I have noticed that Jerry seems to have only one style of argument. He
intentionally draws extreme conclusions unwarranted by the other
persons statements. This is apparently done in an attempt to make the
other person look ridicules. Secondly it allows him to avoid ever having
to actually answer the arguments presented by the other person.
Example:
Till: "some police..."
Jerry: "so you believe all police..."
On the other hand these could be just an unstable persons emotional responses
to criticism.
Paul Robson:
These are pretty standard debating tricks.... it doesn't indicate
emotional instability
(1) Misuse of some and all - implying all and then trying to defend
some - and any use of some can be attacked on the grounds that
it is not applicable to all.
(2) Redefinition of words on the fly.
(3) Answering questions other than the one stated and then
believing you answered the original question.
(4) Making extreme statements and when questioned retreat
to more defensible statements, and if those are agreed assume
the original position was agreed.
(5) Use of rhetorical language rather than argument.
(6) Appeals to emotion (e.g. patriotism and law enforcement, and,
of course, religions all-time favourite, hell).
The list is pretty endless really, but these are the main ones
(excluding denial and avoidance of course)
Here's my theory.Jerry works on (at least) 2 mailing lists, this
one and his own. Because of the pressure of time, he doesn't
respond to what is written, but skim-reads it picking out a few
key words & phrases in the document, and then builds a
concept of what he thinks the post says, and responds to that.
The problem is he seems to be stuck in preach mode most of
the time, which isn't much use for written debates. In spoken
debate, it is very useful (especially if your audience has very
strong preconceptions), in fact, rhetoric often works better than
factual argument. I suspect this is one of the main reasons the
threat to "swap propositions" keeps rearing its head.
Paul Robson (autismuk@aol.com)
PS:
There is a famous old AI program called "Eliza", which pretended
to be a Psychiatrist - it picked up key words and echoed back
responses, and remembered phrases used in previous answers.
If stuck, it responded from a set of stock questions or statements.
With something sufficiently waffly, it is fairly easy to do because
you get the astrology effect - you read into the waffle what you want
to hear or believe. It was quite convincing.