Agreed; like many things, these are guidelines for a conversation with someone you want to have a conversation with. You’ll notice that I didn’t include Counterspells for things like Social Shaming from Varieties of Argumentative Experience or Name-Calling from How to Disagree. Alexander discusses the whole issue at length in his essay.
That isn’t enough, though. First of all, some of what I said applies directly to the quality of the argument—someone could be sincere, but biased, and I may have a reason to avoid arguments based on personal experience or personal expertise from him about certain subjects, without completely avoiding conversation with him. Second, what I said applies when you’re arguing with person A (who you can have a discussion with) and they’re referencing person B (who you can’t), and you want to dismiss the reference to B—in the example above, someone is referring back to the argument made by a senator, but he is not the senator himself.
Agreed; like many things, these are guidelines for a conversation with someone you want to have a conversation with. You’ll notice that I didn’t include Counterspells for things like Social Shaming from Varieties of Argumentative Experience or Name-Calling from How to Disagree. Alexander discusses the whole issue at length in his essay.
That isn’t enough, though. First of all, some of what I said applies directly to the quality of the argument—someone could be sincere, but biased, and I may have a reason to avoid arguments based on personal experience or personal expertise from him about certain subjects, without completely avoiding conversation with him. Second, what I said applies when you’re arguing with person A (who you can have a discussion with) and they’re referencing person B (who you can’t), and you want to dismiss the reference to B—in the example above, someone is referring back to the argument made by a senator, but he is not the senator himself.