of other fallacies, such as the appeal to fear, the false dilemma and the argument from consequences.

For example, We shouldn't allow people uncontrolled access to the Internet. The next thing you know, they will be frequenting pornographic websites and, soon enough our entire moral fabric will disintegrate and we will be reduced to animals . As is glaringly clear, no evidence is given, other than unfounded conjecture, that Internet access implies the disintegration of a society's moral fabric, while also presupposing certain things about the conduct.

7 The slippery slope fallacy described here is of a causal type. continuum fallacy or fallacy of the beard .-->

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Also known as the appeal to the people, such an argument uses the fact that a sizable number of people, or perhaps even a majority, believe in something as evidence that it must therefore be true. Some of the arguments that have impeded the widespread acceptance of pioneering ideas are of this type. Galileo, for example, faced ridicule from his contemporaries for his support of the Copernican model. More recently, Barry Marshall had to take the extreme measure of dosing himself in order to convince the scientific community that peptic ulcers may be caused by the bacterium H. pylori , a hypothesis that was, initially, widely dismissed.

Luring people into accepting that which is popular is a method frequently used in advertising and politics. For example, All the cool kids use this hair gel; be one of them. Although becoming a “cool kid” is an enticing offer, it does nothing to support the imperative that one should buy the advertised product. Politicians frequently use similar rhetoric to add momentum to their campaigns and influence voters.

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An ad hominem argument is one that attacks a person's character rather than what he or she is saying with the intention of diverting the discussion and discrediting the person's argument. For example, You're not a historian; why don't you stick to your own field . Here, whether or not the person is a historian has no impact on the merit of their argument and does nothing to strengthen the attacker's position.

This type of personal attack is referred to as abusive ad hominem. A second type, known as circumstantial ad hominem, is any argument that attacks a person for cynical reasons, by making a judgment about their intentions. For example, You don't really care about lowering crime in the city, you just want people to vote for you . There are situations where one may legitimately bring into question a person's character and integrity, such as during a testimony.

8 The illustration is inspired by a discussion on Usenet several years ago in which an overzealous and stubborn programmer was a participant.

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'How am I to get in?' asked Alice again, in a louder tone. 'Are you to get in at all?' said the Footman. 'That's the first question, you know.' - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Circular reasoning is one of four types of arguments known as begging the question, [Damer] where one implicitly or explicitly assumes the conclusion in one or more of the premisses. In circular reasoning, a conclusion is either blatantly used as a premiss, or more often, it is reworded to appear as though it is a different proposition when in fact it is not. For example, You're utterly wrong because you're not making any sense . Here, the two propositions are one and the same since being wrong and not making any sense, in this context, mean the same thing. The argument is simply stating, ‘Because of x therefore x,’ which is meaningless.

A circular argument may at times rely on unstated premisses, which can make it more difficult to detect. Why is a flower fragrant? Did that happen by accident . Here, the unstated premiss is that things in nature are the way they are and have particular attributes for a reason. Reason implies a reason-giver and hence, the suggestion is that the existence of a fragrant flower implies the existence of a creating force with particular attributes.--> Here is an example from the Australian TV series, Please Like Me , where one of the characters condemns the other, a non-believer, to hell, to which he responds, “[That] doesn't make any sense. It's like a hippie threatening to punch you in your aura.” In this example, the unstated premiss is that there exists a God who sends a subset of people (non-believers) to hell. Hence, the premiss, ‘There exists a God who sends non-believers to hell’ is only supported by the evidence of the assertion that the non-believer is going to hell, which is the conclusion from, ‘There exists a God who sends non-believers to hell.’ and the attestation that the person is a non-believer.

9 More reasonable arguments on this matter do exist; the interested reader may wish to refer to C.S. Lewis' writings, for example.

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Composition is inferring that a whole must have a particular attribute because its parts happen to have that attribute. If every sheep in a flock has a mother, it does not then follow that the flock has a mother, to paraphrase Peter Millican. Here is another example: Each module in this software system has been subjected to a set of unit tests and has passed them all. Therefore, when the modules are integrated, the software system will not violate any of the invariants verified by those unit tests . The reality is that the integration of individual parts introduces new complexities to a system due to dependencies that may in turn introduce additional avenues for potential failure.

Division, conversely, is inferring that a part must have some attribute because the whole to which it belongs happens to have that attribute. For example, Our team is unbeatable. Any of our players would be able to take on a player from any other team and outshine him. While it may be true that the team as a whole is unbeatable, one cannot use that as evidence to infer that each of its players is thus unbeatable. A team's success is clearly not always the sum of the individual skills of its players.

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Many years ago, I heard a professor introduce deductive arguments using a wonderful metaphor, describing them as watertight pipes where truth goes in one end and truth comes out the other end. As it happens, that was the inspiration for this book's cover. Having reached the end of this book, I hope that you leave with a better appreciation of the benefits of watertight arguments in validating and expanding knowledge. I hope that you also leave with a realization of the dangers of flimsy arguments and how commonplace they are in our everyday lives.

Many years ago, I heard a professor introduce deductive arguments using a wonderful metaphor, describing them as watertight pipes where truth goes in one end and truth comes out the other end. As it happens, that was the inspiration for this book's cover. Having reached the end of this book, I hope that you leave not only with a better appreciation of the benefits of watertight arguments in validating and expanding knowledge, but also of the complexities of inductive arguments where probabilities come into play. With such arguments in particular, critical thinking proves an indispensable tool. I hope that you also leave with a realization of the dangers of flimsy arguments and how commonplace they are in our everyday lives.

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a bad argument

Proposition: A statement that is either true or false, but not both. For example, Boston is the largest city in Massachusetts .

Premiss: A proposition that provides support to an argument's conclusion. An argument may have one or more premisses. Also spelled premise .

Argument: A set of propositions aimed at persuading through reasoning. In an argument, a subset of propositions, called premisses, provides support for some other proposition called the conclusion.

Deductive argument: An argument in which if the premisses are true, then the conclusion must be true. The conclusion is said to follow with logical necessity from the premisses. For example, All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal . A deductive argument is intended to be valid, but of course might not be.

Inductive argument: An argument in which if the premisses are true, then it is probable that the conclusion will also be true. 9 The conclusion therefore does not follow with logical necessity from the premisses, but rather with probability. For example, Every time we measure the speed of light in a vacuum, it is 3 × 10 8 m/s. Therefore, the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant. Inductive arguments usually proceed from specific instances to the general.

9 In science, one usually proceeds inductively from data to laws to theories, hence induction is the foundation of much of science. Induction is typically taken to mean testing a proposition on a sample, either because it would be impractical or impossible to do otherwise.

Logical fallacy: An error in reasoning that results in an invalid argument. Errors are strictly to do with the reasoning used to transition from one proposition to the next, rather than with the facts. Put differently, an invalid argument for an issue does not necessarily mean that the issue is unreasonable. Logical fallacies are violations of one or more of the principles that make a good argument such as good structure, consistency, clarity, order, relevance and completeness.

Formal fallacy: A logical fallacy whose form does not conform to the grammar and rules of inference of a logical calculus . The argument's validity can be determined just by analyzing its abstract structure without needing to evaluate its content.

Informal fallacy: A logical fallacy that is due to its content and context rather than its form. The error in reasoning ought to be a commonly invoked one for the argument to be considered an informal fallacy.

Validity: A deductive argument is valid if its conclusion logically follows from its premisses. Otherwise, it is said to be invalid. The descriptors valid and invalid apply only to arguments and not to propositions.

Soundness: A deductive argument is sound if it is valid and its premisses are true. If either of those conditions does not hold, then the argument is unsound. Truth is determined by looking at whether the argument's premisses and conclusions are in accordance with facts in the real world.

Strength: An inductive argument is strong if in the case that its premisses are true, then it is highly probable that its conclusion is also true. Otherwise, if it is improbable that its conclusion is true, then it is said to be weak. Inductive arguments are not truth-preserving; it is never the case that a true conclusion must follow from true premisses.

Cogency: An inductive argument is cogent if it is strong and the premisses are actually true–that is, in accordance with facts. Otherwise, it is said to be uncogent.

Falsifiability: An attribute of a proposition or argument that allows it to be refuted, or disproved, through observation or experiment. For example, the proposition, All leaves are green , may be refuted by pointing to a leaf that is not green. Falsifiability is a sign of an argument's strength, rather than of its weakness.

a bad argument

[Almudheffer] M. R. Almudheffer, The Book of Logic, 1968.

[Aristotle] Aristotle, On Sophistical Refutations, translated by W. A. Pickard, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/sophist_refut.html

[Avicenna] Avicenna, Treatise on Logic, translated by Farhang Zabeeh, 1971.

[Carroll] Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 2008, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-h/11-h.htm

[Curtis] Gary N. Curtis, Fallacy Files, http://fallacyfiles.org

[Damer] T. Edward Damer, Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments (6th ed), 2005.

[Engel] S. Morris Engel, With Good Reason: An Introduction to Informal Fallacies, 1999.

[Farmelo] Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom, 2011.

[Fieser] James Fieser, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu

[Firestein] Stuart Firestein, Ignorance: How it Drives Science, 2012.

[Fischer] David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, 1970.

[Gula] Robert J. Gula, Nonsense: A Handbook of Logical Fallacies, 2002.

[Hamblin] C. L. Hamblin, Fallacies, 1970.

[King] Stephen King, On Writing, 2000.

[Minsky] Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind, 1988.

[Pólya] George Pólya, How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method, 2004.

[Reitman] Thank You for Smoking , Directed by Jason Reitman, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2005.

[Russell] Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, 1912, http://ditext.com/russell/russell.html

[Sagan] Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995.

[Simanek] Donald E. Simanek, Uses and Misuses of Logic , 2002, http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/philosop/logic.htm

[Smith] Peter Smith, An Introduction to Formal Logic, 2003.

[Tzu] Sun Tzu, The Art of War, http://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html

[Woodcock and Loomes] J. Woodcock and Martin Loomes, Software Engineering Mathematics, 1988.

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a bad argument

A reader recently described this website as slow. I believe his exact words were

“Your website is slower than a bag of potatoes.”

Another reader took exception to that insult, replying with

“No, a bag of potatoes is much faster.”

Sadly, the contention is true. You may want to try clicking on View All Pages since that loads the pages as soon as they are available rather than waiting for the entire book to download first. You may also want to try accessing the website at a different time. I am working with our hosting provider to see if we can help alleviate the slowness with a second server.

UPDATE: Thanks in part to the generous donations that have been coming in, I've been able to move the website to a shiny new server, with four times the memory and a lot more processing power. Thanks for stopping by and for sharing this project!

A reader recently wrote in asking if I could share a bit about the process of putting the book together and talk about how the project started. Certainly.

I go on two solitary walks every day. There is a small park off the Embarcadero that is tucked away in a quiet spot. It has a pleasant stream flowing through it and an unassuming bench beside that stream. I have made walking to that frail bench a ritual, and the half an hour or so spent daydreaming on it amid the cool San Francisco breeze, an article of faith.

