Essay:Argumentation - An Introduction

Recently I had the opportunity to take an amateur assessment of the ability to engage in argumentation

of several active members of RW. The results were dismal, but that is hardly the fault of those whom I

assessed, because argumentation is a skill that must be practiced to develop. As is common in most

social settings, argumentation on RW is seen as something undesirable. That attitude was shown to be

apparent when several people, including one with moderator status, expressed their desire to shut down

the various arguments and sub-arguments I was involved in soon after they began, rather than allowing

the arguments to resolve on their own volition. One RW member suggested that I and I alone was "dragging

out" an argument, which is impossible because argumentation is a collaborative endeavor. A person cannot

single handedly keep an argument going. Ironically, I was also told by that member that because RW is a

collaborative effort, my participation in those arguments was antithetic to RW's wiki-based mission.

In the previous paragraph I mentioned that argumentation is a skill that must be practiced in order for

people to develop that skill. Obviously in an arena where argumentation is frowned upon and actively

discouraged it would be very difficult to practice that skill and develop it. The reason most social

arenas, including RW are places where members try to "shut down" arguments when they arbitrarily decide

the arguments are "getting out of hand", is because argumentation has a serious image problem.

Argumentation can be very messy and unappealing, it can generate discomfort in both those who engage in

it and those who are spectators of it. But the reason argumentation suffers from such a bad reputation

is because while it's something we engage in on a daily basis, whether it's between family members,

friends, or public interaction, we all start out being terrible at it. And unless we have opportunities

to engage in it unfettered, we have no hope of getting any better at it. However, it's more complicated

than that. If we engage in many arguments over time our usage of methods that don't seem to work well

will diminish in frequency, as our usage in methods that do seem to work well will increase in

frequency. The problem with that approach is that we will wind up adopting some very bad habits.

Aggressive tactics like shouting, name-calling, and threatening, as well as more passive-aggressive

tactics like ridicule all seem to "work" well in argumentation, if the goal is to triumph over one's

opponent, which is unfortunately what people have been conditioned since childhood to believe is the

ultimate goal of argumentation. What we tend not to realize, because we don't understand much about

argumentation, is that shouting, name-calling, ridiculing and threatening are not parts of

argumentation. When people get to the point where they are willing to resort to those tactics, they've

given up on arguing. They've given up on the collaborative nature of argumentation, and the reason they

give up on arguing in deference to methods of force is because they have exhausted their ability to

argue effectively. And since the likelihood that people engaging in argumentation know how to engage in

argumentation is so low as to be non-existent, people typically exhaust their ability to argue

effectively very quickly.

Even though people generally have no idea what they're doing when they argue, arguments are ubiquitous

in everyone's lives. We do it all the time, probably more than we do anything else, other than sleeping.

So that means that either we are a species doomed to engage in perpetual instances of futile undesirable

behavior, or argumentation is something that is supposed to help us navigate the world, but we're just

so bad at it that we rarely get to enjoy its potential rewards. There are few ways to instigate

progress, and argumentation may even be the most useful one. So if it's so useful, why are we so

clueless about how to do it the right way?

Argumentation is often said to be the "study of reason", so wouldn't you think that a place like RW

would be on top of the whole argumentation process? It should be, but there are reasons why it is not,

besides the one I just discussed, in which argumentation is unfairly considered to be an unsavory

endeavor. The main reason we don't recognize the importance of argumentation is because of where it came

from. For much of the duration of western civilization, there were two main branches of academia,

philosophy (including natural philosophy which evolved into science) and rhetoric. By the time natural

philosophy had evolved into science, it was considered the epitome of acadmic progress, due to the

plethora of useful knowledge science was generating. And because science evolved from philosophy,

philosophy was allowed to maintain its good standing in academia, as long as it stuck to talking only

about the theoretical. Not so for rhetoric, which was soon, and for good reason, considered to be the

bastard child of academia. Rhetoric had evolved into a system of persuasion, where any way of persuading

people was considered "fair game", and that includes the methods of force, the "bad" tactics that

argumentation can devolve into, which I discussed earlier. Besides those methods, dozens, perhaps even

hundreds of manuals were printed that focused only on explaining how to gesture when engaging in oration

