In other words, the quality of individual arguments matters to honest debaters. Thus, it is quite difficult or even impossible to definitively disprove such a position, and a debate between reasonable people will usually turn into a meticulous examination of all the individual arguments, followed by assessment of which positions seem most likely to be correct, and/or which details need to be adjusted to fit the facts. Rather, most semi-reasonable positions will be supported by multiple arguments, and will be nuanced enough that their essentials can be preserved by making small changes to the details. By “moving on” I don’t necessarily mean conceding total defeat, however. All the most important arguments for a given position are taken seriously, and if it turns out that one’s opponent has clearly found a way to neutralize or destroy one of them, an honest thinker will admit it and move on. That doesn’t mean any conclusion is possible, obviously, but honest thinkers have usually already ruled out the most obviously stupid ones by the time they take a stand.Ī serious debate, therefore, is usually characterized by great attention to detail. Since we (almost?) never have all the relevant information, it’s possible to come to different conclusions based on the same set of evidence.
When a reasonable person stakes out a position to argue, it’s usually hard to take it down with one or a few simple arguments (I call them “silver bullets”), because they have usually made some semblance of a good-faith effort to take into account any relevant facts they know of.
#Gish gallop how to
In this post, I’m going to give an example of Sessions’ Gish Gallops, and explain how to recognize and effectively deal with such tactics. Where do you even start? Dean Sessions is an expert at using this common debating technique, called the “Gish Gallop,” of deluging opponents with too much bullpucky to deal with. That is, even if you can easily tell such a collection of “evidence” is a giant pile of bullpucky, it can be daunting to contemplate the task of convincing others of that fact. And supposedly there are two more volumes of similar size in the editing stage! For people who aren’t accustomed to intellectual debate, this kind of thing can often seem impressive because, well… look at all that evidence ! Even those who are used to engaging in serious debate can sometimes be thrown for a loop by such an enormous flood of information. Volume 1 of the Universal Model (UM) is long. Click the link to see the introduction to the series.
#Gish gallop series
This is part of a series of articles responding to the claims made in Dean Sessions’ Universal Model.
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