Episode 2: Arguing Past Each Other

April explains one of the reasons why arguments can go "off the rails"--because the people involved are either unintentionally or deliberately arguing past each other. This happens when people think they are arguing about the same thing, but they are actually arguing different issues related to the topic.
 
April's Show Notes for Episode 2:

Here's a basic explanation of formal argument and how it differs from informal argument:
https://dlc.dcccd.edu/english2-2/formal-arguments

This article from Harvard Business Review explains some of the reasons why we fail to see that we aren't "on the same page" with others, and gives some good tips to make sure everyone is listening and correctly interpreting what the issues are:
https://hbr.org/2012/12/why-youre-talking-past-each-other-and

This is the story of the mother and daughter who were arguing based on different definitions of the term "socialism:"
https://thevoice.us/instead-of-talking-past-each-other-find-common-ground/

A good article about how those involved in national discourse often talk past each other:
https://novellearning.blog/2017/10/12/how-we-argue-talking-past-each-other/

This is a great article that explains why paraphrasing is so effective when you're in the middle of an argument:
https://www.whatcomdrc.org/news/2018/3/30/the-power-of-paraphrasing

"Pivoting" is a common way politicians avoid answering questions they don't like, and often the audience doesn't realize they're being played. Here's how they exploit our "cognitive limitations:"
 https://www.npr.org/2012/10/03/162103368/how-politicians-get-away-with-dodging-the-question 

Transcript

Episode 2—Arguing Past Each Other

Hello and welcome to Episode 2! You know, I don’t think this is going to end up being a limited series podcast as I said in Episode 1; in fact I’ve already got several new ideas outlined for future episodes, so yay! I’ve also scheduled several interviews for upcoming episodes, and I’m looking forward to talking to some really interesting and knowledgeable guests. And just so you know, while I do have a lot of knowledge about the things I talk about in this podcast, by no means am I a perfect example of good critical thinking (just ask anyone who knows me). I’m as fallible as anyone else; in fact, one of the reasons I teach these classes is so I can constantly remind myself of these ideas and concepts, tips and tricks I need to keep putting into practice to get through the day. It’s a lifelong process. And now let’s get to the topic—arguing past each other.

MUSIC

What does it mean to argue past each other? Well, first we need to clarify what I mean when I say argument, because there are formal arguments and everyday common arguments, also known as informal arguments. Formal argument--as defined in philosophy and rhetoric, and this is putting it VERY simply, consists of a series of claims or statements that attempt to prove or support something. There are two different kinds of claims—conclusions and premises. Conclusions are the main claim you’re trying to prove or support, and premises are the evidence that you’re using to prove or support those conclusions. I’ll link to something in the show notes that explains this a little more clearly. If you participated in debate in high school or college, you used formal argument. However, most of us are more familiar with informal argument—that’s an everyday common argument--you’d probably define it as two or more people confronting and contradicting each other. In these kinds of arguments evidence isn’t necessarily at the forefront (although it certainly might play a part); we often focus on how these arguments make us feel (because remember, feelings come first), and frankly even if they start off with civility, they sometimes devolve into anger and yelling and name calling. Maybe some people get off on that, but I certainly don’t; and I generally do everything I can to avoid getting sucked into these kinds of arguments. Now, it might be possible that when you take the emotion out of an everyday argument and look at it, you might actually have a decent formal argument, but often that’s not what happens; you just get a claim with very little or no evidence, and it’s pretty much all emotion and very little else is going on there--for instance, “You’re stupid and I hate you” is not really an argument. But here’s the thing—one of the ways that common informal arguments fall apart and frustrate or anger people is due to the fact that the people involved are arguing past each other. This happens when people are not arguing about the same thing—at least one person in the argument thinks they are but they’re not. We’re often arguing about similar, but not exact, issues, and so it’s difficult to come to any kind of conclusion if we misinterpret what the other person is claiming, and we are claiming something similar but different, and we are both trying to support or prove our own conclusions, and sometimes we even end up arguing something entirely different than we started out arguing. In a lot of these arguments, not only does nothing get settled, we end up harboring bad feelings about that other person. All because we didn’t figure out exactly what the real issue was.