(giving speeches). Stabbing at the air to make your point, sweeping arm gestures, etc, became all the

rage in rhetoric during the 17-18th centuries. By the 19th century science had produced so many concrete

advancements in society that it became the focus of all "serious" academia. Though philosophy was kept

around as a purely theoretical pursuit, science retained a virtual monopoly on all things practical. And

rhetoric, the only competition science had for being an authority on the practical, became relegated to

the history books. Rhetoric was seen as an old fashioned anachronism. It lived on only in specialized

political usage. For example, Bill Clinton's "fist with thumb pointing forward" gesture, and Donald

Trump's "palm-forward index-finger-pointed-up" gesture are the modern remnants of the "gesture school" of

rhetoric that I touched on earlier in this paragraph. Before rhetoric went out of favor, every town had

a town square where common people would give speeches, while standing on a soap-box. Technological

innovations such as the railroad and telegraph slowly put an end to the grassroots politics that had

been dominant in society for hundreds of years. Politics consolidated until it became the sole domain of

the politician. So the simultaneous pressures of science and the consolidation of politics in the hands

of politicians spelled the death knell for rhetoric as a field that every educated person was supposed to

be versed in.

It wasn't until the mid-20th century that academics began to realize that we lost something very

important when we moved away from rhetoric: the ability to effectively get our point across to others.

Two world wars forced them to come to grips with the poor state of diplomacy at a time when "reason" was

supposed to save the world from undesirable things just like those wars. So they dusted off the old

rhetoric manuals, keeping the crucial and doing away with the superficial (such as the "gesture"

manuals). They sought to develop a systematic, reasoned framework for the exchange of ideas. They were

not naive, they knew that differences of opinion led to argument, and that because everyone has their

own unique opinions, arguments happen everywhere, all the time. But they recognized that argumentation

had yet to be figured out and codified, and that the sorry state of the typical argument was far from

the ideal in argumentation, because they noticed that there were differences between poorer arguments

and better arguments. And so, by examining the structure of the argument, they developed what is now

known as Argumentation. Unfortunately, it was a hard sell, and remains so. Argumentation still retains a

dichotomy in which the academic definition is at odds with the colloquial definition. Argumentation is

still considered by most people to be one of the worst of the human tendencies, rather than one of the

best. Because of the situation I described earlier, by which philosophy and science moved on and

progressed, while rhetoric did not, the ways we understand the world, or "reality" has been relegated to

those two fields.

RW is a remnant of the twin powers of philosophy and science. On the one hand, RW exalts the concept of

science, but is also influenced by philosophy. That's because RW grew out of the Skeptic Movement which

began in the mid-1980s. The reason RW has a lot of pages that deal with logical fallacies is because

they are components of what philosophers have deemed "critical thinking". Argumentation also deals

heavily in sorting out fallacious logic, so what's the difference between argumentation and critical

thinking? The difference is that it's a lot easier to understand or explain argumentation than it is to

understand or explain critical thinking. And that's not because argumentation is simple, far from it,

but, having come from philosophy, critical thinking is built on a primarily theoretical concept, while

argumentation is meant to be practical. The term "Critical thinking" was coined by philosophers in the

early 1980s and was quickly adopted by the then nascent Skeptics Movement. The philosophers who coined

the term "critical thinking" did so because they noticed that those of their colleagues who had

revitalized rhetoric by developing argumentation, were making tremendous strides and they wanted a piece

of the action, so to speak. So "critical thinking" began cherry-picking elements of argumentation that

had already been established decades earlier. The most obvious of those elements is the logical fallacy.

Since then, the critical thinking crowd has discovered many new logical fallacies, for which they

deserve credit, but critical thinking remains a fairly nebulous concept. Different so-called authorities

on critical thinking present wildly different definitions of what it entails. Argumentation on the other

hand, only has to deal with two competing definitions, the useful, academic definition as the study of

reason, and the colloquial one as senseless bickering.

As I stated earlier, RW grew out of the Skeptic Movement. We know this because of some of the shared

terminology, the most obvious being "woo". The Skeptic Movement developed to counter the New Age

Movement, which started in the 1960s when westerners began seeking so-called spiritual enlightenment

from the eastern traditions of Hindu gurus, Buddhism, and to a lesser extent, traditional Chinese

medicine. By the 1970s the New Age Movement had dusted off the old books from the western tradition of

mysticism, such as Theosophy, itself a crude copy of eastern spirituality. The western New Age Movement

also flirted with science-fiction in the form of the UFO craze. These various trends in the New Age

