How To Argue with Anybody

The word 'argument' has picked up the negative connotation of a 'quarrel' in many circles where the process of arguing with a person is necessarily interpreted as a contest in which either party attempts to bludgeon the other, by a series of verbal abuses, into accepting its own position. There is, however, another sense in which this word may be understood, that is, as a series of statements or a course of reasoning through which the truth or the falsehood of a certain belief is demonstrated. In this sense, one might even claim that the very existence of every human being is an Embodied Argument, so that as she moves through life she puts into practice this Argument, responds to the Arguments of those who live with and around her, and thereby develops, in an ongoing process, newer forms of this Argument that is distinctive of her. Every human being, therefore, lives at the dynamic point of intersection of several Arguments. And yet, we are often wary of engaging in this process of mutual criticism and learning, and this is the case primarily for the reason that we are filled with a very elemental Fear, the Fear that we may have to give up those views and beliefs that are dearest to us.

Philosophy can be understood as a therapeutic practice that helps us to overcome this Fear : philosophy is the examination of all possible beliefs, and especially of those which we may have come to hold, for whatever reasons, as 'transparently true'. (I shall not go into this matter in detail here but note that this comment applies not only to religious believers who are routinely berated for accepting what-have-you on 'faith', but also to atheists who often turn out to be equally hostile to the notion of submitting their beliefs to evaluation and examination.) Philosophically speaking, the following is what an argument would look like :

(A) The first step of any argument is to make an assertion. There may very well be some people who would rather prefer the 'noble silence' of not saying anything. I do not wish, of course, to disturb their silence, but simply note that until this silence is shattered, the argument cannot even get started.

(B) The second step is to provide some justification for this assertion, for we are not interested simply in knowing what people believe but also in knowing why they believe what they do. So, for example, someone who claims, 'It is right to believe whatever suits your fancy', and in response to the question why we too should accept this claim says, 'Oh, that's my personal fancy' or simply remains silent has not given us any justification for why we should do so the same.

(C) The third step, however, is to make sure that we really have understood the assertion and the associated justification given to us. Very often, we misunderstand what is being declared to us, and this may happen for two main reasons. Firstly, we often like to believe that we are perfect listeners, and can understand everything that we are being told at the first go (whereas, in fact, both these beliefs may turn out to be false). Secondly, there are abstract notions such as justice, truth, freedom, and humanity, which we may understand in strikingly different ways than other people. To avoid the possibility of misunderstanding, we must give the speaker a summary, in our own words, of what has been said to us, and ask the speaker if she agrees that our summary is an accurate representation of her own position. If not, we must try again, and again, until a 'reasonable fit' is attained. In other words, the third step demands a great amount of patience and gratitude on both sides; one of the main reasons why arguments rapidly degenerate into quarrels is because quite often neither side has sufficient amounts of both.

(D) Fourthly, having acquired a reasonably accurate understanding of the speaker's view and of the justifications put forward by her, we must move on to evalute these for until such evaluation has been carried out by us we are not in a position to say whether or not we can accept the assertion and the justification as our own. For example, a woman may put forward the assertion that women have the (legal and moral) right to have abortions, and try to justify this view with arguments such as 'every woman has the ultimate right over her own body' and 'anti-abortionists are patriarchal humbugs'. To leave the matter at that would mean that the argument has come to an end, but we are not merely interested in what and why the speaker believes in but also in whether we, the listeners, can accept her position as our own. Therefore, we must evaluate all possible reasons that have been put forward in support of the assertion in question.

(E) Whereas a quarrel tries to be close-ended (one party has to 'win'), an argument is open-ended. It may so happen that we are convinced that the reasons given to us are valid, and we come to accept the speaker's position; it may also happen, on the other hand, that we reject these reasons, and we consequently disagree with the original assertion. Thirdly, it may also be the case that we have more urgent jobs at that moment (we may need to go and have our dinner, watch a TV show, or simply lie down in the green grass smelling the nice hay), so we may decide to postpone the argument until another time. In other words, the (telic) end towards which an argument is directed is not the establishment of who 'wins' or 'loses' (unlike a quarrel, an argument is not to be understood on the analogy of a boxing match), but the persuasion, through a patient, difficult, disciplined, and attentive process of providing justifications, of the listener to accept the speaker's standpoint.

By breaking down the process of arguing with other people into five stages, I do not mean to imply that all people who are engaged in an argument will be consciously aware of moving from one to the other in the manner of climbing and counting the steps of a logical ladder. Indeed, the more skilled a person becomes in the Art of Argument the more gracefully she will be able to move between them, not hesitating to lay down all her (axiomatic) cards on the table, whether she is Marxist, atheist, Buddhist, Catholic, agnostic, ecofeminist, anarchist, and so on. And even if she is someone who believes that all argumentation is a colossal waste of time (incidentally, a belief fast catching up these days), this belief itself immediately becomes her (quasi-)assertion : so let us, her listeners, ask her in return what reasons she has to justify that belief, and whether we too can accept her claim.

We can now see why the notion that argumentation necessarily goes with an 'quarrelsome mentality' is quite a misunderstanding on the part of people who are either too lazy to argue or are too scared of exposing their most-cherished views to public inspection. In fact, some of the greatest masters of the Art of Argument, in classical Indian philosophy, were the Buddhist thinkers who had to argue with, on the one hand, the Hindus who believed in the 'eternal soul' and, on the other, the nihilists who believed that morality is pointless; and nobody surely will accuse these Buddhist thinkers of being 'quarrelsome'. Classically speaking, in fact, Indians have been some of the most argumentative people around on this planet, until, that is, they forgot how to argue and instead started to quarrel among themselves. It is for this reason that we are often too intimidated to argue against other people simply because they are our peers in some way or the other, or when we do manage to get the argument on track we keep on throwing profuse apologies such as, 'I hope I did not offend you'. I do not mean to say, of course, that we should deliberately be obnoxious when arguing with other people, but that the question of whether a certain statement is true or false must be carefully (and resolutely) separated from the other one of whom we may have offended by trying to establish its truth or falsity.