It was on a day in October of last year when, during one of those quiet moments on that bench, I recalled my college years and how outspoken I happened to be during them, an observation only made interesting by the fact that I have since turned into the quietest of beings. They say that achieving knowledge is a function of one's ability to maintain both doubt and hubris. I don't know. I find that as the years go by, I am left with more of the former and less of the latter.

A realization that coincided with that nostalgic whiff was that a sizable amount of the discourse nowadays continues to be plagued with bad reasoning.

Hence, the idea that finally shook me into soberness was one that had been fermenting for a while. It was that of visualizing, in a simple manner, some of the principles that had helped me do well in debates and in off-the-cuff arguments with colleagues. Simple. That would be the novelty of it. And so, with my two-year old daughter in the back of my mind, I decided that illustration would be an ideal language, given its universal appeal.

Once I had a draft version of the book ready, I sent it to one of my life-long idols, Marvin Minsky, co-founder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and author of The Society of Mind . I must have spent a good week writing that email. I was overjoyed when he wrote back a few hours later calling the book “beautiful!” It was quite possibly one of the highlights of my life. Having read the email, I made sure to maintain my earnestness while I found a private place, wherein I proceeded to do the Apache dance from Fresh Prince .

a bad argument

The cover is inspired by one of my favorite games growing up: LucasArts' Monkey Island series. The title's typography and the general feel of the whole scene borrow a bit from Monkey Island and a bit from Indiana Jones . The cover's concept is based on the metaphor that good deductive logic is like a watertight pipe where truth goes in and truth comes out. Hence, the cave that the two explorers are peeking through, which you may notice has an opening resembling that of a human ear, is actually the inside of someone's head, and the leaking pipes indicate that this person's head is filled with bad logic.

Shown below are some of the original sketches that I came up with. I had the scenarios, characters and captions in mind, and a modest ability to transform them into drawings. What I really wanted though was a woodcut style that would give the work an antiquated feel, because after all, if it looks old, then it must be of value—irony intended. I commissioned a professional illustrator who did a nice job of translating a set of sketches, prose and undocumented ideas into the illustrations you see in this final artifact.

The project is a public service, and although it has cost a fair amount of money, nothing would make me happier than to see it used to teach younger people or those new to the field the importance of logical reasoning. It is meant to serve as a modest, yet hopefully timeless, contribution.

Thank you for visiting and for your emails; they make my day. Enjoy the sketches below. If you don't see them, then they are still being loaded. Look out for the print version on Amazon later this year.

August 20, 2013 · (permalink)

a bad argument

Life Lessons

Critical thinking

15 bad arguments to avoid.

In this article 15 mistakes to avoid in your next argument: Argument by assertion Self-sealing argument Circular reasoning Appeal to authority Appeal to credentials Appeal to common belief Appeal to common sense Appeal to tradition Appeal to emotion Appeal to consequences Appeal to motive Ad hominem Appeal to ridicule Let’s begin: Argument by assertion (aka […]

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In this article 15 mistakes to avoid in your next argument:

  • Argument by assertion
  • Self-sealing argument
  • Circular reasoning
  • Appeal to authority

Appeal to credentials

  • Appeal to common belief

Appeal to common sense

  • Appeal to tradition

Appeal to emotion

Appeal to consequences, appeal to motive.

  • Appeal to ridicule

Let’s begin:

Argument by assertion (aka “proof by assertion”, “Ipse dixit”)

“A bare assertion is not necessarily the naked truth.” – George Dennison

The argument by assertion is not an argument at all. It’s a fallacy.

Argument vs assertion

  • An argument is one or more premises in support of a conclusion
  • An assertion is a confident and forceful statement of fact or belief

The argument by assertion is simply an assertion that something is true or false without evidence.

However, anyone can assert anything, but that doesn’t make it true:

“The Bible is the word of God”

“Muhammad is the final prophet”

“Jesus is returning soon”

“The world is run by the illuminati”

“The earth is flat”

“Everyone knows that”

“That’s just the way it is”

“You’re an idiot”

There is a huge difference between an argument and an assertion. That might sound painfully obvious, but if you listen carefully to most people talk, they’re not making rational arguments backed up by evidence, they’re simply making baseless assertions. But an assertion is not an argument. Nor is it evidence or proof or a reason to believe anything.

It doesn’t matter:

  • How confidently or loudly something is asserted
  • How long it’s been asserted for, or how often
  • How many people assert it, or how many people agree with them

All claims need reasons and evidence to support them.

“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence” – Christopher Hitchens

Self-Sealing Argument (aka “vacuous argument”)

“Heads I win, tails you lose”

“Wherever you go, there you are”

“Everything happens for a reason”

A self-sealing argument is an argument that is unfalsifiable, and setup in such a way that it is impossible to contradict or refute, so that no counterarguments or evidence could possibly be used against it.

Self-Sealing argument example #1

Person A: “All actions are selfish”

Person B: “What about that person who sacrificed their life for others?”

Person A: “They did it for selfish motives. They wanted to die a hero”

Self-Sealing argument example #2

Person A: “Everyone has wounds from their childhood”

Person B: “I don’t think I do. I had a great childhood”

Person A: “Everyone does. You’re just in denial about it”

Self-Sealing argument example #3

Person A: “Everything that happens is Gods will”

Person B: “Even AIDS, cancer, murder, rape, terrorism and war?”

Person A: “Yes”

Conspiracy theorists are often guilty of self-sealing arguments and thinking, in that any counterarguments or denials are seen as evidence in support of the theory, and any ridiculing of far-fetched claims an attempt to cover up and suppress evidence and dissenting voices (e.g. the US government denying that 9/11 was an inside job is part of the cover up “ that’s what they would say” )

Circular reasoning (aka “begging the question”, “circular logic”)

Circular reasoning is when an argument assumes what it is trying to prove (I.e. the conclusion is contained within the premises)

Circular reasoning example #1

“The Bible is true, because it says so, in the Bible”

Circular reasoning example #2

“Islam is a religion of peace, because it says it is”

Circular reasoning example #3

“I know he’s not lying, because he said he’s not lying”

Appeal to authority (aka “argument from authority”)

“Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.” – Bertrand Russell

“One of the great commandments of science is, “Mistrust arguments from authority.” Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else.” – Carl Sagan

Appeal to authority is a fallacy that occurs when someone asserts that something is true, simply because an authority or expert said it.

The structure of the fallacy looks like this:

P1: Albert Einstein says X is true

P2: Albert Einstein is an expert

C: Therefore, X is true

However, just because an authority or expert said it, that doesn’t mean it’s true.

“Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” – Albert Einstein

Experts can be wrong, they can make mistakes, and they can also believe bullshit.

“The wisest of the wise may err.” – Aeschylus

Even if all the experts agree:

“Even if all the experts agree, they may well be mistaken.” – Bertrand Russell

The experts also constantly disagree with one another:

“For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD.” – Gibson’s law

“For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.” – Arthur C. Clark’s forth law

Also, not all statements made by scientists, are scientific statements. Sometimes a scientist is just giving their own personal opinion.

Often people making an argument from authority are too lazy to think for themselves, and believe whatever the “experts” tell them to believe. These same people will often try to pressure you into accepting an argument from authority, as if you should believe something simply because an authority or expert apparently said it.

“Who knows more: You or Stephen Hawking?”

Appeal to authority example #1

Religious people will sometimes try to convince you of something simply because it’s in the Bible, Quran, Bhagavad Gita etc.

“The Bible says…”

“The Quran says…”

“The Bhagavad Gita says…”

“Buddha said…”

“Jesus said…”

“Krishna said…”

“Muhammad said…”

And if you argue or ask questions you might get:

“Who is smarter: You or God?”

This isn’t good enough. You need evidence and reasons, not just assertions from authorities and experts and so-called “Holy Books”.

Appeal to authority example #2

Stephen Hawking said:

“There is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate.” – Stephen Hawking

…this maybe true, but it’s not true just because he said it.

Appeal to authority example #3

Warren Buffett said:

“Bitcoin has no unique value, it’s a delusion, a mirage, rat poison squared.” – Warren Buffett

Therefore, bitcoin is a bad investment.

Appeal to authority example #4

You: “Why Mom?”

Mom: “Because I said so!”

Appeal to false/irrelevant authorities

“Don’t assume that because somebody has one intellectual skillset, they have another, that those tools apply to all types of intelligence, thinking or claims. They don’t.” – Steven Novella

Sometimes people will even appeal to false or irrelevant authorities that aren’t even an expert on the matter at hand.

Before you consider any argument from authority ask yourself:

  • Is it an anonymous authority? Often people will use anonymous authorities or “weasel words” to make their arguments sound more persuasive e.g. “experts say”, “studies show”, “scientists say” etc.
  • Is it an outdated authority? e.g. Aristotle or Isaac Newton when centuries of experimentation and research have provided new discoveries
  • Is it a legit authority? e.g. not Ben Affleck on Islam, Jenny McCarthy on vaccines, Seth Macfarlane on politics, or an “expert” ghost hunter
  • Is the claim made within the authorities specific area of expertise? Linus Pauling won a Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1954, then later made claims that massive quantities of vitamin C would prevent cancer in humans. This claim was in the field of medicine and thus outside his field of competence
  • Has the authority provided good evidence for their claims? Or are they simply asserting?
  • Do the vast majority of other authorities and experts agree with them? Is their viewpoint in the majority or minority? Or is it a contentious issue with no general consensus?
  • Has the authority been misinterpreted, misquoted, or quoted out of context? Were they making a joke or being sarcastic? A lot of experts are misinterpreted, misquoted and quoted out of context. A lot of quotes are also falsely attributed to intellectual heavyweights like Albert Einstein to make them seem more credible. That’s why it’s important to check sources and not just accept that Einstein said X
  • Is the authority possibly biased? Do they have a potential conflict of interest? Is there some reason they may lie or mislead? This doesn’t mean that you should automatically dismiss anything they have to say (appeal to motive) but it’s worth keeping in mind

I’m not saying we shouldn’t listen to the experts, simply that we need to think critically about any information presented to us, and demand good reasons and evidence, instead of blindly believing and taking things on faith.

“Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” ― Albert Einstein

The credentials fallacy is when someone dismisses an argument from someone on the basis that they lack qualifications or achievements in the field being discussed.

However, this is fallacious reasoning, because you don’t need a degree or a PhD or a multi-billion dollar business to make a valid point.

Someone making the credentials fallacy is ignoring my favorite bit of critical thinking advice:

“Examine the statement – not the speaker”

It’s stupid to automatically dismiss an argument or statement just because someone doesn’t have credentials in the field being discussed. A statement is either true or untrue, and an argument is either valid or invalid, regardless of who says it.

There are also lots of autodidact’s (self-taught people) that are incredibly smart e.g. Christopher Langan, Leonardo da Vinci, Mark Twain, Matt Dillahunty, Nikola Tesla, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers etc.

Credentials fallacy example #1

You: “I think you should do your due diligence before going into business with someone”

Him: “I’m sorry, are you a business owner? Do you own a business? How many successful start-ups have you been a part of?”

Credentials fallacy example #2

You: “Don’t you think you should spend some time with your kids? Help them with their homework etc.?”

