It seems to me that it might be of benefit to have them posted somewhere on the board; has this been done? I tried running a search, and for “subject only” got no matches. I mysef have not seen a list of the rules of debate since high school (not on the debate team, just saw the rules).
I was noticing that DAVEWOO71 had started a thread in the Pit about jmullaney, and perhaps some of the rules could be useful to jmullaney, and I would use them also. Anyone have a list?
I can also try a search engine outside the board but I thought it would also be an interesting topic of conversation here.
Is “begging the question” one of the infractions?
Thanks for any input on this.
I found several sites through Altavista, but am having trouble posting links. Maybe these are really familiar to everyone but me, but I will list a few I found at various sites. These are Fallacies used to incorrectly support an arguement:
Appeal to Inappropriate authority - using a claim by someone whose knowledge is questionable or unreliable. While it may be appropriate to quote a person in their field of expertise, their knowledge iin other areas should not be used as "authoritative’.
Arguement From Ignorance - using a statement as a premise that has not been proven to present a conclusion that is false. . .
Arguementum Ad Hominem - attacking the person, not their ideas: namecalling
Bandwagon - claim is made that ‘everyone’ or ‘everyone worth listening to’ does something or believes something
Begging the question - already been addressed in other arenas - circular reasoning
Others are: inflammatory language, questionable cause (mistakes cause and effect, assumes that because A precedes B, A causes B), suppressed evidence
This is just a really short synopsis of what I have found so far, but it would be an interesting way to refute some of the things that people say in the Great Debates forum.
Sorry if I am stating some really obvious or often discussed material, I am still pretty new here.
lurker checking in
I looked at the thread in the Pit that Spider Woman mentioned, and it mentions the Tenets of the board. There are some general guidelines listed there, but not as specific as the ones she mentions.
Spider Woman introduced me to this site. It’s pretty cool.
It might be worth noting that there are various degrees of proof in the face of the evidence:
Beyond reasonable doubt: No wiggle room here. Only definitive statements like “a hydrogen atom contains one proton,” or “cigarettes cause cancer” (chuckle) are likely to get by.
Preponderance of evidence: It used to be 51% of the evidence proves the point. Nowdays, lawyers tell me that it is 50.000… 001%. This is what snagged O.J., allowed the feds to decide that secondhand smoke to cause cancer, and allows Cece to question that decision.
Reasonable likelihood: A scholarly standard employed which not only considers the “facts” as they are presented, but the circumstance, motivation, and historio-ethno-socio- climate that recorded the evidence. It has been successfully proven in court that a “reasonable likelihood” can stand in the face of other well-crafted explanations that comfortably fit the evidence, but not quite as well. In other words, it can comprise less than fifty per cent of the evidence.
The Salem Witch Trial proved to the satisfaction of those involved in deciding the case, presumably beyond a reasonable doubt, that some individuals were practicing witchcraft. The preponderance of the evidence submitted may have sufficed to prove that. But today, many people think there is a reasonable likelihood that the individuals involved were embarassingly hypocritical and self-motivated Puritans who really wanted to see a hangin’, whatever the circumstances.
Check out the Athiesm Web for a great list of fallacies.
http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html
(and yes, this is my very firstest post) :o )
Spider, do you mean using rules of debate for the SD boards?
I don’t think that would work very well here.
Or are you just curious?
About using the rules of debate, I’m not really sure. I think it would be easy to make some of those fallacy errors and people couldn’t always be held to that. But it would be kind of nice to have the rules of logic posted as a reference if a person were trying to refute an arguement logically. And I don’t really see where name-calling fits in at all here, except to be sort of funny, like in that bar fight thread. But to call someone a name or attack them because they hold a certain position or defend a certain opinion does seem out of place, and that is breaking one of those logical rules of debate, the one called argumentum ad hominem.
Make that argument, sorry.
First, maybe we should establish exactly what a bebate is
Here’s m-w’s opinion;
Main Entry: 1de·bate
Pronunciation: di-'bAt, dE-
Function: noun
Date: 13th century
: a contention by words or arguments: as a : the formal discussion of a motion before a deliberative body according to the rules of parliamentary procedure b : a regulated discussion of a proposition between two matched sides.
