{"id":4602,"date":"2013-12-30T08:45:16","date_gmt":"2013-12-30T13:45:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4602"},"modified":"2013-12-30T08:45:16","modified_gmt":"2013-12-30T13:45:16","slug":"3am-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4602","title":{"rendered":"3:AM Magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"

3:AM Magazine has an interview with our own Scott Aikin. \u00c2\u00a0Get it here<\/a>. \u00c2\u00a0A sample:<\/p>\n

3:AM:<\/strong>\u00c2\u00a0Your\u00c2\u00a0new book\u00c2\u00a0<\/a>is about the social nature and political significance of argument. You see argument as any attempt to think things through, talk things over or figure out by means of processes aimed at sharing and evaluating reasons. The originality of this is that you broaden the idea of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcargument\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 out considerably so you catch what you call \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcdialectical fallacies\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 . So can you first say something about what you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re doing here \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and how it contrasts with more common approaches to evaluating arguments \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and what a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcdialectical fallacy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 is.<\/p>\n

SA:<\/strong>\u00c2\u00a0The first step is to acknowledge that the term \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcargument\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 captures two types of things. On the one hand, arguments are informational products \u00e2\u20ac\u201c sets of premises and conclusions bearing logical relations to each other. On the other hand, arguments are processes and performances \u00e2\u20ac\u201c reason-exchanges between people for the sake of resolving a dispute by finding out what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s true. For the most part, philosophical interest in argument has been focused on the product-side of argument, and the process-side has been left to rhetoric. This is lamentable. First, because the focus of rhetoric isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t about what normatively appropriate methods there are, but about what methods yield assent. Second, because there are norms of argument as a process that are truth-oriented.<\/p>\n

So consider the old straw man fallacy. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard to say what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s wrong about it from a formal perspective, as a straw man fallacy entails erecting a fallacious argument and criticizing it. Nothing is formally wrong with that, but what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s informally wrong is that you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not hooking up with the arguments and views those who oppose your views have. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a kind of misfire between interlocutors. So there are groundrules for good arguments, ones that arise out of (or are the conditions for) the exchange of reasons. And one of those groundrules is that if we are jointly weighing reasons, we accurately assess each other\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s reasons \u00e2\u20ac\u201c to distort the other\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s reasons subverts the process. Consequently, to take on this notion of dialectical fallacy, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got to take on this pragmatic perspective on argument \u00e2\u20ac\u201c we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re out for the truth (or at least understanding) by way of the honest exchange of reasons.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole thing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

3:AM Magazine has an interview with our own Scott Aikin. \u00c2\u00a0Get it here. \u00c2\u00a0A sample: 3:AM:\u00c2\u00a0Your\u00c2\u00a0new book\u00c2\u00a0is about the social nature and political significance of argument. You see argument as any attempt to think things through, talk things over or figure out by means of processes aimed at sharing and evaluating reasons. The originality of … Continue reading 3:AM Magazine<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1817,408,407,1818,1795],"class_list":["post-4602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-3am-magazine","tag-robert-talisse","tag-scott-aikin","tag-why","tag-why-we-argue"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4602"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4603,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4602\/revisions\/4603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}