Do You Make These Six Mistakes When Debating?
No doubt you’ve seen this yellow diamond road sign. You have a hunch you know what it means, but…
Is the City trying to tell you that the children playing on this street are moving in slow motion? Mentally handicapped? Or…
Merely you, as the car driver, need to slow down along this stretch of street because children live and play here?
Common sense tells you it’s the last one.
Why the confusion? Bottom line: Poor sentence structure. Insert a comma after “Slow” and the meaning becomes clear.
This mistake is known as a fallacy of amphiboly. And it’s part of a class of ambiguous arguments that are unsound because they contain words that can be understood in more than one sense.
Here are five more common fallacies of ambiguity.
Accent. Arises when there is ambiguity on stress or tone. Think email or blog comments taken the wrong way or out of context. If someone writes, “It’s impossible to praise this book too highly,” you have to wonder: are they being sarcastic or not? You just don’t know.
Hypostatization. Occurs when you regard an abstract word as a concrete one. Commonly known as personification. “The City can do no wrong.” Only a person can do no wrong, not the City.
Equivocation. Stems from a shift in meaning of a key term during an argument. Here’s an absurd example to prove my point: “Only man is rational. No woman is a man. Thus, no woman is rational.” See the shift in meaning on the word “man?” That’s equivocation.
Composition. Results when you try to apply what is true of the individual to the whole group. The first violinist in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra maybe the best violinist in the country, but…that doesn’t mean that the CSO is the best symphony in the country.
Division. Occurs when you try to apply what is true of the group to each part or member. The Chicago Symphony maybe the best orchestra in the world, but that doesn’t mean the first violinist in the orchestra is the best violinist in the country.
Why do I bring this up? I bring this issue up because I make these mistakes quite often on this blog and elsewhere. And I’ve seen others do the same. My goal is to help us all avoid these mistakes so we can exchange sound arguments as best as we can.
Got any other good examples of these mistakes? Things you’ve seen in your own experience? I’m looking forward to your thoughts.
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6 Comments to Do You Make These Six Mistakes When Debating?
Random thoughts:
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1. Everyone in Ohio knows that the CSO is the Columbus Symphony Orchestra. Except for the people in Cleveland and Cincinnati.
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2. While we should exert every effort to do whatever we do in the very best possible manner (Christians: do all to the glory of God in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ), we must not refrain from attempting to perform well for fear of failure.
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3. The only people who don’t make mistakes are those who do nothing at all. Which, if you think about it, is a mistake.
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4. In other words, we all make nistakes.
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Demian FarnworthMay 8, 2009
Al, you said,
we must not refrain from attempting to perform well for fear of failure
Amen.
I don’t have a quick example to hand, but a frequent error of which I am guilty is rewriting as I write. Which means, of course, that there a lots and lots of verb tense disagreements, dangling participles, and other egregious grammatical errors. I know that a grammatical error is not, necessarily, a logical or philosophical debating mistake, but it can muddy the waters quite effectively.
Another debating mistake I have made (and I’ve seen others do the same) is using shorthand. In a comment thread regarding the fact that some Christians claim to be both persecuted and, at the same time, the majority, we got onto the topic of home schooling. A commenter pointed out that not all home schoolers are conservative or fundamentalist Christians. I agred and apologized for using homeschoolers as shorthand for “conservative or fundamentalsit Christian homeschoolers.” In other words, it can really help to keep a debate, conversation, comment thread on topic if terms are actually defined as they are used (especially if one is describing a subset of a larger group).
Demian FarnworthMay 9, 2009
Billy, yeah, I’m with you: Writing in general can muddy the water. Sometimes I agonize for 30 minutes [slight exageration, maybe] over a comment before pushing send, hoping that I’m being as clear as possible [like I'm doing now ], but you really never know…until you hit send and somebody reads it and responds.
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And I get dinged a lot for shorthand, too. That’s kind of the nature of blogging, though, right?
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I saw Daniel Florien get dinged for the very same homeschooling thing…interesting. Thanks for your comment, Billy!
RemcoJune 14, 2009
Great post, there are a lot of debating mistakes out there. There’s one common example I can offer you: the assertion.
In an assertion, a person uses an assumption (often a personal opinion) and bases his argument on it as if it is a proven fact.
For example: “You are a liar, therefore your arguments aren’t true”.
Remco: Well said. And that particular example is also an instance of an ad hominem…or attack on character where the substance of the argument is ignored…good stuff. Thanks for sharing.
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May 7, 2009