Logic

The Steel-Man Principle

Let me begin with a claim that will sound counterintuitive to anyone trained in modern debate culture: if you want to win an argument, you should make your opponent’s position as strong as possible before you attempt to refute it.

This is not a rhetorical flourish. This is the foundation of serious intellectual work.

The Straw-Man Epidemic

Contemporary discourse is dominated by what logicians call “straw-manning”: the practice of replacing your opponent’s actual argument with a weaker, more easily defeated version. You see this everywhere. A nuanced position on immigration policy becomes “they want open borders.” A complex critique of capitalism becomes “they want everyone to be equally poor.” A careful argument about free speech becomes “they want to ban all disagreement.”

The False Dilemma Factory

You are presented, in the course of any given week, with dozens of false dilemmas. Security or privacy. Growth or sustainability. Tradition or progress. Open borders or closed borders. Regulation or innovation.

Each of these is constructed to suggest that you must choose one and abandon the other. Each is a lie.

I do not use that word carelessly. A false dilemma is not a simplification. It is a logical error, and when it is deployed deliberately – as it almost always is in political discourse – it is a form of manipulation. The person presenting the dilemma is not trying to help you think. They are trying to prevent you from thinking, by eliminating from your consideration every option except the two they have preselected.