Re: [Ksummit-2013-discuss] [ATTEND] How to act on LKML

[James Bottomley]

On Tue, 2013-07-23 at 19:51 -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 8:02 PM, Daniel Phillips
> <d.phillips@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On 07/20/2013 12:36 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> >> I think you need more than "hope" to change one of the fundamental
> >> rules of LKML; be open and honest, even if that means expressing your
> >> opinion in a way that others might consider offensive and colorful.
> >
> > Logical fallacy type: bifurcation. You can be open and honest without
> > being offensive or abusive.
> 
> You are mistaken, that is not what the false dichotomy fallacy means.
> I'm not saying you have to be A (open and honest), or B (polite), and
> that you can't be both, if that's what you arguing (which seems to be
> the case), you are wrong, and to argue against that position would be
> a straw man fallacy.
> 
> Your mistaken fallacy seems to be that you think one can *always* be
> both A (open and honest), and B (polite), I'm not sure if there's a
> name for that fallacy, but you don't provide any evidence for that
> claim.

It's not actually one of the original logical fallacies, but it's called
argument to moderation or false compromise: The fallacy is the
assumption that the original statements represent extremal positions of
a continuum so there must always be middle ground which represents the
correct statement.  To those accepting the fallacy making the middle
ground statement by that fact alone demonstrates the invalidity of the
previous proposition.

I think it's not in the original fallacies because they come from Greek
rhetoric and the Greeks believed dialectic: the taking opposite
positions and arguing them thoroughly.  It's only with the advent of
Western European political systems that we're conditioned to seek
compromise without rigorous examination.  This actually makes argument
to moderation one of the most effective rhetorical tools in use today
for discrediting an opponent's argument without actually addressing it.

James


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