Consider the "strawman" logical fallacy (wonderfully illustrated in video here):
1. Person A presents her argument (call it A).
2. Person B voices his disagreement with argument S (an exaggerated or incorrect version of A).
I think it's good that we teach people about the strawman fallacy in school, but it gets really annoying when you're in an adversarial argument and one or both sides devolve to just calling the other person's argument a strawman. It's tedious, and hard to resolve. Words are ambiguous, and especially when we're coming from a place of disagreement, it's hard to agree on a characterization of an adversary's argument.
Sidebar: something I love to hear (and say) in an argument is: "Let me state your argument as I understand it, and you can tell me if I got it right". This is such a great phrase to hear; it means the person saying it is actually listening and interested in a constructive dialogue.
OK, back to my main point.
I think there's a new logical fallacy floating out there in the world. Logical fallacy is probably the wrong phrase for what I'm about to describe, but it certainly is a variant of the strawman fallacy.
There is a class of argument that is incredibly hard to resolve, because both sides are arguing past each other. When people write articles, tweet, and often even argue in person, the debate isn't advanced at all because the arguments are not really relevant to the opposite side.
I want to illustrate this with an example. Let's talk about , but to avoid getting too political (i.e. with current hot issues), I'll use capital punishment as my example.
No matter what your feelings are about capital punishment, you probably would agree that it's still debated, at least a bit. What is difficult about having an argument about capital punishment is that you don't know exactly what you're arguing about. That makes it harder to engage with the other side.
I'd even argue that people Even the names of the two camps are instructive. I can't paint all pro-lifers and all pro-choicers with one brush, because their members hold different sets of beliefs about the topic (similar to Christianity and feminism, which I've written about before). But imagine this hypothetical conversation which I'm fairly sure has happened in real life somewhere:
A: I am pro-life. I don't believe you should abort fetuses starting at the moment of conception.
B: That is wrong. I am pro-choice. I believe women should have control over their bodies.
The debate could go in a number of different directions from here, and it often does. But I want to point out two things.
First, A never said women shouldn't have control over their own bodies. I've even argued with a person who *did* believe women should have control over their own bodies, but still believed that abortion was murder starting at the moment of conception.
Second, B never said