[nileshtrivedi]

I'm surprised that neither the article nor the comments here mention the "principle of charity". I read about this early in my study of logic and philosophy.

It basically says that, if your objective is to discover truth rather than to win a debate, you ought to grant the best possible interpretation of the speaker's statement instead of focusing on narrow and literal interpretations which contain obvious logical fallacies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

[jonnathanson]

Most people start from the (ostensibly reasonable) assumption that you can't win an argument on the internet. It doesn't matter how cogent, how thought-provoking, how thoroughly researched and meticulously cited your position may be. You're not convincing the other side of anything. At best you can "win the crowd" in the Gladiator sense of the term.

And this is what encourages most of the fallacy-citing, semantics nitpicking, and prosaic grandstanding seen in pseudo-sophisticated internet arguments. People aren't trying to convince the other side of anything in particular; they're trying to convince the audience -- oftentimes, more imagined than actual -- of their intellectual superiority.

People these days join conversations, by default, in fight-or-flight mode. They presume hostility is lurking in every response, or, conversely, that responding to a post necessitates correcting it in some way. If more of them assumed good intent until proven otherwise, they wouldn't rush headlong into internet arguments.

[MartinCron]

Most people start from the (ostensibly reasonable) assumption that you can't win an argument on the internet

I should be spending more time in whatever corners of the Internet where you are.

[EvanKelly]

Maybe not... his point is that this premise causes internet arguers to play to the crowd, rather than to engage in meaningful discourse with the person they are arguing with.

There are alternatives to winning an argument. A very positive one would be coming to an understanding of why your opponent holds their view, but continuing to disagree because what you value is different.

[dragonwriter]

The principle of charity is important but also can be dangerous if taken too far, particularly, it can avoid productive discussion by what amounts to a version of the strawman fallacy where instead of inventing something that the other person didn't say shaped by one's own preconceptions to argue against, you are inventing something that the other person didn't say shaped by one's own preconceptions to agree with, which is clearly an impediment, rather than a boon, to the productive interchange of ideas.

Beyond deciding how to resolve obvious ambiguities where it can readily provide a best interpretation which it is most likely was actually intended by the speaker (the Caesar example in the Wikipedia article is a good one for this), the principle of charity is best applied cautiously to form a hypothesis of what the other speaker may have intended that can be verified through a clarification request.

[MetaCosm]

Of course, charity only goes so far, if the ROOT of their argument is a logical fallacy, no amount of charitable thinking will repair the hole.