Her: “I’m not going to take parenting advice from someone who has never been a parent”

Credentials fallacy example #3

You: “I’m not convinced we have sufficient evidence to accept string theory”

Friend: “Is that so Einstein! Some of the smartest physicists in the world like Edward Witten, Brian Greene and Michio Kaku accept string theory. Do you think you’re smarter than those guys? Come back and speak to me when you win a Nobel Prize in Physics.”

Just because someone is an authority or expert, has a PhD or a multi-billion dollar business, that doesn’t mean they’re right, and just because someone lacks qualifications or accomplishments, and has little to no experience, that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.

Remember: Examine the statement – not the speaker.

Exception: It’s obviously reasonable to point out someone’s lack of credentials if they’re giving medical advice without being a doctor or having been to medical school

Appeal to common belief (aka “appeal to the majority”, “appeal to popularity”, “bandwagon fallacy”)

“The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.” – Bertrand Russell

Appeal to common belief is a fallacy that occurs when someone tries to convince you to accept or believe something, simply because many or most people believe it.

“Everyone knows that!”

“Everyone’s doing it!” 

“50 Million people can’t be wrong!”

However, just because a claim is widely accepted, that doesn’t mean it’s justified or true.

If the whole world believes that the earth is flat, or is the centre of the universe, or that slavery or racism or sexism is okay, does that mean it is?

“Everyone” believing something, only proves that a belief is popular , not that it’s true .

For example:

There are 2.4 billion Christians in the world

There are 1.8 billion Muslims in the world

There are 1.1 billion Hindus in the world

There are 500 million Buddhists in the world

There are also hundreds of millions of believers in other religions e.g. Jews, Jains, Sikhs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Scientologists etc.

These religions all make contradictory claims, so they can’t all be true (but they can all be false). This means at an absolute minimum, billions of people have believed bullshit for thousands of years (and continue to) because Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism etc. can’t all be right, since they’re all making contradictory claims.

Beliefs don’t become popular because they’re necessarily true, it’s often but because of marketing and promotion, mass indoctrination in the schooling and educational system, propaganda and social engineering through the media etc.

“Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.” – Maimonides

“Common sense is not so common.” ―  Voltaire

Appeal to common sense is a fallacy that occurs when someone asserts that something is “common sense” when it may not be, in order to persuade others to accept or reject a claim.

However, it’s not good enough for someone to simply assert that something is “common sense”, or to claim that it’s “obvious” or “everyone” knows it. Reasons and evidence must be given to support all claims.

What is common sense anyway?

“Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind prior to the age of eighteen.” – Albert Einstein

Common sense is defined as:

“Good sense and sound judgement in practical matters”

But who is to say what “good sense” and “sound judgement” is?

These are subjective terms, and when a parent, teacher, pastor etc. tells you to “use your common sense”, or claims that something is “obvious” or that “everyone knows that”, they’re often trying to pressure you into accepting their assertions without evidence.

The other problem with “common sense” is that it’s often wrong.

What is common believed is often bullshit.

“Common sense is what tells us the earth is flat.” ―  Stuart Chase

Appeal to tradition (aka appeal to antiquity)

Appeal to tradition is a fallacy that occurs when someone argues that something is correct or right, or that a habit or practice should be continued, simply because it’s tradition and has “always been done that way.”

Travelling the world I’ve seen so many stupid customs and traditions (including in my home country of New Zealand) that are continued generation after generation for no apparent reason except, “this is the way it’s always been done” . But “tradition” is not a good reason for believing or doing something, nor for suspending your critical thinking skills. Just because it’s “tradition” and has “always been done that way” , that doesn’t mean it “should” be, or that it’s right, or that you should continue to keep doing it.

The appeal to tradition is related to the sunk cost fallacy: No one wants to admit that they’ve spent hundreds or even thousands of years blindly believing or doing something stupid for no good reason.

I’ll paraphrase Matt Dillahunty:

“The number of believers in a thing, nor the amount of time it has been believed, says anything at all about whether a belief is actually true or not.” – Matt Dillahunty

Beliefs, customs, traditions etc. can go unchecked for thousands of years. People can persist in believing bullshit forever. They may reason that, “if it was wrong, it would have been challenged/disproven/replaced by now” . But this is not always the case.

Many traditions are started upon false assumptions e.g. sacrificing animals and humans to appease angry imaginary Gods, slavery is okay, tobacco is okay etc. but there comes a time when you have to question these things, and ask, “Why are we doing this in the first place?”

The opposite of an appeal to tradition is an appeal to novelty , which is when someone claims that something is correct or superior, just because it’s new and modern.

See also: Critical thinking about History

“Won’t somebody please think of the children?” – Helen Lovejoy, The Simpsons

Appeal to emotion is a fallacy that occurs when someone tries to persuade you emotionally (instead of through evidence, facts and reason)

  • Anger: “Are you going to put up with that shit? Let them treat you that way?”
  • Compassion/pity: Advertisers and the media using tear-jerking images of starving children in Africa, or crying migrant children separated from their parents to pull on the heartstrings of the public to let in refugees
  • Ego/pride: “Are you man enough?” , “You deserve the best!”
  • Envy: “ Why can’t we have nice things like other people?”
  • Fear: “If you don’t believe Jesus died for your sins and accept him into your heart you’ll burn in hell for eternity”
  • FOMO: Fear of missing out, “You only live once!”
  • Flattery “OMG, you’re so amazing, beautiful, intelligent, strong, sexy, a “Goddess”, a “Queen”
  • Guilt: “After all the things I’ve done for you, you can’t even do this little thing for me?”
  • Ridicule: “Can you believe these idiots believe…?”

Emotional appeals are powerful tools of persuasion, and are often used in extremely manipulative ways by advertisers and the media. They know that emotion overrides logic for most people, and if they can get you to feel something, they can get you to do something.

That’s why instead of trying to persuade you rationally through logic and evidence, they try to manipulate you emotionally by showing you images of frightened children, cute puppies, sexy women showing their approval towards a guy for using a certain product etc. (which is intellectually dishonest and manipulative)

Fuck the facts, most advertising is exaggerated claims and false promises, it’s “feels over reals” , and most news is clickbait garbage designed to anger and outrage you.

Your thinking, actions and decisions however, should be motivated by facts and evidence, not appeals to emotion, so notice if someone (advertisers, the media, friends, family, boss, workmates etc.) is trying to emotionally manipulate you, and try to avoid emotional reasoning yourself.

“Facts don’t care about your feelings” – Ben Shapiro

Appeal to consequences is a fallacy that occurs when someone concludes that a belief must be true or false, because otherwise the consequences would be desirable or undesirable.

Appeal to consequences example #1

“If God doesn’t exist, than life is pointless and has no meaning. Therefore there must be a God.”

Whether or not you want there to be a God, says nothing at all about whether or not there actually is a God.

Lawrence Krauss puts it this way:

“The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not. The existence or nonexistence of a creator is independent of our desires. A world without God or purpose may seem harsh or pointless, but that alone doesn’t require God to actually exist.” ―  Lawrence Krauss

Appeal to consequences example #2

“If there is no objective morality and no afterlife, heaven, hell etc. then Hitler, Stalin, Mao etc. won’t be punished for their sins after death. That’s unacceptable to me.”

Appeal to consequences example #3

“Free will must exist because if it doesn’t, then we would be like machines in the matrix just going through the motions. That’s absurd.”

Again, regardless of whether or not you like the consequences of a belief, that says nothing at all about whether that belief is actually true or not. Your desires and preferences don’t determine what’s true.

Sam Harris hilariously mocked the appeal to consequences:

Appeal to motive is a fallacy that occurs when you attack or question the motives of the arguer, instead of attacking the argument itself.

Appeal to motive example #1

“You’re just saying that Bitcoin is a good investment because you own it!”

Appeal to motive example #2

“You just believe in evolution because you’re an atheist!”

Appeal to motive example #3

“You’re just saying MMA is better than Karate because you want people to join your MMA gym!”

Motives might lead a person to motivated reasoning, but even if someone is biased towards a particular outcome e.g. a politician trying to get votes, or a salesperson wanting to make a sale, that doesn’t mean that their argument or statement is necessarily invalid.

Ad hominem (attacking the person, instead of attacking the argument)

Ad hominem is a fallacy that occurs when you attack the person making the argument, instead of attacking the argument itself.

Ad hominem example #1

“You think I’m going to take advice from someone who didn’t even graduate high school?”

Ad hominem example #2

“This guy thinks he’s an expert on women, but seriously, name one woman that would want to fuck a guy that looks like him!”

Ad hominem example #3

“I don’t care what you think! You’re a racist, sexist, bigot!”

Ad hominem attacks are incredibly common online, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.

Appeal to ridicule (aka “appeal to mockery”)

Appeal to ridicule is a fallacy that occurs when someone misrepresents an argument in such a way, that it makes it look laughable and ridiculous, and therefore not worthy of serious consideration or discussion.

Appeal to ridicule can be funny, and it’s almost all that late night talk show hosts like Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and Trevor Noah do. But it’s also often an intellectually dishonest type of ad hominem/strawman where you misrepresent the argument and mock it, maybe by using mocking tonality and facial expressions, sarcasm, repeating your opponent’s claim (or part of it) in a silly voice, and attempt to convince others to agree with you in order to avoid becoming the butt of the joke.

Appeal to ridicule example #1

“You believe in God just like some people believe in Santa Claus… except that Santa Claus is based upon someone who actually used to exist!”

Appeal to ridicule example #2

“If evolution were true then we would see one of these… a crocoduck!” – Kirk Cameron

Appeal to ridicule example #3

Psychics claim they can predict the future, but:

“ How come you never see a headline like ‘Psychic Wins Lottery’?” – Jay Leno

This concludes part one of a four part series on bad arguments to avoid.

Bad arguments to avoid – Part 2

How to call Bullshit

a bad argument

Tangle

What makes a bad argument?

Isaac Saul

All the ways to engage in bad-faith.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

We need more debate.

I'm a firm believer that one of the biggest issues in our society — especially politically — is that people who disagree spend a lot less time talking to each other than they should.

Last week, I wrote about how the two major political candidates are dodging debates . Yesterday, I wrote about how a well known scientist (or someone like him) should actually engage Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on his views about vaccines.

In both cases, I've received pushback. There are, simply put, many millions of Americans who believe that minority views — whether it's that the 2020 election was stolen or vaccines can be dangerous or climate change is going to imminently destroy the planet or there are more than two genders — are not worth discussing with the many people who hold those viewpoints. Many of these same people believe influential voices are not worth airing and are too dangerous to be on podcasts or in public libraries or in front of our children.

On the whole, I think this is wrongheaded. I've written a lot about why. But something I hadn’t considered is that people are skeptical about the value of debate because there are so many dishonest ways to have a debate. People aren’t so much afraid of a good idea losing to a bad idea; they are afraid that, because of bad-faith tactics, reasonable people will be fooled into believing the bad idea.

Because of that, I thought it would be helpful to talk about all the dishonest ways of making arguments.

The nature of this job means not only that I get to immerse myself in politics, data, punditry, and research, but that I get a chance to develop a keen understanding of how people argue — for better, and for worse.

Let me give you an example.