Movement became very popular. By the 1970s every newspaper had a horoscope section, an indication of

just how far it had infiltrated the mainstream. The Skeptic Movement coined the term "woo" to derisively

refer to all the New Age concepts which relied on supernatural explanations of how they worked and

derived their power. After 9/11, the Skeptic Movement, which had always been quite small in comparison

to the New Age movement, entered a period of renewed popularity. This was when the New Atheist movement

was created, and soon after it was created it coalesced to some degree with the Skeptic Movement. After

all, 'god' is a supernatural concept, so it only makes sense that it would be included in the "woo" the

Skeptic Movement campaigns against, right? Well it wasn't quite that easy. Like the way argumentation is

commonly misunderstood as a social taboo, so too was the concept of atheism. For the first 15-20 years

of the existence of the Skeptic Movement, it lacked the courage to tackle religion head on, instead it

flirted with the Humanism movement. It wasn't until some very aggressive atheists gained traction in the

public sphere after publishing books, that the Skeptic Movement finally had the guts to welcome the New

Atheists into the fold. However, as we'll see in the next paragraph, the marriage between the Skeptic

Movement and the New Atheist movement ultimately revealed political incompatibilities that resulted in a

Great Schism of these two movements. But don't worry, we'll get back to Argumentation soon.

At this point in our history lesson about ourselves, it should be noted that there had always been a

strong faction within the Skeptic Movement that acted as apologists for (western) "progress". As society

began questioning some of less desirable results of 'progress', such as Social Darwinism, and became

devoted to exposing historical wrongs on disenfranchised populations, all in the name of "progress", the

New Atheist movement, having been born out of reactionary anti-Islamic post-9/11 rhetoric, moved further

to the right of the political spectrum, while a large contingent of the Skeptic Movement moved to the

left, and began recognizing the post-colonial problems that exist in society today. Gamergate,

Elevatorgate, and the rise of the alt-right resulted in some very clear lines of demarcation being drawn

between the two political forces. RationalWiki has been able to embrace the issues of importance to the

New Left while retaining its fundamental opposition to the supernatural and veneration of western

"progress" in the form of science. This makes RW unique in the public sphere of discourse. These are

heady times, my friends, but for all the advancement in culture that RW represents, there remains at

least one elephant in the room that will have to be addressed for this progressive trend to continue to

thrive. Or course I mean argumentation.

Besides the reasons I already stated for why argumentation hasn't caught on in the imaginations of the

arm-chair intelligentsia, the current political climate has caused the skill of argumentation to further

wither. This problem also plagued the Skeptic Movement, just as it continues to plague RW. The problem

I'm referring to is sometimes called an "echo chamber". Because the ideological opponents of RW harbor

views that are either vile, insane, or both, there is very little if any opportunity for the denizens of

RW to engage in useful argumentation. The average member of RW doesn't have to argue with alt-right

wingnuts or woo-loving moonbats because those people never present cogent arguments. The only place the

people of RW could even hope to find worthy opposition for argumentation is among themselves. Yet

developing that kind of collaborative relationship among members is discouraged because the preferred

ideologies of RW are considered to be so important that any serious disagreement is seen as a threat to

the cohesion of the ideologically aligned community. And this is not an unreasonable standpoint, because

people who are really bad at arguing really do risk the disruption of cohesion if they explore the

nature of internal disagreement. There are only two ways to stop that from happening: discourage

disagreement or promote the learning of proper argumentation. The latter is clearly preferable because

when people learn how argumentation works, they instinctively refrain from making as many poor arguments

as they used to. And when people know that they are arguing with someone who knows argumentation, they

know they have to present solid arguments, because they know their arguments will be scrutinized.

Learning argumentation doesn't cause one to be more argumentative, or to drag arguments on ad nauseam,

in fact it results in the exact opposite: fewer and shorter arguments. Arguments only drag on when one

or more participants keep making poor arguments. They keep making poor arguments because they don't know

how argumentation really works.

But argumentation can still be messy, even when everyone involved knows how to argue. It is a skill that

can never be perfected, and even people very skilled in argumentation can sometimes make poor arguments.