This probably doesn’t fit the style of the GD forum, but could be ammended to do so. The words “formal” and “regulated” seem a little out of place. “Deliberative body” and “Parliamentary procedure”, though, do fit.
We, the dopers and the moderators, seem to do a pretty good job of keeping each other in line.
What say you all?
Peace,
mangeorge
The burden of proof is on the person making the assertion.
Occam’s razor - Of all the explanations that cover all the known facts, those that are more parsimonious are to be preferred over those that are less. (“Parsimonious” needs to be clearly defined, of course, although in practice it is usually pretty obvious which explanation has this character.)
Assertions that are explicitly or implicitly at odds with well-established ideas carry a very large burden of supplying unambiguous proof.
Fallacy (my favorite) - The argumentum ad bacculum (sp?); A threat is made of violence or punishment to be delivered if an assertion is not accepted. Examples: Accept my views, or I’ll smack you. You should accept Jesus as your savior, or you’ll go to hell and roast for eternity. It is wrong to smoke marijuana because if you do you’ll go to jail - and jail is way nasty.
I would think it would be too restrictive and take too much time to evaluate each post as to whether the poster was following the formal rules of debate. I just think that if they were posted somewhere, like maybe “About This Message Board” so people could look them up, it would be a better defense to say "What you said is a fallacy and here is why. . . " (denying the antecedent or something like that) instead of calling the person an idiot or saying that no one who really knows what they are talking about believes that (not that I have seen a lot of the latter).
But I am a bit of an upstart here and maybe it is early days for me to be making suggestions. The Pit was one of the first places I ended up by following a different thread there and it seemed like there was a LOT of name-calling, etc. Apparently this is exactly the place to do this sort of thing but it did rather startle me.
I juat noticed the Occam’s Razor post as I was finishing this: I’ve also heard it called The Law of Parsimony. By that burden of proof thing, do you mean that people need to look up the rules themselves? I was thinking maybe some of the people didn’t know about them, like the person who was flamed for pretending to have relatives who were victims of the Holocaust.
I should have read that more closely before responding; you were listing more rules of debate. Occam’s Razor is one of my favorites.
Yes, me too, though it can sometimes be ambiguous what the “simplest” explanation is.
For example, animal behaviorists have been known to decry the tendency to anthropomorphize animal behavior: tears, smiles, etc. don’t necessarily mean to an animal what they mean to people. This often gets extended to the point that we should not assume anything about animal psychology based on what we know of humans’. This is considered the most parsimonious approach: if a wolf howls over her dead cub, it should NOT be automatically taken as an expression of grief as we would interpret the same behavior in people. All you can say is that the wolf howled over her cub.
On the other hand, there’s a lot of similar function between a wolf’s makeup and our own. Why should we note that a wolf has homologous structures of skeleton, tissue, and brain, and then posit a completely novel emotional structure? Obviously a wolf is not human, but doesn’t it stand to reason that evolution would endow us with similarities of psychology, just as we have similarities of morphology?
So which is the most parsimonious approach: To make no assumption, or to make the extremely likely assumption?
If the answer is the former, then we end up ignoring inductive reasoning and IMO this principle is highly overrated. If the answer is the latter, it makes the principle much harder to apply generally since there can be more than one valid interpretation of what is “likely”.
I prefer APB9999’s second approach. For one thing, it allows for a more interesting forum. For another, it encourages input from the less scientific and scholastic viewpoints.
The SDMB is not, after all, a formal debate forum.
Or is it?
The wolf is sad for the loss of her cub. Even though we may not fully understand the exact nature of her sadness.
Peace,
mangeorge
Maybe the simplest explanation in the case of the wolf is that it is sad about the death of the cub (until a more logical explanation would present itself). Anthropormorphism sounds like the more complex idea here. But the law of parsimony doesn’t always hold true.
Sometimes I think we get a little snooty about anthropomorpism, as if to keep humans apart from the animals, and we probably aren’t as far apart as people would like to think.
As for the SDMB being a formal debate forum, I hope it never becomes one. I do think it would be helpful to have people give input on good methods of defending a position, and I greatly appreciate the posts of those who have responded.