[coldtea]

I suggest you go and re-read TFA. All your points showcase extreme naivety and prejudice.

Just two examples upon many:

>Translation: Some people never shut up after they have been proven wrong, <em>and the author values this assertiveness over whether their arguments are logically sound</em>. He concludes that the most assertive arguer is automatically <em>correct</em>. He calls for the total abandonment of logic and reason and to respect force and effect in their stead.

Very bad translation. He does not say, or even suggest, that he values the assertiveness. He ACCESSES the baloney detectors not as less assertive, but as less persuasive, and their argumentation of lower quality. He judges, in the VERY quote you mis-translate, the worth of their argument --not of their assertiveness: "their arguments seemed to possess an inner strength".

You choose to interpret that strength as they believing strongly in it, but his argument makes clear he says it's strong because it's less "feeble", more in "command of their resources", and "much more mature".

If anything, the baloney detectors are equally assertive ("rigid"), stubborn and utterly convinced for their reasoning superiority.

>Next he says that the correct identification of a logical error does not imply incorrectness of the argument. No comment is needed.

Actually comment very much needed. In real human conversation, as opposed to medieval formal argumentation, the correct identification of a logical error does not prove any incorrectness of the whole argument. It's not some axiomatic system or a formal proof, so that everything relies on a single, unified, core. Arguments in actual human conversation are multifaceted, nuanced and complicated. One --or even a bunch-- of logical errors in them do not suffice to invalidate them.

[Tangaroa]

Reread it yourself. He does in fact uphold forcefulness ("confidence", "command", "outmaneuver", not "feeble") and rhetoric ("inner strength", "emotion") as superior to logical thought ("predictable", "rigid"). It's like he just discovered that street-level debates don't follow Oxford rules, that some people cannot be persuaded by logic, and that other people can be persuaded by illogical means, so he denounces the use of logic and stands by the illogical means as the path to deducing correctness. He views rhetoric as persuasiveness as correctness. His examples all reinforce this analysis.

And let's consider that "inner strength". It is not the actual strength of the argument since that is what the logic-users would see and support. If the argument had outer strength, the baloney detectors would not have called it out in the first place. This "inner strength" is a feeling he gets from the argument. It is an emotional uplift. It is irrelevant to the actual strength of the argument.

When the baloney detectors are correct, they very well ought to be assertive, stubborn, and convinced of their own correctness. Why should they accept their opponent's views as fact after they have proved it insufficiently justified or logically false?

And yes, conversations can be multifaceted. I'm sorry to have to inform you that serious logical flaws and mistakes of fact in one facet of a multifaceted conversation do in fact invalidate that one facet of the conversation.

And please refrain from the insults, although it was nice to learn that I am both young and old at the same time, and also a racist.

[coldtea]

>And let's consider that "inner strength". It is not the actual strength of the argument since that is what the logic-users would see and support.

A circular argument, if I ever met one. No, it's the actual strength of the argument, since, what the logic-users would "see and support" (the mere logical consistency of the argument) is far from the essence of human argumentation. Except if you argue with Aristotle or Medieval Philosophers.

>And yes, conversations can be multifaceted. I'm sorry to have to inform you that serious logical flaws and mistakes of fact in one facet of a multifaceted conversation do in fact invalidate that one facet of the conversation.

For one, you misunderstood me. Badly.

I said that real world arguments are multifaceted, and thus, spotting a "serious logical flaw" in one, doesn't mean the whole argument is invalidated. And you reply to me that ...it would invalidate just that facet? Well, you don't say!

This repeating of what I told as if it was some novel information tells me you are incapable of evaluating even my simple arguments in context.

>And please refrain from the insults, although it was nice to learn that I am both young and old at the same time, and also a racist.

Where you gathered that from my reply, I can't even fathom. If my guess is right, you think "naive" also implies "young", and "prejudiced" implies racism. I don't know about "baloney detection", but my extreme reading comprehension issues detector started beeping wildly.