Hopefully, though, they'll do that less often as they gain more experience arguing as arguers informed

of how argumentation works (which includes understanding what doesn't work). Argumentation is the

practical cousin of critical thinking. The members of RW already have the disposition to be good

arguers. I can't think of any group that has more to gain by learning argumentation and is perfectly

primed to excel at it, than the active members of RationalWiki. But in order for that to happen the

members must realize the importance of free expression. Not "free speech" as an alt-right dog-whistle,

but free expression among themselves. They must not be afraid of getting banned even if they totally

fly off the handle. There isn't even a need to ostracize the arguer, because there is nothing scary

about arguing, or at least, there is nothing that should scare a grown adult. Yes, you may cringe when

you see poor arguments take place within the confines of RW, but so what? Are we so fragile that we

cannot let each other make their point? They say that anything worth doing is worth doing well, and I

agree with that, but doing things well takes practice and knowledge of the parameters of the task at

hand. There will be people name-calling, ridiculing, threatening, etc. But over time, if those people

learn argumentation, they will resort to those tactics less often, and eventually creating good

arguments and recognizing bad ones will become so easy there will be no point in debasement. If we don't

learn how argumentation works, the amount of name-calling, ridiculing and threatening will likely never

diminish.

At the beginning of this spiel I mentioned that I found it peculiar that so many people piled on and

happily accused me of being responsible for all the arguments I was involved in on RW. It took me a

while to figure out why. At first I blamed it on cronyism, and while I'm sure that dynamic played some

part in the discrepancy, I had forgotten that my profile on RW lists Argumentation as one of my

interests, while another of my interests is listed as Egoism. A person who has no idea what those

interests actually entail would probably be inclined to interpret it to mean that I am a belligerent

narcissistic blowhard who can't play nice in the sandbox, and maybe even set out to prove it by way of

provocation. Others might jump at the chance to "take me down a few pegs", to show me up as a hostile

meany. Even someone who is not consciously aware of a bias against someone who claims to be interested

in argumentation (and egoism) may have a desire to do some proverbial poking at the beast, just to see

what transpires. That's all very unfortunate, but the good news is that it doesn't have to be that way.

This is your opportunity to improve yourself in a way that I think is paramount in this day and age.

Argumentation is a skill perfectly suited to today's Internet-driven world. Every person who has ever

fallen for a conspiracy theory has allowed themselves to be convinced by a poor argument. Every

alt-right "influencer" of any note is a seemingly bottomless repository of poor arguments (whenever

they're not too lazy to do anything but lie).

So here's my proposal: I will volunteer to write a manual of argumentation exclusively for RW. Besides

keeping me busy, I believe it will give members of RW an opportunity for self-improvement that will pay

life-long dividends. This manual will be loosely based on David Zarefsky's Argumentation course lecture

series for the Teaching Company. That series is over 20 years old now, so I will update it by writing

new chapters pertaining to the internet and wiki format, as well as using more current references and

examples. I will try my best to not plagiarize Zarefsky's lectures by paraphrasing as much as possible.

I will also be writing much more about bias and context than Zarefsky does, as well as integrating an

egoistic perspective that is missing from Zarefsky's treatment.

This will be a long and arduous process that will take up most of my free time for a significant period.

I am not an academic trained in argumentation, I have learned it on my own mainly from Zarefsky's

lecture series. I hope there will be some appreciation of the effort I am willing to put into doing

this. Zarefsky's lecture series is 12 hours long and is available in video format at a cost of $235 at

the time of this writing. If it interests you, I highly recommend purchasing it. I've listened to an

audio-only version of it, which no longer seems to be available for purchase, several times and I will

go through it chapter by chapter to coincide with the chapters of the manual I will be writing. This

project will probably take at least a few months to complete and the release of new chapters may be

delayed by unforeseen issues in my life. Each chapter will probably be about as long as this proposal is.

If you read it, you will become familiar with the terminology used when talking about argumentation,

pitfalls that can derail good argumentation, as well as some "burdens" that a person who desires to

argue in good faith must accept responsibility for. I am not exaggerating when I say that learning

argumentation has been the most beneficial thing to my life that I have ever done. It has helped me

communicate more effectively with my family, friends and people on the internet. If you set your mind to

learning argumentation, I think you may find it as rewarding as I have.

This essay represents an introduction to the series. Subsequent chapters will appear in the

Essay section of RW. I expect it to be a valuable resource that will go a long way in helping RW remain at the

cutting edge of online discourse. If anyone feels like helping, I'm sure we can work out a system for

collaboration. Even a proof-reader or two would be very helpful (and you'll get to read the chapters

before anyone else does!). FairDinkum (talk) 08:18, 11 March 2023 (UTC)