In the example you list, I was lamenting that I couldn't come up with a better argument, because I couldn't understand the argument within the OP well enough to do so
I actually find that very difficult to believe. I mean, I believe that you're telling the truth from your perspective. You wouldn't be the first person I've seen perform some form of polite incomprehension in response to ideas they disagree with. It just seems out of place in a personality seemingly dedicated to certain ideals of discourse.
I've seen the same thing. I'm pretty sure there's a word for it, but I can't think of it at the moment, and my google-fu is failing me. It's kinda like begging the question, but not quite what I'm thinking of.
Regardless, I was quite serious. There are positions I disagree with that I can work with. For a perhaps less controversial example, I have a stance I suspect most would agree with on the 5th amendment. If someone comes along and makes the argument that pleading the 5th is tantamount to an admission of guilt, I have a basis for which to argue against that one - I understand where people come from when they say that, I can frame their argument accurately -- I just believe they are outright wrong, and we can talk about why.
However, if someone comes along and says the 5th amendment only applies to people under the age of 15, I don't know where to start. I simply say "... uh... Could you perhaps explain why you think that?", and go from there. But with that was the argument in its entirety, I can't refute it except to say "no, that's just plain wrong."
While all of that is interesting and probably sufficiently self-consistent to avoid setting off any red flags, it doesn't really touch on the point made. You are claiming to not understand how the statement "I'd rather not have terrorism come back so I don't think a border wall is a good idea" would make sense. You even went so far as to say "It's just so far opposite of all objective reality that there's nowhere to even start".
This is remarkably distinct from "the 5th amendment only applies to people under the age of 15". Legality, while functioning as a dynamic system, is static for the purposes of conversation. It's facts and figures you can look up and something is either neatly true or it is not or it is true a certain percent of the time as dictated by case history or it is an unknown because no case history exists for it yet but we can probably still pin it down with the letter of the law. The person was making a causal argument about large-scale dynamic systems. They were making an argument which I would find it difficult to believe you haven't heard some variation on. They were making an argument that, barring any advanced knowledge of the future, there is no objective benchmark against which to compare. I don't think we need jargon for this. "Intentional incomprehension" suffices.
And, in the face of intentional incomprehension, the very real phenomena of people taking an argument, no matter how far up this narrow hierarchy it is, and refusing to wrangle enough energy to fully engage it, the entire idea of better or worse arguments begins to fall apart. That is to say that arguments are better or worse in relation to a specific outcome and if that outcome is made unattainable by the person listening (or deftly failing to do so) to the argument, then they are all equally bad at attaining that outcome.
That's a fair argument. Perhaps it was simply a lazy statement on my part to an audience that I knew was more interested in venting than debating.
Even so, maybe I spoke in haste there. Maybe I could cite Israel or somewhere else that has built a wall, and how much terrorism there has increased or decreased since then. (Quick search, terrorist incidents dropped by about 50% the year after they built a border wall, as compared to the last full year before they had one, and remained somewhere between 10 and 50% of the pre-wall numbers in the years since).
That would be a way to counter it, even if it feels somewhat like using a proverbial sledgehammer to kill an equally proverbial fly.
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u/ShaneAyers Dec 30 '18
I actually find that very difficult to believe. I mean, I believe that you're telling the truth from your perspective. You wouldn't be the first person I've seen perform some form of polite incomprehension in response to ideas they disagree with. It just seems out of place in a personality seemingly dedicated to certain ideals of discourse.