Winning Arguments
What Works and Doesn't Work in Politics, the Bedroom, the Courtroom, and the Classroom
Stanley Fish
First annotation on .
6 quotes
Chapter 4
- This sketch teaches (at least) three lessons: () You can’t just engage in argument in the abstract. An abstract argument—an argument where there is nothing at stake and you are just practicing the form—is what the Palin character asks for, but before he knows it he is enmeshed in a very specific argument (about argument) and the cool distance he affects when announcing “I’d like to have an argument, please” gives way quickly to the exasperation that always attends the real thing. () You can neither avoid argument when it is offered to you nor extricate yourself from it on your terms. When the Palin character grows tired of the game and says, “I’ve had enough of this,” his partner-in-agon replies, “No you haven’t,” and it begins all over again. () You cannot manage argument. The career of argument is always running ahead of the intentions and desires of those who engage in it; as an arguer you’re always playing catch-up, trying to deal with the twists and turns you had not anticipated.Feb 21 2024 6:30AM
- But we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where God and Truth have receded, at least as active, perspicuous presences, and the form they take at any moment will be the result of a proposition successfully urged, of an argument: believe me, this is what God is like and what he wants, or, believe me, this is the truth of the matter. Rhetorically created authorities are all we have; absolute authority exists only in a heaven we may hope someday to see, but until that day we must make do with the epistemological resources available to us in our fallen condition; we must make do with argument. For all intents and purposes, and as far as we know or can know, we live in a world of argument. Indeed, arguments about the world come first, the world comes second.Feb 21 2024 6:35AM
- Francis Bacon, one of the founders of the scientific method, warned in the early seventeenth century that the project of apprehending “the true divisions of nature” (a nice definition of science’s aim) is always being torpedoed by words that refuse to be confined to the modest task of mirroring a prior reality and instead offer themselves as a substitute for the facts they should be faithfully representing. Bacon believed that the power of language to lead men astray is one of the unhappy consequences of the Fall. The tendency of fallen creatures to love the words they produce more than the truth the words supposedly serve is an effect, he says, “of that venom which the Serpent infused . . . which makes the mind of man to swell.”Feb 21 2024 6:35AM
- Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama: What has rhetoric done for us? Well, it has brought about all of Western civilization, for a start. What is democracy, but the idea that the art of persuasion should be formally enshrined at the center of the political process? What is law, but a way of giving words formal strength in the world, and what is the law court but a place where the art of persuasion gives shape to civil society? Sounds good, and it is good, but it leaves out the darker side of the picture, the side that leads Orwell, Wilkins, Sprat, and countless others to warn against eloquence’s dangers and propose remedies designed to curtail its effects. Their common fear is the one expressed early on by Aristotle, that a sufficiently skilled speaker may make the worse appear the better and so turn humankind in the wrong direction. It is as a stay against that fear that rationalists of various stripes offer methods and requirements—no metaphors, only better arguments, only simple Anglo-Saxon words, mathematical plainness, plain meaning, strict construction, a stringent literalism—in the hope that both linguistic and general disaster might be forestalled.Feb 21 2024 6:40AM
- Here it would seem is a signal instance of a bedrock utterance that is invulnerable to argument and interpretive variation; it is not ambiguous; its source bears an impeccable authority; it is complete in and of itself. Satan seems to be in a corner, confronted with a text that leaves him no room to maneuver. Can he extricate himself and find a way to get Eve to do what she knows, with total certainty, she should not do? Piece of cake! What he does is utter a single interjection when Eve stops speaking: “Indeed?” or, in other words, “You don’t say; fancy that.” The apparently benign implication is that he and she should talk about it, get it clear, which suggests, ever so gently, that it wasn’t clear in the first place. Simply by subjecting the divine prohibition to the mild interrogation of “Indeed?” Satan opens up a space of doubt that he then fills with alternative readings of God’s utterance. He does this by varying the intentional context within which the supposedly hard and fixed words are first heard, and then pointing out that in the light of this newly thought-up intention—and there is no end of intentions that could be hypothesized—the words mean something quite different.Feb 21 2024 6:42AM
- Saying “you be the judge” is always a good rhetorical move, especially when the “you” being deferred to doesn’t know what it’s talking about and can be led to any conclusion desired by a master manipulator. And that is the way, say Oreskes and Conway, that “the tobacco industry . . . and the skeptics about acid rain, the ozone hole, and global warming strove to ‘maintain the controversy’ and ‘keep the debate alive’ by fostering claims that were contrary to the mainstream of scientific evidence and expert judgment” (241).Feb 21 2024 6:44AM