How to Disagree

Edit: and on a more recent (and cynical :-) ) note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right

The new category brings to mind an interesting property of this hierarchy though, namely that it seems to be difficult to respond to an "argument" with a higher order technique than that which was originally presented. For example, if one were disagreeing with a purely ad hominem rant, one would find it futile and nearly impossible to disagree with the rant at any higher level; how can one truly refute an argument that has no central point? It's somewhat depressing because, if true, it implies that a discussion is upper bounded at the level of discourse that initiated the discussion.

The way out of this, as far as I can tell, is recognizing that statements are not made in a vacuum. Sometimes the only way to raise the level of discourse is to engage in a sort of meta-disagreement. In other words, sometimes the point of a statement is not the content, but the context. While it works to classify criticisms of tone, for example, as weak if one were dealing with a substantive argument, the metadata (tone, speaker, etc) around the content of a non-argument may allow one to say something intelligent about the statement by tying it to the broader context in which it was made.

If comments could be tagged with hierarchy levels, it might raise the general level of argument.

"Such labels may help writers too. Most intellectual dishonesty is unintentional."

I totally agree with this, particularly on YC News where there are a lot of smart people. When the words fly, there's a tendency to overreact and say things that wouldn't occur if we were face-to-face. I admit having done this. It would be great if some optional tagging feature were built into a comment system, so writers could get some feedback when others thought they strayed.

I remember being part of an Academic Games league in high school. One of my favorite games was simply called "Propaganda." Everyone sat in a big room, listened to arguments, and identified the type of rhetorical technique being used. It may sound lame, but it was actually pretty fun and cultivated some useful skills.

Anyway, here's the technique list they used: http://mlagonline.org/Prop_ABCE.pdf [pdf]

and a more detailed but somewhat different list of logical fallacies: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/