Philosophy For Dummies. Tom Morris

of sense experience for confirming anything we believe. The sentence, “I’ll believe it when I see it” is a typical empiricist claim. But even the most experientially oriented philosophers value the role of reason in analysis, discernment, evaluation, and inference, or logical argument.

In philosophy, an argument is a reasoned presentation of ideas, where you marshal evidence in favor of the truth of a conclusion. Arguments, in their essence, aren’t something you direct at people as you would a gun you’re aiming at a target. You don’t primarily argue with someone or at someone; you present an argument for a conclusion, which you often intend as a means to persuade someone else, but you also sometimes employ an argument just as a way of discovering for yourself the truth. As the French essayist Joseph Joubert once pointed out, “The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.” Good arguments can make for good progress.

So, in philosophy, arguments aren’t supposed to be things you win or lose. They’re not like games or athletic contests of the mind. Even if you engage in an argument with another person in the colloquial sense over a substantive issue — and you truly want to convince your dialogue partner of the persuasiveness of your viewpoint — you’d better be able to construct a good argument in the philosophical sense as well. And studying a little philosophy helps you know how to do so better than you may already.

      In every walk of life, you need to be able to give a reasoned presentation of your beliefs in such a way as to persuade other people. Lawyers aren’t the only ones who worry about convincing others to accept a particular point of view. Persuasive argument is an important part of every marketing campaign and management job, it’s a tool for any business builder, a requirement for any challenged parent, and it’s useful for any young person making their way in the world. It’s as important to serious preachers and teachers as to practicing scientists. A good argument helps us see where the truth is to be found.

      In my first year at college, I discovered an important truth about the limitations of reasoned argument. My mother had always insisted I have short hair and be perfectly shaved each day. But away on my own, I grew my hair long and began to cultivate an impressive mustache. A few months later, I saw my mom for the first time since the inception of my new look. She offered me money on the spot to shave off my mustache and claimed that “Something’s psychologically wrong with anyone who has a beard or mustache!”, I refused on principle and found the claim to be outrageous.

      Instead, I decided to prove by argument she was wrong and started enumerating aloud all the great personages of history I could think of who had mustaches or beards and yet who were paragons of psychological health and worldly success. Working my way from ancient Greece through modern times, I was taken up short and momentarily struck mute by a sudden realization “Mother,” I said with all the shocked conviction I could muster, suddenly certain that I had unassailable proof of my own stance that facial hair and sound psychological health can go quite well together, “Dad has always had a mustache!”

      “You see what I’m saying?” she instantly replied, and in doing showed me the sad truth about the limits of reasoned argument in the world.

As the ancient thinker Protagoras saw in his time, “There are two sides to every question.” That doesn’t mean there is no one truth to be found on any issue, but that along the way to its discovery, we need to appreciate the various considerations that strike different people as important. And on big issues, we can rarely get everyone to agree. An old country-music lyric says, “One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.” Sometimes traffic can flow both ways in the analysis or assessment of an argument. What I’d thought was the most decisive possible refutation by counterexample of a general claim that I knew to be false was taken by my maternal dialogue partner as a particularly clear confirmation of her own emphatic view to the contrary. Sometimes, reason just hits a wall that it cannot begin to crack. You see this all the time.

      UNDERSTANDING THE DANGERS OF ARGUMENT: A GUIDE

      How can you actually use argument well and maybe even make progress in an argument with another person — or at least not get your shorts all twisted and wind up with an intellectual wedgie? You can find all sorts of advice on this subject from throughout the centuries. A bit of the advice is philosophical, some of it is psychological, and part of it is just plain pragmatic.

      First is the very practical advice, such as, “In arguing, answer your opponent’s earnest with a jest and his jest with earnest,” given to us by the witty word warrior Leontinus Gorgias (as quoted in Aristotle’s Rhetoric). In other words, keep the person with whom you’re arguing off balance. Know when to joke, and when to be serious. Be unexpected. But this practice is indeed a subset of rhetoric, which is the art of persuasion, and not of philosophy, which is a determined search for the truth. Most of the pragmatic advice available about argument presupposes precisely that you’re after a win more than the truth.

      The psychological advice offers cautionary reminders most often about the limits of argumentation in dealing with another person and the truth at the same time. Sir Thomas Browne, for example, warned, “In all disputes, so much as there is of passion, so much there is of nothing to the purpose.” Debate, you often hear, typically generates more heat than light. You should know that likelihood going in. Passion clouds reason. And in the context of an interpersonal argument or debate, people sometimes are willing to do anything to save face. Joseph Addison once observed, “Our disputants put me in mind of the scuttlefish, that when he is unable to extricate himself, blackens the water about him till he becomes invisible.” It’s a sad but common reality. So, as Publilius Syrus concluded long ago, “In a heated argument, we are apt to lose sight of the truth.”

      Finally, some modest philosophical advice of a practical bent: Protagoras may have been the first to affirm that every major question has more than one side. And Henry Fielding added in the 18th century that, “Much can be said on both sides.” Whenever you see sincere, intelligent people supporting a cause or arguing a point of view, you can expect as a maxim of common sense to find more than just sheer foolishness in that position or cause. By extrapolation, it can be said that, in all the history of philosophy, with all the competing schools of thought and opposed points of view, you’re never going to come across large numbers of sincere, intelligent, and relatively well-informed people who are just completely wrong in every way. So, always try to remain open-minded and look for the truth that any opposing view may capture. On the other hand, Oscar Wilde sought to warn us, with more than a bit of hyperbole, that “The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.” Neither reason nor common sense dictates or even advises that we should aspire to balanced indecision anywhere in life.

      And, of course, life consists of much more than argument. Socrates once remarked, “You are fond of argument, and now you fancy that I am a bag of arguments.” As you make your way in the world, you don’t want to avoid argument, and yet neither do you want to constantly seek it out as the only thing in life worth your time. So, please, remind yourself and your undergraduate philosophy-major friends: Not even Socrates was just a bag of arguments.

Of course, people can often reasonably differ on a piece of evidence cited in an argument, or they can blind themselves to the truth and even refuse to listen to rational considerations at all. The best intellectual reasoning can fail completely to overrule strongly opposed passions.

      Emotion and logic are sometimes at odds. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t important to learn to reason well. The point now is simple and vital to grasp.

      Argument is essentially about deliberation and discernment before it’s about persuasion. Its aim is understanding. In the right context, the ability to argue cogently can prove of great importance for seeing yourself where the truth is to be found, and then later perhaps convincing others to join you in its pursuit. Good argument isn’t always guaranteed to produce the good result you may desire, but good argument is better than bad argument any