Quote:
Originally Posted by cat in the hat
The arousing of prejudice, pity, anger, and similar emotions has nothing to do with the essential facts, but is merely a personal appeal to the man who is judging the case.
I see this violated many time every day even on this site.
For instance, I do not beleive that having served in the military automatically makes someones opinion on anything other than military matters more or less valid. ie. Expertise in one field does not necessarily transfer to another.
There are many other logical fallacies that people slip in to their arguments especially when they are speaking to people who already agree with them. Once emotions get stirred up, reason loses out to fear or pride.
Of course name calling can be effective. Get someone upset and they will not think as clearly and sometime violence IS the answer. But once an opponent throws out the red herring, straw man, appeal to emotion, argument ad hominem or begging the question, I usually lose interest in their arguments.
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Persuasion (especially persuasion on a large scale) and debate are not the same thing.
Scott Adams has been addressing this for a few years.
One of the problems people run into with debate is the lack of specifically defined assumptions.
Often, parties who can't agree on "facts and logic" are both reasonably logical, given their own mutually-exclusive set of unstated assumptions.
For instance, SJWs assume that: (1) all hierarchies are arbitrary, purely based on power, and (2) no merit is involved.
Many of their arguments and prescriptions for remedy are quite logical, given the original axioms.
The problem is that if you directly attack either of their assumptions, they immediately go to the logical fallacy of false dichotomy.
They re-cast your position as (1) hierarchies involve no arbitrary power and (2) hierarchies are purely based on merit.
Both of those positions are demonstrably false and SJWs conclude they have proven their assumptions.
They will be resistant to any attempts at nuance and attempts to debate or influence them by directly attacking their assumptions will prove fruitless.
Instead, you must grant them their assumptions, then build logical connections to conclusions which can be shown to be true or false in reality.
When conclusions logically connected to their assumptions are shown to be false in reality, you just sit back and let them chew on it, without doing an end-zone dance.
From a persuasion perspective, many will listen because you've reached "emotional congruence" by granting their assumptions, and they are also allowed the ability to retreat with dignity when shown error.
Logically speaking, this is proof by contradiction (or, in this case, disproof by contradiction) using contraposition.
This addresses both the persuasion and debate angles.
It doesn't work on all, but it will reach some.