I could make the argument that guns make all us safer. To support this argument, I could point to the largest and most comprehensive survey of American gun owners ever conducted, which found that firearms were used in self-defense 1.7 million times per year, proof that guns are a critical aspect of people defending themselves from violence. Similarly, 94% of all mass public shootings since 1950 have happened in gun-free zones, according to a 2018 report — evidence that areas without guns actually invite violence, not prevent it.

Moving from this position, I could argue that any attempt to limit the free flow of firearms will make individuals and society less safe, and that if you are concerned about mass shootings or being able to defend yourself, you should either own a gun or support the right of others to do so.

This would be an argument of omission. Making it requires omitting studies that show owning a gun substantially increases the risk of being killed with a gun, that defensive use cases might be vastly overstated , and that guns are used for violence far more often than they are used to defend oneself . It also requires omitting context on gun-free zones , like the fact that from 1950 to 1990 many states banned or heavily restricted concealed firearms, making essentially any mass shooting during those years one that took place in a gun-free zone. The study cited by the original argument also classified places like military bases as gun-free zones (because guns are restricted for citizens), even though armed officers are stationed there. And, of course, it omits the simple fact that there are more gun deaths in states with more gun ownership .

Now, it's possible that gun ownership can increase safety for certain people in certain scenarios. But in order to make that argument honestly, you'd need to include the evidence above and address it. Many people choose not to when making this argument.

Omitting key information in arguments, or omitting counter-evidence to central claims, is just one bad argument style that is common in politics.

For the purposes of this piece, I’ve identified several others. Below, I'm going to define them, give some recent examples from the news, and then explain why they’re deficient, all with the hopes of making it easier for you to identify them when these argument styles pop up — and why you should be critical of them.

Whataboutism: This is probably the argument style I get from readers the most often. There is a good chance you are familiar with it. This argument is usually signaled by the phrase, "What about...?" For instance, anytime I write about Hunter Biden's shady business deals , someone writes in and says, "What about the Trump children?" My answer is usually, "They also have some shady deals."

The curse of whataboutism is that we can often do it forever. If you want to talk about White House nepotism, it'd take weeks (or years) to properly adjudicate all the instances in American history, and it would get us nowhere but to excuse the behavior of our own team. That is, of course, typically how this tactic is employed. Liberals aren't invoking Jared Kushner to make the case that profiting off your family’s time in the White House is okay, they are doing it to excuse the sins of their preferred president's kid — to make the case that it isn't that bad, isn't uncommon, or isn't worth addressing until the other person gets held accountable first.

None of this is helpful or enlightening. Yes, context is important, and if I'm writing about Hunter Biden's business deals I may reference how other similar situations were addressed or spoken about in the past. But when the topic of discussion is whether one person’s behavior was bad, saying that someone else did something bad does nothing to address the subject at hand. It just changes the subject.

Bothsidesism: Naturally, this is what I get accused of the most. I'd describe bothsidesism as a cousin of whataboutism. Wikipedia defines it as "a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports." An example might be presenting a debate about human-caused climate change and giving equal air time to two sides: Humans are causing climate change vs. humans aren't causing climate change.

Given that the scientific consensus on climate change is robust , arranging an argument this way would lend credence to the idea that scientists (or people in general) are evenly divided on the issue, even though they aren't. Today, most of the debate isn’t about whether climate change is real, it’s about how to predict it, address it, prepare for it, and resolve it.

At Tangle, what we try to do to avoid bothsidesism is to represent arguments proportionally with space in the newsletter. For instance, when we covered Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to run for president, we shared one liberal pundit arguing for his candidacy and two liberal pundits arguing against it. Given that roughly one in five Democratic primary voters are saying they’d support Kennedy, this was a bit of an over-representation (we gave this argument one-third of the space on the left), but it was better than totally ignoring Democrats who support him or giving them all the space on the left.

Given its relevance here, I want to reiterate the underlying intent of our format: Grappling with arguments that don’t confirm your existing beliefs. This often requires highlighting opinions that may represent a minority viewpoint, but it’s important to be aware of them to understand the range of views that exist on a given topic.

On the flip side, it’s important to acknowledge when your position is in a small minority. It’s okay to argue for something many people don’t believe, but if you don’t offer sound explanations for why that’s the case, you won’t convince many people of your view.

Straw man arguments: This is another common tactic, and it's one you have probably heard of. A straw man argument is when you build an argument that looks like, but is different than, the one the other person is making — like a straw man of their argument. You then easily defeat that argument, because it’s a weaker version of the actual argument.

For instance, in a debate on immigration, I recently made the argument that we should pair more agents at the border with more legal opportunities to immigrate here, a pretty standard moderate position on immigration. I was arguing with someone who was on the very left side of the immigration debate, and they responded by saying something along the lines of, "The last thing we need is more border agents shooting migrants on the border."

Of course, my argument isn't for border agents to shoot migrants trying to cross into the U.S., which is a reprehensible idea that I abhor. This is a straw man argument: Distorting an opposing argument to make it weaker and thus easier to defeat.

Unfortunately, straw man arguments are often effective as a rhetorical tactic. They either derail a conversation or get people so off-track that their actual stance on an issue becomes unclear. For the purposes of getting clarity on anyone’s position or having an actual debate, though, they are useless.

The weak man: There are different terms for this but none of them have ever really stuck. I like Scott Alexander's term, the weak man, which he describes this way : "The straw man is a terrible argument nobody really holds, which was only invented so your side had something easy to defeat. The weak man is a terrible argument that only a few unrepresentative people hold, which was only brought to prominence so your side had something easy to defeat."

The weak man is best exemplified by the prominence of certain people. For instance, have you ever heard of Ben Cline? What about Marjorie Taylor Greene? I'd wager that most of my readers know quite a few things about Greene, and very few have ever even heard of Ben Cline. Both are Republican representatives in Congress. One is a household name, and the other is an under-the-radar member of the Problem Solvers Caucus. Why is that?

Because Greene is an easy target as "the weak man." Democrats like to use her to portray the Republican party as captured by QAnon, conspiracy theories, and absurd beliefs because they found social media posts where she spouted ridiculous ideas about space lasers and pedophilia rings.

The weak man is largely responsible for the perception gap , the reality in our country where most Democrats vastly misunderstand Republicans and vice versa. For instance, more than 80% of Democrats disagree with the statement "most police are bad people." But if you ask Republicans to guess how Democrats feel about that statement, they guess less than 50% disagree; because the weak man is used so effectively that it distorts our understanding of the other side’s position.

Moving the goalposts: This is one of the hardest ones to spot, but it is critical to entrenching a partisan mindset, and for that reason all too common in politics. When someone or a group of people change the standard of what is acceptable or unacceptable to them in real time, they’re “moving the goalposts” for what needs to be achieved to challenge their ideas.

I actually just called out an example of this in Tangle recently.

Amid the scandal around Donald Trump's handling of classified documents, many of his defenders first alleged the documents he had were likely declassified by him before he left office. Then they argued they might have been classified, but they were probably mementos and other benign things — like letters from foreign leaders. Then they argued that they may have been classified documents, but unless they were something like nuclear or military secrets, raiding his home was unnecessary and overkill.

Then, of course, the indictment alleged that some of the documents found did contain nuclear secrets, military secrets, and other highly sensitive information. That's when The Wall Street Journal editorial board published this whopper : "However cavalier he was with classified files, Mr. Trump did not accept a bribe or betray secrets to Russia."

This is classic moving of the goalposts. We went from “there weren't classified documents” to “they were classified but not that serious” to “they may have been classified but the raid was unjust unless there were nuclear secrets” to "okay, but he wasn’t selling the nuclear secrets to Russia."

Of course, this is not something unique to Trump or conservatives. But this was a potent, recent example of how it works in real time.

Anecdotal reasoning: An anecdote is a short story about something that really happened. Anecdotal reasoning is using that real event to project it as the norm, and then make an argument that your lived experience is representative.

Frankly, I’m hesitant to include this one in the context of today’s newsletter, because I do think politics are personal — and personal experiences should be shared and considered. They are often enlightening, and anyone who reads Tangle knows I regularly lean into personal experience. But they can also be a trap. Anecdotal arguments are dangerous because they can prevent people from seeing that their experience might be the exception rather than the rule.

We actually just had a great example of this, too. As you may have heard, unemployment is currently near an all-time low. At the same time, though, the tech sector (which is a fraction of the economy) has been experiencing a lot of layoffs and downsizing. This has left many people in tech concluding that the job numbers are somehow wrong or being fudged. Take a look at this exchange on Twitter:

a bad argument

This is a classic example of an anecdotal argument. Because personal experiences are so powerful, we struggle to see beyond them. While anecdotes can add color or create context, they shouldn't be used to extract broad conclusions.

Prove a negative: This might be the most frustrating style of argument there is. The "prove a negative" argument is when someone insists that you prove to them something didn't happen or isn't true, which implies that they have evidence something did happen or is true — but they don’t actually present that evidence.

For instance, if I asked you to prove that aliens don't exist, you might have a hard time doing it. Sure, you could argue that we don't have an alien body locked up in some government facility ( or do we? ), but you’d have a hard time listing the contents of every government facility. And if you could somehow do that, you haven’t proved that aliens don't exist at all, or even that they've never been to Earth. But the burden of proof isn't on you to show me that aliens don't exist, it's for me to show you evidence that they do.

This was, in my experience, one of the most frustrating things about some of the early claims that the 2020 election was stolen. A lot of people were alleging that Dominion Voting Systems was flipping votes from Trump to Biden, and then insisting that someone must prove this didn't happen. But the burden of proof was not to show that it didn't happen (proving a negative), it was to show that it did happen. Which nobody ever did.

When making an argument, insisting someone prove a negative is always a hollow way to approach an issue. If we want to debate something, there first needs to be an affirmative claim to discuss, and then evidence to support that claim. Absent that, whatever can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence .

Circular reasoning: I would never make one of these bad arguments. And because I wouldn’t make a bad argument, this argument I’m making isn’t a bad argument. And I am not a person who makes bad arguments, as evidenced by this argument I’m making, which isn’t a bad argument.

Exhausting, right? That’s an example of circular reasoning, which uses two claims to support one another rather than using evidence to support a claim. This style of argument is pretty common in supporting broad-brush beliefs. Here are a few examples:

  • Women make bad leaders. That’s why there aren’t a lot of female CEOs. That there are not a lot of female CEOs proves that women are bad leaders.
  • People who listen to Joe Rogan’s podcast are all anti-vaccine. I know this because RFK Jr. was recently on the podcast spreading lies about vaccines, which proves that his anti-vaccine audience wants to hear lies about vaccines.
  • The media is lying to us about the election in 2020 getting stolen. If the media were honest, they’d tell us that the election had been stolen. And the fact that the dishonest media isn’t telling us that is more proof that the election was stolen.

Circular arguments are usually a lot harder to identify than this, and because they’re self-enforcing are often incredibly difficult to argue against. In practice, there are usually a lot more bases to cover that reinforce a worldview, and it can be incredibly difficult to address one claim at a time when someone is making a circular argument.

Of course, these aren't all the ways to make dishonest arguments. There are a lot of others.

