It’s all Greek to me

Just a warn­ing to any other sites out there that have pre­vi­ously held the cher­ished title of Web­site From Which Vaughan Steals Most Of His Inter­est­ing Links — watch your backs, because Sashinka is fast becom­ing my favoured port of call for all those URLs I couldn’t be bothered to find myself. The latest to grab my atten­tion is The Logical Fal­la­cies, a detailed and sci­entific ana­lysis of the vari­ous meth­ods by which humans engage in argu­ment. Most of the mod­els employ social or polit­ical examples to illus­trate how they work, but I recog­nise a num­ber of the brief defin­i­tions as demon­strat­ing how my brain oper­ates in situ­ations involving dis­agree­ments or, even worse, arguments:

Slip­pery Slope
Defin­i­tion: In order to show that a pro­pos­i­tion P is unac­cept­able, a sequence of increas­ingly unac­cept­able events is shown to fol­low from P. A slip­pery slope is an ille­git­im­ate use of the “if-then” operator.

I’ve sud­denly real­ised that the Slip­pery Slope is one of my favour­ite meth­ods of attack or, more fre­quently, one of my favour­ite get-out clauses. If you know me (and give the above quote another quick read-through), I sus­pect you will real­ise that this is true. If you don’t — well, d’ya wanna fight about it?

I love art­icles such as The Logical Fal­la­cies, which apply such incred­ible sci­entific pre­ci­sion to the art of con­ver­sa­tion. They’re just so won­der­fully imprac­tical in real life. We all like to ima­gine that we really do think before we speak, but the art of con­ver­sa­tion — whether friendly banter or ser­i­ous argu­ment — is at its best when it is fluid and free-flowing, when the brain is work­ing seam­lessly with the mouth in chan­nel­ling the words that the ears have just heard.*

So, yes, it would undoubtedly lead to fewer mis­un­der­stand­ings if, mid-conversation, we were sud­denly able to think:

“Oops, I’m hor­ribly aware that I’ve just indulged in a non sequitur of Affirm­ing the Con­sequent. Can I steer myself clear by Deny­ing the Ante­cedent, or should I just opt for a Fal­lacy of Exclu­sion and hope that settles the matter?”

How­ever, the down­side of such ana­lyt­ical beha­viour would be that the aver­age person’s head would almost cer­tainly implode into a hor­rible fleshy pulp with the sheer mind-fuck of the whole thing — thereby reveal­ing the mass of scorched tendril wires and fizz­ing ele­ments beneath the skull, all linked up to a Dur­a­cell bunny work­ing on over­load. (Speak­ing as someone who already over-analyses con­ver­sa­tions, emails and text mes­sages too much, I know my stuff when it comes to this sub­ject, believe me).

Per­haps the above web pages are rather too detailed for most pur­poses. We should start with some­thing more user-friendly, like the frequently-quoted examples con­tained in Con­ver­sa­tional Ter­ror­ism, which con­tains lurid par­od­ies of the way we cheat in con­ver­sa­tions (and the examples have to be so pain­fully obvi­ous because, like chil­dren, we need to be shown the worst pos­sible out­comes before we’ll ever learn):

Pre­tend ad hom­inem
Make it seem as if the other per­son is attack­ing you rather than mak­ing a simple point or cor­rec­tion, if you sus­pect that the other party is right. Rather than stay­ing on the sub­ject, begin to act hurt — as if you have been viciously attacked as a human being — rather than admit you are wrong or could do bet­ter in some par­tic­u­lar. That will teach them to keep quiet about such things in the future, no? Also known as the escal­a­tion ploy.

The ideal solu­tion — the path to a bliss­ful exist­ence of thought­ful, mean­ing­ful yet naturally-evolving con­ver­sa­tion — prob­ably lies some­where between the two extremes. The ultra-carefree extreme allows your mouth to leapfrog over your brain when it comes to form­ing the next sen­tence you plan to deliver to your eager and undoubtedly cap­tiv­ated listen­ers, while the ultra-cautious extreme makes you so aware of all the con­ver­sa­tional tricks and pit­falls that you decide to take a vow of silence for ever and ever, amen. So, by a pro­cess of not even remotely sci­entific dedu­ca­tion, the marshy middle ground must mean real­ising which par­tic­u­lar con­ver­sa­tional error you have made or are about to make, and alert­ing every­one to it:

“Sorry chaps, hope you didn’t mind that brief dis­play of Dis­tor­ted Act­ive Listen­ing just now. Couldn’t help myself. Apologies.”

Don’t think before you speak (well, not unless you can put up with really long pauses in all your con­ver­sa­tions). Don’t speak before you think (because the Black Pit of Con­ver­sa­tional Doom will suck you into its unfor­giv­ing clutches). Instead, think and speak at the same time. Mar­vel­lous. Mil­lions of years of human evol­u­tion got us this far, so don’t give up on the whole speak­ing thing just yet. We have the technology.

In next week’s thor­oughly use­ful les­son: Text Mes­saging, And Why It’s Prob­ably A Bet­ter Idea To Slice Off Your Fin­gers With A Carving Knife.

Foot­note

The whole Brain-Mouth Equa­tion issue (and come on, you always sus­pec­ted there was an equa­tion in there some­where, didn’t you?) can also be used as a means to jus­tify the pop­u­lar belief that although we may not make much sense when we’re drunk, we tend to think that we’re say­ing what we truly feel because noth­ing much is block­ing the path­way between brain and speech, apart from per­haps clearly hear­ing what was being said in the first place. From this, nat­ur­ally, comes the fol­low­ing pop­u­lar con­ver­sa­tional gam­bit guar­an­teed to silence any drunken con­ver­sa­tion, par­tic­u­larly if spoken closely into someone’s ear thus expos­ing them to the heady stench of stale lager:

“You’re my besht­esht, besht­esht friend, you are. Have I ever told you that? I have? Well, I meant it. You’re my absholutesht besht friend. I wuv you. I weally, weally wuv you. In fact, I wuv you so much — would you like to know sumfink about me that I’ve never, ever, ever told anyone?”

(Shortly after, you end up reveal­ing how you were adop­ted by a fam­ily of seals as an orphaned tod­dler, and that this explains your strange fas­cin­a­tion with wet­suits. Or some­thing equally improb­able. I’m sure you can fill in the blanks for yourselves. Sorry, I digressed again. Ignore this bit).

Once again, you may jus­ti­fi­ably accuse me of being a pot call­ing the kettle black. Many people will attest to the fact that I have drunk­enly slurred vari­ants of the above on many occa­sions. But I lead by example. I did this so you don’t have to suf­fer in the same way. And I know for a fact that while the sen­ti­ments are undoubtedly plain in their hon­esty, you will (a) wake up the next morn­ing feel­ing very fool­ish indeed, be unable to look the vic­tim of your non­sensical ram­bling in the face for the next week, while wish­ing that the ground would swal­low you up because you feel extremely ridicu­lous; and (b) begin to har­bour nag­ging doubts in the back of your mind about why you can’t com­mu­nic­ate such warm and fluffy feel­ings to people when you’re sober and able to string words together in a semi-coherent fashion.

Why do we often (though not always) need to get drunk to say cer­tain things to people, even those we trust most impli­citly? Good ques­tion. It’s all down to the Brain-Mouth Equa­tion. Oh look, I appear to have come full-circle on that one. I must rest.