Silas’s First Rule of Argumentation
I was riding the bus home from L.C.C. the other day when I happened to overhear an interesting conversation. It started out as two guys talking about this “total idiot of a teacher” that they had for what I’m assuming is some kind of PoliSci current events class. Their conversation went the typical outspoken wannabe-neocon route until they started talking about reverse racism — an extremely hot topic in bus conversation it turns out, since almost immediately the conversation was joined by a young women of what turned out to be Hispanic origin.
Unfortunately (and this is getting to the heart of this post) a Caucasian female in what appeared to be her 40s, addressed them, first asking them to “keep your voices down” repeatedly, with which they complied (they had gotten a tad loud during this discussion). Then, she said, to a point I didn’t hear, “Well, that is just because you are ignoring the historical context of that event. Since you obviously have no idea what you are talking about, you should just shut up.” When they, obviously taken aback by this, asked her to please explain the historical context then, she replied that there was not enough time to explain it to them, despite the fact that there was a good 15 minutes left of the bus trip.
This bugs me, since it shows a lack of understanding on the woman’s part as to the true purpose of this kind of argumentation. She should not have based her response to the men on what she believed they thought — instead she should have rememberd that the purpose of a debate on a bus full of people who believe themselves to be educated is to convince the observers that you are right, which leads to:
Silas’s First Rule of Argumentation
Your goal, in an debate with spectators, is to convince the spectators, not your debate opponent.
Unfortunately, too few people have either a) never heard of this, or b) forget it in the heat of debate.
To get back to the case study, the woman on the bus should have either a) given some explanation that would explain the one case they were talking about, in order to avoid a lengthy discussion on that one point, or b) attacked some other facet of the men’s argument. Pragmatically speaking, she could have also added some bogus facts to response (a) that would have stood up to the limited scrutiny of the bus (note: no internet on buses), but that are too trivial to cause people to look them up at home, thus helping her argument even more, since these facts could not have pre-prepared responses from the men.
But basically, I wrote this to say AUUUUUGGGGGHHHHHH!