There is the "just asking questions" rhetorical trick, where someone asks something that sounds a lot like an outlandish assertion, and then defends themselves by suggesting they don't actually believe this thing — they're just asking if maybe it's worth considering.

There is "black and white" arguing, where an issue becomes binary this or that (is Daniel Penny a good samaritan or a killer?) rather than a complex issue with subtleties, as most things actually are. There’s ad hominem argument, when someone attacks the person ("RFK Jr. is a crackpot!") rather than addressing the ideas ("RFK Jr. is wrong about vaccine safety because..."). There is post hoc — the classic correlation equals causation equation ("The economy grew while I was president, therefore my policies caused it to grow.") There are the slippery slope arguments ("If we allow gay marriage to be legal, what's next? Marrying an animal?") and false dichotomy arguments (like when Biden argued that withdrawing from Afghanistan was a choice between staying indefinitely or pulling out in the manner that he did). There is also the “firehose” trick, which essentially amounts to saying so many untrue things in such a short period of time that refuting them all is nearly impossible.

In reality, a lot of the time we’re just talking past each other. There is one particularly annoying example of this I run into a lot, which is when people interpret what you said as something that you didn't (close to a straw man argument), or ignore something you did say and then repeat it back to you as if you didn't say it. This actually just happened to me this morning on Twitter (of course).

It started when news broke yesterday about an IRS whistleblower testifying on damning text messages from Hunter Biden that were obtained through a subpoena. I tweeted out a transcript of the message Hunter Biden purportedly sent to a potential Chinese business partner. In the message, Hunter insists his father is in the room with him , and they are awaiting the call from the potential partner. Obviously, this would undercut President Biden's frequent claims that he had nothing to do with Hunter's business dealings.

I tweeted this:

a bad argument

"It’s a WhatsApp message, whose to say Joe was even in the room?" one user responded.

"Addicts tend to lie a lot, don’t they? Steal from grandma and such?" another person said.

"Hunter was a crack addict at the time. A crack addict lying for money???  No!!" someone else wrote.

Of course, I aired this possibility right there in my tweet. Again, emphasis mine, I said: "These texts from Hunter Biden insisting his dad was in the room are very, very bad. Hard to know if he was being honest or just bluffing, but Joe was just barely out of office and it looks extremely gross."

But as people, we often come into conversations already knowing what point we want to make, and we’ll try to make it regardless of what the other person said. In one case, when I pointed out that I had literally suggested this very thing in my tweet, someone responded that it buttressed their point — as if I had never said it all.

a bad argument

Of course, just as important as spotting these rhetorical tricks is being sure you are not committing them yourselves. Dunking on bad ideas, styling ideas few people believe as popular, or using anecdotes to make broad claims are easy ways to “win” an argument. Much more difficult, for all of us, is to engage the best ideas you disagree with, think about them honestly, and explain clearly why you don't agree. And even more difficult is to debate honestly, discover that the other person has made stronger arguments, adapt your position and grow. Because of the current media landscape, arguments that don’t contain these bad-faith tactics aren’t always the ones that end up in Tangle — but they are the kind of arguments I aspire to employ myself.

And I’d love to get your help. In the coming week, please write in if you see an argument in Tangle that employs any of the above-mentioned tactics. I want to commend the readers who can spot a deficiency, maybe in a source we cite but especially in an argument I’m making. Something I always want to do with Tangle is to support the best arguments, and that only happens if we can call out the bad ones.

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a bad argument

As you (hopefully) know by now, we are hosting an event in Philadelphia on August 3. The event will be held at Brooklyn Bowl Philadelphia, and in partnership with our awesome venue we have decided to do a contest. We’re offering an opportunity to land two VIP seats in the first two rows , a pre-show VIP meet-and-greet, and free Tangle merchandise, and all you have to do is submit your email address to participate. You can join the fun by clicking here . We're only running this promotion until Monday night!

We're up with a fresh new interview video on YouTube! I was thrilled to sit down with Philip Wallach, who spoke about the problems in Congress, how to fix them, and how they tie into the history of the institution.

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Robert Taibbi L.C.S.W.

Forgiveness

After an argument: the right way to make up, making up after an argument is more than just saying you're sorry..

Posted June 6, 2018 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

  • Avoiding each other after an argument creates an anxious and awkward climate in the home that can be especially harmful to children.
  • Apologizing after an argument acknowledges the other person's feelings.
  • It may take time to get back into a rational frame of mind before continuing to discuss a contentious issue.

Jason and Kate had one of those late-night arguments last night…again. It wasn’t one of their worst, but it left them both feeling raw. The next morning was awkward, circling around each other in the kitchen as they got coffee. One of them finally mumbled an apology, and the other did the same, both trying to just put it behind them. Case closed.

Maksim Fesenko/Shutterstock

There are a lot of ways couples try to mop up after an argument: Jason and Kate’s mumbled apologies; for others, make-up sex , or several days of deep-freeze during which no one talks until it somehow gradually defrosts, but nothing more is said as things go back to "normal."

Disagreements will flare up in any close relationship, and there are two parts to them:

At the front end is the way the argument unfolds. This is about balance and containment. The balance is exactly that — that both partners need to feel safe enough to speak up. It doesn’t work when there isn’t that balance — when one person dominates the conversation through rants and bullies and the other person shuts down. Or when both partners shut down, or worse, stop bringing up problems at all. These couples keep everyday conversations superficial, walk on eggshells, and use distance to avoid conflict.

Containment is about keeping the disagreement in emotional bonds — where it doesn’t turn into open warfare in which each person digs up the past to throw more wood on the emotional fire. This is where hurtful things are said and things can get physical, creating emotional or physical scars that don’t go away but create more fear , resentment, and fodder for future arguments.

But then there is the backside of the argument—the making-up.

What You Don’t Want to Do

Don’t pretend it didn’t happen. You skip the apologies and get up on Sunday morning and pretend that what happened last night didn’t.

Don’t continue to punish the other guy. You do the silent treatment, not because you don’t know how to make-up, but because it’s your way of punishing and essentially continuing the argument in another form. Here partners often throw in passive-aggressive behaviors to rub salt into the other's wounds.

Don’t do the "deep freeze." Even if it’s not about punishment , but anxiety and awkwardness, the deep freeze creates an awful climate in a relationship as the home becomes a who-will-blink-first contest. This is particularly harmful to children, who are forced to walk on eggshells and often naturally and erroneously believe that it is all somehow happening because they did something wrong.

Don’t fail to apologize. Apologizing is not about saying that the other person is right, i.e., you're wrong and she wins the argument, but simply about acknowledging that you hurt the other’s feelings. Apologies are simply about taking responsibility for your side of the argument.

Doing It Right

Cool off. You want to cool off in order to get your rational brain back online. If you try to talk too soon, you're likely to trigger each other again. That said, couples usually differ in how much time they need to calm down (and men often take longer). If you're not ready yet to come back and make up, simply say, in one sentence, "I’m still upset; I'm not trying to ignore you, I just need more time to cool off."

Go back and solve the problem that started the argument. The dishes left on the counter, the money spent on shoes or video games, the time the kids need to get to bed. This is where it is easy to fall down. Jason and Kate say they’re sorry, but don’t return to the topic. Why? Because they are afraid it will only turn into another fight. The challenge is to go back and talk about it and solve the problem, rather than sweep it under the rug.

Your job at this point is to stay sane — pretend you’re at work and act as you would if a coworker did something that bothered you. Resist the urge to plow back into the argument: you said, no I didn’t, if you hadn’t said, etc. Move forward — figure out a plan for dealing with the dishes, the expenses, the bedtime. If it gets hot again, stop, cool off, try again, or write down your solution to the problem, then circle back and talk again.

a bad argument

Figure out the moral of the story of the argument. You want to fix the problem so it doesn’t keep coming up, but you also want to learn something that the argument can teach you about communication and, often, the underlying source of the problem.

Questions to Ask Yourself

Is there a deeper issue underlying the problem?

The dishes are not about dishes but about feeling criticized, or feeling like the other person doesn’t hear you and dismisses your requests, or feeling like you are Cinderella and the other person isn’t doing his or her share of the work. Ditto for money. Bedtime? Different parenting styles, a power struggle about parenting, or something else? Be curious: Dig down, look for the larger pattern that makes the argument merely the tip of the iceberg, then have a conversation about the bigger stuff.

Why did it turn into an argument at all?

Was there something that the other person did that pushed your buttons? Talk about that. Was it because you were both tired and cranky already, or that it was late at night and you both had had a couple of drinks? Talk about that, and how to do it differently going forward. Was it because you were holding things in for a long time and finally blew up? If so, talk about what you need to feel safe to bring things up sooner. Was it because you both had been feeling disconnected from each other, and somehow had subconsciously developed this pattern of picking a fight so you could then have make-up sex or cuddly make-up and get recalibrated? Talk about how to catch the disconnection sooner and develop better ways of bringing you both closer.

The goals here are clear: Solve the problem and learn from the experience so you don’t keep repeating it. The challenge is having the courage to do so, to step up (or step down), and approach your anxiety rather than avoiding it.

Robert Taibbi L.C.S.W.

Bob Taibbi, L.C.S.W., has 49 years of clinical experience. He is the author of 13 books and over 300 articles and provides training nationally and internationally.

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Supreme Court seems skeptical of EPA’s ‘good neighbor’ rule on power plant pollution

FILE - Emissions rise from the smokestacks at the Jeffrey Energy Center coal power plant as the suns sets, near Emmett, Kan., Sept. 18, 2021. The Supreme Court's conservative majority seemed skeptical Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2024, as a government lawyer argued that the Environmental Protection Agency should be allowed to continue enforcing its anti-air-pollution "good neighbor'' rule. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)

FILE - Emissions rise from the smokestacks at the Jeffrey Energy Center coal power plant as the suns sets, near Emmett, Kan., Sept. 18, 2021. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed skeptical Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2024, as a government lawyer argued that the Environmental Protection Agency should be allowed to continue enforcing its anti-air-pollution “good neighbor’’ rule. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)

a bad argument

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed skeptical Wednesday as the Environmental Protection Agency sought to continue enforcing an anti-air-pollution rule in 11 states while separate legal challenges proceed around the country.

The EPA’s “good neighbor” rule is intended to restrict smokestack emissions from power plants and other industrial sources that burden downwind areas with smog-causing pollution.

Three energy-producing states — Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia — challenged the rule, along with the steel industry and other groups, calling it costly and ineffective. The rule is on hold in a dozen states because of the court challenges.

The Supreme Court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, has increasingly reined in the powers of federal agencies, including the EPA, in recent years. The justices have restricted EPA’s authority to fight air and water pollution — including a landmark 2022 ruling that limited EPA’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants that contribute to global warming. The court also shot down a vaccine mandate and blocked President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program.

Athletes take a break as they run at the San Siro hill and look at the view skyline of Milan, Italy, Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2024. Italy's northern Lombardy region imposed severe antismog measures across Milan and eight surrounding provinces Tuesday to combat a particularly bad period of air pollution. The measures bar heavy motor vehicles from operating during the day and impose limits on heating and industiral agricultural activities in the nine provinces. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

The court is currently weighing whether to overturn its 40-year-old Chevron decision , which has been the basis for upholding a wide range of regulations on public health, workplace safety and consumer protections.

