Hi folks, long time no see.
Here's the deal, I was speaking with a neighbour of mine, a intelligent fellow certainly, and quite commonsensical in most matters. The problem is his particular style of "argument". Have you ever spoken with someone who ends up ...I'm not sure if theres a formal phrase for this: "Muddying the water" by well...constantly going off into bizzarre branches and strange circuituitous(sp?) routes. Everytime you try and "pin em" they end up defining their way out of a situation or going through some strange side path that only wastes more time and confuses all parties even further.
E.g.
- "Well, you see, language happens to be a means of useful communication. We have certain roughly, or in the case of scientific terminology accurately, agreed upon phenomena or shared experiences which we use to communicate: i.e. We both have a pretty darned clear understanding of what the other means when we say "tree" "
Respons: "Yes, yes, but Language ultimately is comprised of letters! It is an illusion!"
-"We may one day conquer aging, halting the aging process entirely"
Response: "Yea right. The universe is change. The only thing that is constant is change!"
Counter-" Thats well and good, but what does that have to do with humans achieving immortality?"
Response: " We cannot achieve immortality, the universe will continue to change!"
Huh?
While I managed to eventually get a clear, prescise series of definitions and statements out of him, that particular argumentative method is fairly disturbing, even more disturbing however, is when I face this argumentative style in people who *don't* have something sensible or even remotely logic or evidence based to say. How are you supposed to deal with that particular method? It's one thing to deal with someone who just has a weird way of going about things, another thing to try and get through to a person who keeps going around in in insane circles without anything solid to support them.
Here's the deal, I was speaking with a neighbour of mine, a intelligent fellow certainly, and quite commonsensical in most matters. The problem is his particular style of "argument". Have you ever spoken with someone who ends up ...I'm not sure if theres a formal phrase for this: "Muddying the water" by well...constantly going off into bizzarre branches and strange circuituitous(sp?) routes. Everytime you try and "pin em" they end up defining their way out of a situation or going through some strange side path that only wastes more time and confuses all parties even further.
E.g.
- "Well, you see, language happens to be a means of useful communication. We have certain roughly, or in the case of scientific terminology accurately, agreed upon phenomena or shared experiences which we use to communicate: i.e. We both have a pretty darned clear understanding of what the other means when we say "tree" "
Respons: "Yes, yes, but Language ultimately is comprised of letters! It is an illusion!"
-"We may one day conquer aging, halting the aging process entirely"
Response: "Yea right. The universe is change. The only thing that is constant is change!"
Counter-" Thats well and good, but what does that have to do with humans achieving immortality?"
Response: " We cannot achieve immortality, the universe will continue to change!"
Huh?
While I managed to eventually get a clear, prescise series of definitions and statements out of him, that particular argumentative method is fairly disturbing, even more disturbing however, is when I face this argumentative style in people who *don't* have something sensible or even remotely logic or evidence based to say. How are you supposed to deal with that particular method? It's one thing to deal with someone who just has a weird way of going about things, another thing to try and get through to a person who keeps going around in in insane circles without anything solid to support them.
