Friday, September 17, 2010

Violating the Principle of Rational Discussion

Violating the principle of rational discussion is when someone who does not understand what is rational discussion or purposely trying to mislead the discussion. Here are some examples of how this occurs.

Begging the question:  The argument that begging for question when the premises are questionable and implausible.
Strawman: The technique is to knock down someone's argument if the person misrepresent the argument, putting words in to other people's mouth.
Shifting the burden of proof: By trying to disproof other people claim instead of proving his or her own discussion.
Relevance: When the premises are so weak that they do not help to support the conclusion or the claim at all.
Slanters: Usage of misleading language to conceal the dubious claims.
Ridicule: Making a joke out of someone's claim to discredit the claim.

For example, in politics when a politician lose an argument. The losing politician will tried to discredit the opponent by making fun of the opponent's idea or tried to put some kind of words into the opponent's mouth. 

1 comment:

  1. Really good example! That is totally true. When I saw how you brought up politics, it reminded me of when they do debates when presidential candidates run for office. When you think about it, they totally do some of these things. They bash on one another, they put words in the other candidate's mouths to make them look bad, sometimes they try to be irrelevant to throw people off and derive them from a different direction of the initial argument, and so on. Now, it makes you really think about how politicians are and how they think. It's almost like some jedi-mind trick using by violating the principles of discussion. It's not totally proper, but you can use it to your advantage and do it on purpose to win the argument.

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