Arguments that are used to believe things are also called arguments. It is rather unfortunate that those two sense are not distinguished. There are things that people do in debates where they try to turn the situation to their advantage that are not reasons to believe things ie arguments that are not arguments. An example would be (simply) saying “shut up!”. Then there is where it has argument forms and non-argument forms. If you simply beat up anyone that disagrees with you it will affect discussion but if you threaten to beat someone for believing something that is appeal to the stick and actually has a “therefore” in it and is an argument.
Well the technique you are using is working because of equivocation. The concept is used in two different contexts where it actually means different things. I think there has been a lot of discussion about how arguments over definitions are largely pointless and miss the real things. However that is exactly what would combat the usage of this technique. Making formal appeals on why things “proved” for one sense of the word do not apply to its other senses. Off course in order to do that it must first be established on what sense is used in the original argument. The trouble is that most of the time multiple senses can form interesting and potentially critical separate arguments. It doesn’t help matters that often their truth is pretty entangled. For example any argument that works against broad hedonism should work against narrow hedonism. Thus it can become tempting to not keep track whether the claim is broad or narrow. The trouble is that sometimes the defensibility/applicability of the argument is sensitive whether the claim is narrow or broad.
Also I would like to point out that it’s not that the truth is trivial in the broad sense. While it can be easy to attribute a behavior or attribute to a really broad ism this can fail to be appropriate even if the ism is very very broad. For example a champion trainee might in fact be motivated by sense of duty or being a sporty man being a high virtue for them even if the people around them understand his behavior in hedonistic terms. Or rather than them winning they might feel that it is important that their country wins.
This can form a basis for another maybe coused technique. If you see a hard worker you might tell (yourself) a plausible story about how they are working to get their children fed and struggling to make ends meet. This might let you think that they are motivated by the practical enablingness of money, a form of positive greed. Someone might use the existence of the worker as an argument how a worldview that emphasizes greed ends in positive results. Thus you might be inclined to support heavy privatization schemes. However if you were to ask the worker how they feel about their work they might tell about how they chose their profession so they can see first hand how their work helps others or how the work helps their community. If the reason you attributed for them wouldn’t come up and for example they turned down a more paying job because it involved less personal contact it can be obvious that the story you told of them is a work of your fiction and contrary to the fact. By that time you might have used that story to passionately defend the way of life you had empirically witnessed against dubious theoretical alternative systems. But if your “emprical experience” was based on your way of interpreting the existence of the worker it’s more case of a word against word. Part of your experience might have been the champion trainee demonstrating how ambition for personal achievement gets you places. But what if the champion trainee did it for national pride?
Just because an explanation works doesn’t mean you should understand a phenomenon in those terms. One way of defending against spins that are convenient for third parties is to be interested on direct factual accuracy of psychological claims and not rely on external circumstances alone to infer states of mind. That is that a person works isn’t evidence for what reason they do the work. For example a greed arguer might say that if a person didn’t desperately need money they wouldn’t work so that they work is evidence that they do need it desperately. However if you believe this line of argument you are just taking their word for psychological laws and states about the human mind (while the arguer might want you to focus on the states of the world). Epistemologically (atleast) it would be prudent to recognize this as a claim that might need backing to be believed. Even if you end up accepting the claim you will have rooted in more easily checkable things than the word of a potentially agendafull arguer. If for example your own experience of your own mind backs the existence of these psychological laws you are backing them with direct empirical evidence. In addition you know to be wary of typical mind fallacy and you might be more easily aware that greed is not the be-all-end-all of psychological law.
Arguments that are used to believe things are also called arguments. It is rather unfortunate that those two sense are not distinguished. There are things that people do in debates where they try to turn the situation to their advantage that are not reasons to believe things ie arguments that are not arguments. An example would be (simply) saying “shut up!”. Then there is where it has argument forms and non-argument forms. If you simply beat up anyone that disagrees with you it will affect discussion but if you threaten to beat someone for believing something that is appeal to the stick and actually has a “therefore” in it and is an argument.
Well the technique you are using is working because of equivocation. The concept is used in two different contexts where it actually means different things. I think there has been a lot of discussion about how arguments over definitions are largely pointless and miss the real things. However that is exactly what would combat the usage of this technique. Making formal appeals on why things “proved” for one sense of the word do not apply to its other senses. Off course in order to do that it must first be established on what sense is used in the original argument. The trouble is that most of the time multiple senses can form interesting and potentially critical separate arguments. It doesn’t help matters that often their truth is pretty entangled. For example any argument that works against broad hedonism should work against narrow hedonism. Thus it can become tempting to not keep track whether the claim is broad or narrow. The trouble is that sometimes the defensibility/applicability of the argument is sensitive whether the claim is narrow or broad.
Also I would like to point out that it’s not that the truth is trivial in the broad sense. While it can be easy to attribute a behavior or attribute to a really broad ism this can fail to be appropriate even if the ism is very very broad. For example a champion trainee might in fact be motivated by sense of duty or being a sporty man being a high virtue for them even if the people around them understand his behavior in hedonistic terms. Or rather than them winning they might feel that it is important that their country wins.
This can form a basis for another maybe coused technique. If you see a hard worker you might tell (yourself) a plausible story about how they are working to get their children fed and struggling to make ends meet. This might let you think that they are motivated by the practical enablingness of money, a form of positive greed. Someone might use the existence of the worker as an argument how a worldview that emphasizes greed ends in positive results. Thus you might be inclined to support heavy privatization schemes. However if you were to ask the worker how they feel about their work they might tell about how they chose their profession so they can see first hand how their work helps others or how the work helps their community. If the reason you attributed for them wouldn’t come up and for example they turned down a more paying job because it involved less personal contact it can be obvious that the story you told of them is a work of your fiction and contrary to the fact. By that time you might have used that story to passionately defend the way of life you had empirically witnessed against dubious theoretical alternative systems. But if your “emprical experience” was based on your way of interpreting the existence of the worker it’s more case of a word against word. Part of your experience might have been the champion trainee demonstrating how ambition for personal achievement gets you places. But what if the champion trainee did it for national pride?
Just because an explanation works doesn’t mean you should understand a phenomenon in those terms. One way of defending against spins that are convenient for third parties is to be interested on direct factual accuracy of psychological claims and not rely on external circumstances alone to infer states of mind. That is that a person works isn’t evidence for what reason they do the work. For example a greed arguer might say that if a person didn’t desperately need money they wouldn’t work so that they work is evidence that they do need it desperately. However if you believe this line of argument you are just taking their word for psychological laws and states about the human mind (while the arguer might want you to focus on the states of the world). Epistemologically (atleast) it would be prudent to recognize this as a claim that might need backing to be believed. Even if you end up accepting the claim you will have rooted in more easily checkable things than the word of a potentially agendafull arguer. If for example your own experience of your own mind backs the existence of these psychological laws you are backing them with direct empirical evidence. In addition you know to be wary of typical mind fallacy and you might be more easily aware that greed is not the be-all-end-all of psychological law.