A lawyer for the EPA said the “good neighbor” rule was important to protect downwind states that receive unwanted air pollution from other states. Besides the potential health impacts, the states face their own federal deadlines to ensure clean air, said Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart, representing the EPA.

States such as Wisconsin, New York and Connecticut can struggle to meet federal standards and reduce harmful levels of ozone because of pollution from power plants, cement kilns and natural gas pipelines that drift across their borders.

Judith Vale, New York’s deputy solicitor general, said as much as 65% of some states’ smog pollution comes from out of state.

The EPA plan was intended to provide a national solution to the problem of ozone pollution, but challengers said it relied on the assumption that all 23 states targeted by the rule would participate.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh seemed sympathetic to that argument, saying the EPA plan could impose unreasonable costs on states that remain under its authority, because it was initially designed for 23 states.

“EPA came back and said, ‘Even if we have fewer states, we’re going to plow ahead anyway,’'' Kavanaugh said. “Let’s just kind of pretend nothing happened and just go ahead with the 11 states.’'

The EPA proceeded “without a whole lot of explanation, and nobody got a chance to comment on that” as part of the rule-making process, added Justice Neil Gorsuch.

“What (states) are asking for is simply an opportunity to make the argument before the agency,″ said Chief Justice John Roberts.

Stewart responded that requirements for states to control air pollution don’t change based on the number of states subject to the rule. “The requirements are exactly the same,’' he said.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson questioned why the Supreme Court was hearing the case before the other legal challenges were completed. A lawyer for industry groups challenging the rule said it imposes significant and immediate costs that could affect the reliability of the electric grid.

“There are hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, in costs over the next 12 to 18 months,’' with only a small reduction in air pollution and no guarantee the final rule will be upheld, said industry lawyer Catherine Stetson. “There are over-control issues here,’' she said.

The EPA has said power-plant emissions dropped by 18% in 2023 in the 10 states where it has been allowed to enforce its rule, which was finalized last March . Those states are Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. In California, limits on emissions from industrial sources other than power plants are supposed to take effect in 2026.

The rule is on hold in another dozen states because of separate legal challenges. The states are Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.

States that contribute to ground-level ozone, or smog, are required to submit plans ensuring that coal-fired power plants and other industrial sites don’t add significantly to air pollution in other states. In cases where a state has not submitted a “good neighbor” plan — or where EPA disapproves a state plan — the federal plan was supposed to ensure that downwind states are protected.

Ground-level ozone, which forms when industrial pollutants chemically react in the presence of sunlight, can cause respiratory problems, including asthma and chronic bronchitis. People with compromised immune systems, the elderly and children playing outdoors are particularly vulnerable.

Environmental and public health advocates have praised the EPA plan as a life-saving measure for people who live hundreds of miles away from power plants, cement factories, steel mills and other industrial polluters.

Industry groups criticize it as having an anti-coal bias that would drive up the cost of electricity.

Associated Press writer Mark Sherman contributed to this story.

MATTHEW DALY

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The $355 Million Trump Fraud Fine Is Even Worse Than It Sounds

The New York state judge presiding over the civil fraud trial against Donald Trump brought down the hammer with an appropriately harsh $354,868,768 judgment against him for a decade’s worth of lies at the Trump Organization. With interest, that total is over $435 million–and the total sum awarded surpasses $450 million when damages against the other defendants are included. This is the latest blow against the former president and current Republican front-runner as his legal problems crescendo. That is because the steep financial penalty was combined with the court in effect banishing Trump from conducting business in New York for three years, as well as his sons Don Jr. and Eric Trump from doing so for two years. Both sons are also on the hook for over $4 million each. Engoron’s ruling was a staggering defeat for Trump, forcing him to relinquish the legal reins of his eponymous company, though it fell short of a complete victory for New York Attorney General Letitia James because Judge Arthur Engoron refused to apply the corporate death penalty. That is, he did not order the cancellation of the Trump businesses’ certificates of doing business. That imperfect outcome for James’ office, however, may be a blessing in disguise. It demonstrates Engoron’s careful analysis of the evidence and will help rebut attacks on his objectivity in both the appellate court and the court of public opinion.

Let’s review how we got here. In September 2022, following an extensive three-year investigation, James filed a complaint against Donald Trump, various companies known collectively as the Trump Organization, and five of its senior executives: his children Eric, Don Jr., and Ivanka, along with Allen Weisselberg and Jeffrey McConney. Ivanka was later dismissed as a defendant, but in September 2023, the court granted partial summary judgment finding that each of the five remaining individual defendants was responsible for persistent and repeated fraud at the Trump Organization through their preparation and certification of financial statements that indefensibly (and sometimes comically) overvalued company assets. The court set the case for trial against the five defendants on several unresolved issues. It also appointed an independent monitor to oversee the Trump Organization and canceled its business certificates and those of any other entity controlled or owned by the defendants—meaning those companies could no longer operate. An appellate court, however, delayed canceling the certificates pending the outcome of the trial. Taking the hint, Judge Engoron has now reversed himself.

The 44-day trial, which began on Oct. 2 and wrapped up with final argument on Jan. 11, focused on six remaining causes of action—falsifying business records, falsifying financial statements, insurance fraud, and three counts of conspiracy, one for each of these three offenses—and the appropriate penalties. The three core legal issues at the heart of the trial were whether each defendant was responsible for the misrepresentations about the Trump Organization’s financials, the misrepresentations were intentional, and the misrepresentations mattered. The attorney general’s argument boiled down to “ the myriad deceptive schemes [the defendants] employed to inflate asset values and conceal facts were so outrageous that they belie innocent explanation .” In response, each of the five defendants sought to blame outside accountants for preparation of the financial statements and establish the inherent imprecision and subjectivity of valuing real estate. While each defendant individually argued there was insufficient evidence proving his respective intent to defraud, they collectively argued that this was a victimless fraud.

Although the defendants scored several points during trial, it was difficult if not impossible to justify the overinflated financial statements, effectively forcing Trump (and the other defendants) into a “we lied but so what” defense. That argument was doomed to fail because—whether phrased as Trump’s shouts of “ No victims, No Fraud, No Crimes, Happy Banks and Insurance Companies ” or his lawyer’s more sophisticated wording that the financial (mis)statements caused “ no harm to the public … or implicated the public market in any way ”—victim loss is not legally required. Ultimately, Engoron appropriately found that, as one commentator put it, “ breaking the law is breaking the law .”

The court’s verdict ruled against Trump, Eric, and Don Jr. on five of six counts, but did not hold them liable for committing insurance fraud. The verdict found Weisselberg and McConney liable on all six counts. The evidence was thin connecting Trump and his sons to the negotiations with the insurance companies and the representations made to obtain those policies, whereas Weisselberg and McConney systematically presented fraudulent information to insurers. Some may question the attorney general’s charging the three children, but the verdict against the sons validates the decision. That the court found no liability against the Trump family on one count demonstrates that Judge Engoron evaluated the evidence fairly and credited specific arguments made by the defense—which will protect the record on an appeal likely to challenge the sufficiency of the evidence and lob baseless allegations of judicial bias.

The nearly $355 million disgorgement was, as the law requires, based on the Trump Organization’s ill-gotten gains, including reduced interest rates on loans and profits from two deals that would not have occurred without Trump having lied about his financials. The office of the attorney general had requested $370 million plus interest which, compounded at the state statutory rate of 9 percent , could have been hundreds of millions more. As importantly, the judgment includes injunctive relief barring Trump from serving as an officer or owner for three years and keeping the Trump Organization under the control of an outside monitor for three years to ensure that it starts telling the truth about its assets. Judge Engoron stopped short of dissolving the Trump Organization, a punishment that would have appeared incongruous with the history of New York’s corporate death sentence .

Trump has vowed to appeal, but nothing in the record stands out that would overturn the judgment. Additionally, for Trump to delay enforcement of the judgment requires posting a bond in an amount equal to the judgment (called an “undertaking” under New York law). In light of the recent $83 million judgment in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, the immediate question is whether Trump has the liquidity to post a $355 million bond. If not, the judgment will go into effect, and Trump may have to sell assets to raise the cash needed to pay it. Trump cannot easily turn to his political donations to pay the judgment. It is illegal to use campaign funds to pay an expense that is totally unrelated to a campaign, and although Trump super PACs spent approximately $50 million of donor money on legal bills in 2023 defending the four criminal indictments, those cases are all connected to his candidacy for or tenure as president. It would be trickier for a super PAC to pay for this business debt, especially because Trump cannot legally control those funds. But it would be naïve to think Trump wouldn’t try to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of campaign finance law. And he could always make a direct appeal to his massive donor base to help pay this judgment, although this amount is a huge sum to raise, even for Trump.

In addition to the personal financial squeeze and beginning of the end for the Trump Organization, the judgment is the latest omen of looming legal problems that bear political significance. Trump’s inability to control himself is hurting his cause. In the Carroll trial, Trump’s courtroom behavior helped seal his fate with the jury . In the fraud trial, Trump ignored Judge Engoron’s instructions and ranted about how he should receive damages from the “political witch hunt.” This type of absurd argument has begun to surface in the criminal cases . Despite Trump constantly whining about being a political victim, three independent and objective fact-finders—two juries and a judge—have ruled against Trump in the three cases that have gone to trial: the recent Carroll defamation suit, the earlier 2023 case in which a jury found Trump sexually abused Carroll, and the New York civil fraud case. Those verdicts are based on the evidence and the law in a courtroom where, unlike a political rally, facts matter but conspiracy theories and baseless claims do not.

This judgment, along with the Carroll verdicts before it, could hurt Trump’s political brand. He rode to the 2016 nomination and eventually the White House as a rich, successful businessman who wins, but he is now being exposed as a fraud who keeps losing. Although his legal woes have strengthened his standing among the Republican electorate, his image is not as impervious with the broader American public. Polling has shown that a criminal conviction could severely damage his chances in the general election, and while this judgment is not going to put Trump in handcuffs, his team is certainly not celebrating. His reelection chances may depend on surviving the upcoming prosecutorial barrage, but this legal defeat was a painful blow to his campaign as well as his pocketbook.

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Regions & Countries

How americans view the situation at the u.s.-mexico border, its causes and consequences, 80% say the u.s. government is doing a bad job handling the migrant influx.

a bad argument

Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand the public’s views about the large number of migrants seeking to enter the U.S. at the border with Mexico. For this analysis, we surveyed 5,140 adults from Jan. 16-21, 2024. Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for the report and its methodology .

The growing number of migrants seeking entry into the United States at its border with Mexico has strained government resources, divided Congress and emerged as a contentious issue in the 2024 presidential campaign .

Chart shows Why do Americans think there is an influx of migrants to the United States?

Americans overwhelmingly fault the government for how it has handled the migrant situation. Beyond that, however, there are deep differences – over why the migrants are coming to the U.S., proposals for addressing the situation, and even whether it should be described as a “crisis.”

Factors behind the migrant influx

Economic factors – either poor conditions in migrants’ home countries or better economic opportunities in the United States – are widely viewed as major reasons for the migrant influx.

About seven-in-ten Americans (71%), including majorities in both parties, cite better economic opportunities in the U.S. as a major reason.

There are wider partisan differences over other factors.

About two-thirds of Americans (65%) say violence in migrants’ home countries is a major reason for why a large number of immigrants have come to the border.

Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are 30 percentage points more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to cite this as a major reason (79% vs. 49%).

By contrast, 76% of Republicans say the belief that U.S. immigration policies will make it easy to stay in the country once they arrive is a major factor. About half as many Democrats (39%) say the same.

For more on Americans’ views of these and other reasons, visit Chapter 2.

How serious is the situation at the border?

A sizable majority of Americans (78%) say the large number of migrants seeking to enter this country at the U.S.-Mexico border is eithera crisis (45%) or a major problem (32%), according to the Pew Research Center survey, conducted Jan. 16-21, 2024, among 5,140 adults.

Related: Migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border hit a record high at the end of 2023 .

Chart shows Border situation viewed as a ‘crisis’ by most Republicans; Democrats are more likely to call it a ‘problem’

  • Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to describe the situation as a “crisis”: 70% of Republicans say this, compared with just 22% of Democrats.
  • Democrats mostly view the situation as a major problem (44%) or minor problem (26%) for the U.S. Very few Democrats (7%) say it is not a problem.

In an open-ended question , respondents voice their concerns about the migrant influx. They point to numerous issues, including worries about how the migrants are cared for and general problems with the immigration system.

Yet two concerns come up most frequently:

  • 22% point to the economic burdens associated with the migrant influx, including the strains migrants place on social services and other government resources.
  • 22% also cite security concerns. Many of these responses focus on crime (10%), terrorism (10%) and drugs (3%).

When asked specifically about the impact of the migrant influx on crime in the United States, a majority of Americans (57%) say the large number of migrants seeking to enter the country leads to more crime. Fewer (39%) say this does not have much of an impact on crime in this country.

Republicans (85%) overwhelmingly say the migrant surge leads to increased crime in the U.S. A far smaller share of Democrats (31%) say the same; 63% of Democrats instead say it does not have much of an impact.

Government widely criticized for its handling of migrant influx

For the past several years, the federal government has gotten low ratings for its handling of the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. (Note: The wording of this question has been modified modestly to reflect circumstances at the time).

Chart shows Only about a quarter of Democrats and even fewer Republicans say the government has done a good job dealing with large number of migrants at the border

However, the current ratings are extraordinarily low.

Just 18% say the U.S. government is doing a good job dealing with the large number of migrants at the border, while 80% say it is doing a bad job, including 45% who say it is doing a very bad job.

  • Republicans’ views are overwhelmingly negative (89% say it’s doing a bad job), as they have been since Joe Biden became president.
  • 73% of Democrats also give the government negative ratings, the highest share recorded during Biden’s presidency.

For more on Americans’ evaluations of the situation, visit Chapter 1 .

Which policies could improve the border situation?

There is no single policy proposal, among the nine included on the survey, that majorities of both Republicans and Democrats say would improve the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. There are areas of relative agreement, however.

A 60% majority of Americans say that increasing the number of immigration judges and staff in order to make decisions on asylum more quickly would make the situation better. Only 11% say it would make things worse, while 14% think it would not make much difference.

Nearly as many (56%) say creating more opportunities for people to legally immigrate to the U.S. would make the situation better.

Chart shows Most Democrats and nearly half of Republicans say boosting resources for quicker decisions on asylum cases would improve situation at Mexico border

Majorities of Democrats say each of these proposals would make the border situation better.

Republicans are less positive than are Democrats; still, about 40% or more of Republicans say each would improve the situation, while far fewer say they would make things worse.

Opinions on other proposals are more polarized. For example, a 56% majority of Democrats say that adding resources to provide safe and sanitary conditions for migrants arriving in the U.S. would be a positive step forward.

Republicans not only are far less likely than Democrats to view this proposal positively, but far more say it would make the situation worse (43%) than better (17%).

Chart shows Wide partisan gaps in views of expanding border wall, providing ‘safe and sanitary conditions’ for migrants

Building or expanding a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border was among the most divisive policies of Donald Trump’s presidency. In 2019, 82% of Republicans favored expanding the border wall , compared with just 6% of Democrats.

Today, 72% of Republicans say substantially expanding the wall along the U.S. border with Mexico would make the situation better. Just 15% of Democrats concur, with most saying either it would not make much of a difference (47%) or it would make things worse (24%).

For more on Americans’ reactions to policy proposals, visit Chapter 3 .

Facts are more important than ever

In times of uncertainty, good decisions demand good data. Please support our research with a financial contribution.

Report Materials

Table of contents, fast facts on how greeks see migrants as greece-turkey border crisis deepens, americans’ immigration policy priorities: divisions between – and within – the two parties, from the archives: in ’60s, americans gave thumbs-up to immigration law that changed the nation, around the world, more say immigrants are a strength than a burden, latinos have become less likely to say there are too many immigrants in u.s., most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

Alabama justice invoked 'the wrath of a holy God' in IVF opinion. Is that allowed?

An Alabama Supreme Court's ruling has torn open a long-simmering and emotionally charged debate about whether some aspects of in vitro fertilization represent a form of abortion and should be banned under religious principles.

Christian opposition to abortion has long driven the debate over reproductive rights. Abortion opponents say life begins at conception, and even a handful of cells deserves the same legal protections as a person.

In his concurring opinion last week, Chief Justice Tom Parker, an elected Republican, invoked similar reasoning.

"In summary, the theologically based view of the sanctity of life adopted by the People of Alabama encompasses the following: (1) God made every person in His image; (2) each person therefore has a value that far exceeds the ability of human beings to calculate; and (3) human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself."

But legal scholars say invocating religion is an unusual step for a judge. And IVF advocates are concerned about injecting religion into what they see as a medical decision to have a family.

“The substance of the ruling is not a surprise at all. But the language he used, it’s completely out of bounds ‒ unusual to an extreme degree,” said Jennifer Hendricks, a law professor and family law expert at the University of Colorado Boulder.

IVF has faced religious opposition from some Christians

It all comes down to a small cluster cells .

On one side of the battle are millions of Americans who used in-vitro fertilization to have desperately wanted children who could otherwise not have been born.

On the other are Christian religious conservatives who argue humans should not be playing God in a laboratory, and that life begins at conception. The Catholic Church in particular opposes IVF, though some religions, including Buddhism and Hinduism , have no hesitations about the procedure.

Several Alabama facilities, including the provider that was sued in the initial case , announced this week that they are pausing their IVF programs.

Although the ruling itself affects only embryos in Alabama, word of the decision has spread quickly across the nation and already is reverberating in Washington. Opinions are highly polarized.

President Joe Biden weighed in with a statement Thursday saying voters should re-elect him if they wanted a different approach to reproductive rights. "The disregard for women’s ability to make these decisions for themselves and their families is outrageous and unacceptable," he said.  Vice President Kamala Harris also slammed the court's decision , saying it sets a dangerous precedent for "robbing women of the freedom to decide when and how to build a family."

But Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said she agrees with the court's contention that frozen embryos created through IVF are children. “Embryos, to me, are babies,” Haley told NBC News . “That's a life."

Ruling again pits theology against reproductive rights

Some conservative states have passed laws specifying that life begins at conception, and the Alabama court leaned heavily on Christian faith and the Bible to make its case. The court referred to the embryos as "embryonic children ... kept alive in a cryogenic nursery."

Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Washington D.C.-based nonprofit Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said citing the Bible in this manner is like “giving the middle finger to a foundational promise of our country.”

Alabama’s top court ruling on IVF is part of a larger movement to “impose religious theology," Laser said, in conflict with the constitutional promise of separating church and state. She saw the verdict in Alabama as part of a larger Christian nationalist movement – the idea that America was created by and for Christians an its laws should reflect that.

“The agenda doesn’t stop with reproductive rights. It’s much, much bigger,” Laser said. “And that should concern every American, because America wouldn’t be America without the separation of church and state.”

Laser noted that moral arguments put forth by lawmakers and judges often impose a singular definition of morality on everyone, including people of other faiths and Christians who don’t align with the same set of values or believe they should be imposed by law.

Along with jeopardizing access to IVF and abortions, Laser said the ruling could affect access to contraception, as some forms work by blocking embryos from implanting in the uterus.

“That’s what could come next,” she said.

IVF was a polarizing issue from the start

In 1979, a year after the world's first IVF baby was born, a coalition of anti-abortion groups denounced the new technology as "morally abhorrent" and persuaded the federal government to block funding for any research in which embryos were destroyed. But the number of what were then referred to as "test tube" babies continued to rise as desperate families turned to IVF to conceive children. Today, about 2% of all babies born in the U.S. annually are conceived through IVF.

"Over the years, the anti-abortion movement gradually accepted some reproductive technologies, as long as no embryos were destroyed during their use," said Margaret Marsh, a historian and professor at Rutgers University. "But the peace it made with the new technologies was always an uneasy peace.”

Marsh co-wrote a 2019 history of IVF with her sister, a gynecologist.

Because IVF was developed after Roe became the law of the land in 1973, embryos have typically been treated as private property that donors could implant, give away or have destroyed without consequence. But newly passed "personhood" laws pushed by conservatives and some religious groups are changing that.

Nationally, about 100,000 births a year involve IVF, an emotionally and physically exhausting process by which multiple eggs are harvested, fertilized and implanted to bring about a pregnancy. In most cases, doctors create more embryos than are implanted, allowing patients to store those embryos in liquid nitrogen at -321 degrees for future use, donation or destruction.

In the IVF procedure , a three- to five-day-old fertilized egg, known as a blastocyst , is implanted in a woman's uterus. At this point it contains between 70 and 200 cells .

Those tiny clusters of cells can only develop inside a womb, and officials estimate there may be as many as 1 million frozen embryos stored nationwide.

IVF families have often struggled for years to get pregnant and undergoing expensive IVF treatment typically requires the administration of powerful fertility drugs and invasive medical procedures for the chance to have a baby. People turn to IVF for many reasons, including fertility loss after cancer treatments, or military members heading out on long-term deployments who want to delay having children.

Is it OK for a judge to invoke the Bible?

In a commentary attached to the Alabama ruling, Parker leaned heavily on the religious foundation of American laws, connecting them to longstanding Christian tenets such as the 10 Commandments' prohibition against murder. Parker noted that other countries have adopted IVF policies that reduce the number of unneeded embryos and suggested that IVF regulations in the United States are little better than "the Wild West."

"The Alabama Constitution's recognition that human life is an endowment from God emphasizes a foundational principle of English common law, which has been expressly incorporated as part of the law of Alabama," Parker wrote.

"All three branches of government are subject to a constitutional mandate to treat each unborn human life with reverence," he continued. "Carving out an exception for the people in this case, small as they were, would be unacceptable to the People of this State, who have required us to treat every human being in accordance with the fear of a holy God who made them in His image."

The Catholic Church in 1987 issued an opinion setting out its opposition to IVF, arguing in part that it was immoral because it "does violence to human dignity and to the marriage act," by replacing the act of conception between a married couple with a procedure by a laboratory worker.

"Human beings bear the image and likeness of God. They are to be reverenced as sacred. Never are they to be used as a means to an end, not even to satisfy the deepest wishes of an infertile couple," the church said. "The marital act is not a manufacturing process, and children are not products."

Lael Weinberger, a nonresident fellow at Stanford Law School and attorney who previously clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, appointed by former President Donald Trump said the court's decision did not invoke religion and Parker was simply musing about the history and theology of law in his concurring opinion.

“It can't be the case that the First Amendment prohibits our courts from grappling with the history of law,” Weinberger said.

Weinberger said the new ruling gives the couples who originally sued another chance to file a wrongful death suit. A lower court had dismissed their claims on the basis that embryos were not considered children.

But Nicole Huberfeld, a law professor at Boston University School of Law, said Parker's opinion stands out because it references Christian beliefs so significantly.

"The thing is that's unusual is how overtly this concurrence is relying on Christian sanctity of life reasoning," she said.

The First Amendment's Establishment Clause typically limits the role religion can play in government, but the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 changed the longstanding process by which it reviewed conflicts between government and religion. The decision to change that process was written by Justice Gorsuch, who said the court needed to rely more heavily on "reference to historical practices and understandings." Parker, the Alabama judge, specifically referenced Gorsuch in his concurrent opinion.

Past Supreme Courts might have objected to Parker's reliance on religion, but Huberfeld said she's not sure whether the current conservative majority ‒ which overturned the right to abortion two years ago ‒ would find it problematic.

"Judges are not supposed to rely on religious principles for legal reasoning," Huberfeld said. "The Alabama Constitution does use the word 'God.' But so does the Declaration of Independence."

Professor Ian Farrell of the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law said Parker’s opinion is “certainly problematic” because it invokes cherry-picked portions of the Christian faith.Like other experts, he said the judge’s opinion may run afoul of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause because it so clearly draws from Christian faith to reach a conclusion.  “The Bible tells people to do a lot of crazy stuff,” Farrell said. “It doesn’t strike me as legitimate legal reasoning.”

Religion has always affected the way people interpret the law and played a role in the life of Americans, said Hendricks of UC Boulder. But legal standards have typically kept one specific religion, such as Christianity, from imposing its values on everyone.“The concern a lot of people have is that we’re on a path to theocracy here."

Lindsay Heller, an IVF mom and attorney, said she thanks "whoever is up there" every day for her two kids. But she believes IVF decisions should be between families and doctors ‒ not courts and religion.

"IVF might fall by the wayside if you're going by someone's religious values about how life is created," she said. "A doctor isn't going to put their license on the line to help someone get pregnant."

Elizabeth Weise contributed to this report.

IMAGES

  1. 18 Examples Of Fallacies To Help Improve Argumentation

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  2. Upset Couple Having Bad Argument Stock Image

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  3. 18 Examples Of Fallacies To Help Improve Argumentation

    a bad argument

  4. Upset Couple Having Bad Argument Stock Image

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  5. Upset Couple Having Bad Argument Stock Image

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  6. Man and Wife Having Bad Argument Stock Photo

    a bad argument

COMMENTS

  1. Bad Arguments and How to Avoid Them

    To start, let's define three common types of bad arguments, or logical fallacies: "straw man," "hollow man," and "iron man." Straw man arguments A straw man argument is a misrepresentation of an opinion or viewpoint, designed to be as easy as possible to refute.

  2. Arguments and How They Fail

    Neel Burton M.D. Hide and Seek Marriage Arguments and How They Fail A short guide to debate and logical fallacies. Posted June 22, 2019 Source: Pexels "I strongly object to wrong arguments on...

  3. What Is a Logical Fallacy? 15 Common Logical Fallacies

    A logical fallacy is an argument that can be disproven through reasoning. This is different from a subjective argument or one that can be disproven with facts; for a position to be a logical fallacy, it must be logically flawed or deceptive in some way. Compare the following two disprovable arguments. Only one of them contains a logical fallacy:

  4. The Hallmarks of a Bad Argument

    The Hallmarks of a Bad Argument September 13, 2023 by Isaac Saul Photo by Yan Krukau Note from Jane: Today's post is somewhat tangential to the usual focus of this site, but I'd argue—for nonfiction writers anyway—knowing how to make a decent argument is fundamental to persuasive writing, op-ed writing, and overall literary citizenship.

  5. List of fallacies

    A fallacy is the use of invalid or otherwise faulty reasoning in the construction of an argument. All forms of human communication can contain fallacies. Because of their variety, fallacies are challenging to classify. They can be classified by their structure ( formal fallacies) or content ( informal fallacies ).

  6. Fallacies

    Fallacies First published Fri May 29, 2015; substantive revision Thu Apr 2, 2020 Two competing conceptions of fallacies are that they are false but popular beliefs and that they are deceptively bad arguments. These we may distinguish as the belief and argument conceptions of fallacies.

  7. Good and bad arguments

    When the argument is weak, the argument is bad. You could say that the premises fail to provide support for the conclusion altogether. For example: I have a very strong feeling that my lottery ticket is the winning ticket, so I'm quite confident I will win a lot of money tonight. If the argument is strong, there are again two cases:

  8. Argument and Argumentation

    First published Fri Jul 16, 2021 Argument is a central concept for philosophy. Philosophers rely heavily on arguments to justify claims, and these practices have been motivating reflections on what arguments and argumentation are for millennia.

  9. Evaluating Arguments

    A good argument supports a rational inference to the conclusion, a bad argument supports no rational inference to the conclusion. [1] Consider the following example: All human beings are mortal. Socrates is a human being. / ∴ / ∴ Socrates is mortal. This argument asserts that Socrates is mortal.

  10. How to Win Every Argument, According to an Expert

    If you see a conversation as a fight or competition, you can win by cheating as long as you don't get caught. You will be happy to convince people with bad arguments. You don't mind ...

  11. Exposing bad arguments

    In many disciplines, a good or bad argument is a matter of opinion, but from a critical thinking standpoint, bad arguments are weak and invalid and lead to faulty conclusions and misguided decisions.

  12. 9 Ways to Construct a Compelling Argument

    In the absence of conviction, arguments tend to lack coherence or force. In this article, we take a look at how you can put together an argument, whether for an essay, debate speech or social media post, that is forceful, cogent and - if you're lucky - might just change someone's mind. 1. Keep it simple Keep your argument concise.

  13. The Rules of Logic Part 2: Good vs. Bad Arguments

    This is an important distinction. If the argument is good, then the conclusion must be true, but if the argument is bad, the conclusion may or may not true, all that you can conclude is that the argument itself does not work. For example: Therefore, Socrates is a mortal. This is a good argument.

  14. Bad Faith Argument vs. Good Faith Argument

    A bad faith argument boils down to whether the arguer genuinely believes the claim they're making. Bad faith arguments and logical fallacies A bad faith argument isn't a logical fallacy per se, but in many cases, arguers use logical fallacies to support bad faith arguments. Common ones include: Ad hominem attacks Straw man claims

  15. A Field Guide to Bad Faith Arguments

    The hallmark of a bad-faith argument is that it disguises the core point of a debate rather than addressing issues, beliefs, and values head-on. Bad faith arguments aren't "real" positions; they're proxy positions people take for rhetorical purposes. In some cases, a bad faith position can be intentional.

  16. 16 Common Logical Fallacies and How to Spot Them

    Karla Hesterberg Published: July 26, 2022 Logical fallacies — those logical gaps that invalidate arguments — aren't always easy to spot. While some come in the form of loud, glaring inconsistencies, others can easily fly under the radar, sneaking into everyday meetings and conversations undetected.

  17. An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments

    Hope you enjoyed that. This has been An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments. Thanks for visiting. Sightings of unintended irony should be reported to the author! If you would like to help support this book with a donation, that would be much appreciated. Thank you! (Also, now on Substack .) Donate with Stripe. Donate with PayPal.

  18. 15 Bad arguments to avoid

    15 Bad arguments to avoid In this article 15 mistakes to avoid in your next argument: Argument by assertion Self-sealing argument Circular reasoning Appeal to authority Appeal to credentials Appeal to common belief Appeal to common sense Appeal to tradition Appeal to emotion Appeal to consequences Appeal to motive Ad hominem Appeal to ridicule

  19. What makes a bad argument?

    Jun 23, 2023 What makes a bad argument? Isaac Saul Photo by Jeremy Bishop / Unsplash All the ways to engage in bad-faith. I'm Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then "my take."

  20. 3. What is a Good Argument (I)?

    Both of these are bad arguments, as you might be able to see. But they're bad in different ways. In the first argument on top, the problem is obviously that the first premise is false — all actors are not robots. But that's the only problem with this argument. In particular, the logic of this argument is perfectly good.

  21. How to Get Past That Endless Argument

    Discover How to Get Past That Endless Argument The whys How to stop Getting over it Seeking professional help Recap It's not always easy to move on from a disagreement in a relationship. But with...

  22. After an Argument: The Right Way to Make Up

    Go back and solve the problem that started the argument. The dishes left on the counter, the money spent on shoes or video games, the time the kids need to get to bed. This is where it is easy to ...

  23. ELI5: What is a bad faith arguement, exactly? : r ...

    The fact that it's messy and context-dependant is precisely why it's so powerful for making bad faith arguments. An argument made in good faith tries to clarify which meaning is being used. An argument in bad faith deliberately exploits the confusion.

  24. Supreme Court seems skeptical of EPA's 'good neighbor' rule

    FILE - Emissions rise from the smokestacks at the Jeffrey Energy Center coal power plant as the suns sets, near Emmett, Kan., Sept. 18, 2021. The Supreme Court's conservative majority seemed skeptical Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2024, as a government lawyer argued that the Environmental Protection Agency should be allowed to continue enforcing its anti-air-pollution "good neighbor'' rule.

  25. The $355 million Trump fraud fine is even worse than it sounds

    The 44-day trial, which began on Oct. 2 and wrapped up with final argument on Jan. 11, focused on six remaining causes of action—falsifying business records, falsifying financial statements ...

  26. The U.S.-Mexico Border: How Americans View the Situation, Its Causes

    Just 18% say the U.S. government is doing a good job dealing with the large number of migrants at the border, while 80% say it is doing a bad job, including 45% who say it is doing a very bad job. Republicans' views are overwhelmingly negative (89% say it's doing a bad job), as they have been since Joe Biden became president.

  27. IVF opinion from Alabama justice was overtly religious. Was it OK?

    Laser noted that moral arguments put forth by lawmakers and judges often impose a singular definition of morality on everyone, including people of other faiths and Christians who don't align ...

  28. 'Bad for Trump': Law professor explains Supreme Court's delay on ...

    The SCOTUS wait game on whether to keep the January 6 prosecution on hold as Trump has asked is likely due to some back chambers maneuverings. But one expert believes the nine justices have ...

  29. Coco Gauff says she was 'fueled' by a lengthy argument with ...

    American Coco Gauff said that she was "fueled" by a heated debate with the umpire during her 2-6 6-4 6-3 victory against Karolína Plíšková at the Dubai Tennis Championships on Wednesday.