Let me repeat that--Arguing past each other happens because we are each making a different claim that might be related to the general topic but is not the same. Then we are trying to support or prove our claim, and the other person is doing the same thing about their claim. But since they’re different issues, the argument cannot actually be resolved. This plays out in so many ways in our everyday lives, and it can lead to a lot of misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and sometimes can drive a wedge between people. I’m going to take you through several examples of how this can happen on a daily basis, and I hope you’ll see what I mean:

The first way in which people argue past each other is when they don’t realize they are arguing from two different perspectives—let’s say a husband and wife are watching the news, they see a report about someone who just got the death penalty for some crime, and the wife says something about how capital punishment is horrible, and her husband says it’s perfectly appropriate. She says, but it’s so painful and immoral and they’ve killed people and later found out they were innocent, and he says, yeah well what about things like treason? What about serial killers? Those people deserve to die! And it goes back and forth, without either of them realizing they are arguing two different issues, one is whether or not capital punishment is immoral, and the other is whether or not it is appropriate. Yes, these issues are both related to the topic of capital punishment, But not the same thing. And unless they figure that out, they’re just going to piss each other off. 

Another way that people can argue past each other has to do with the way they each define terms. Here’s a great example from the website The Voice—an older woman, when she finds out her grown daughter and family are excited that Bernie Sanders is running for president again (this was obviously back in 2019), says to her daughter “Don’t you know he’s a communist?” When the daughter says, no mom, he’s a socialist, the woman says, “It’s the same thing.” And things of course went downhill from there, and they actually ended up not speaking for a while. All because of the way they each defined the term “socialist.” 

Our third example has to do with something called “deflection,” and it’s also a version of the “tu quoque” fallacy, which I’ll be talking about in a future episode on fallacies, so something to look forward to. Here’s a scenario--A mom is working from home on an important project, and her fifteen-year-old daughter wants to go to the store, the mom says she can ride her bike there, and the daughter says back, “why should I? You drive down to the corner 7-11 just to get a Slurpee.” So of course 95% of parents would immediately say something like, “Don’t you speak to me like that young lady!” and then it likely turns into an argument where they’re just sniping at each other, with the mom defending her driving habits and the daughter complaining that nobody understands her, because that’s what parents and teenagers do. But the mother’s original claim (that the daughter should ride her bike to the store) has nothing to do with the claim the girl is making about the mom’s driving a short distance to get something. Whether or not the daughter should ride her bike to the store, and whether or not the mom drives short distances when she probably ought to walk are related, but different issues. And certainly the way the daughter spoke to the mom, while many people might think it’s the MOST important issue here, is definitely not related to either of those issues. And that’s what deflection is—moving the argument from the original issue to a different issue, or maybe several different issues. And the daughter may or may not have realized she was doing that, but if the mom just follows that argument path, she’ll end up very far away from her original claim. Is this a dumb argument? Yes. Do dumb arguments like this happen all the time and cause problems in relationships? Also yes.

Example four: this is one of the ways it can happen on social media, someone posts an article, and makes an original comment about that article, then other commenters pick up on a word or an idea that is only tangentially related to the actual topic of the original post and starts pontificating on that, then other people respond to that. The original argument may even get ignored as commenters go down an entirely different path. You should be able to find an example of this with very little trouble--this kind of thing happens so often on social media that we just expect it (and I admit it actually can be kind of entertaining to see how the comments on even the most innocuous post can go completely off the rails), but with everyone arguing different things nothing ever seems to get resolved, and it tends to inflame our already polarized feelings and push people even further apart.

Example five: it happens all the time in politics—it’s known as “pivoting” and it’s another very common way in which people talk past each other, in this case it is usually deliberate on the part of the politician. It could be a news conference, Sunday morning news program, any interview with a politician, the interviewer asks a question, but the politician doesn’t answer THAT question, they pretend to, but in actuality they are giving talking points that are only tangentially related and spin off into things they know and have an answer for. And more often than not, they successfully dodge the original question.

As you can see, arguing past each other happens all the time. However, there are ways we can rectify this, but it takes recognition of what’s going on, which in the heat of the moment can be difficult. For all these examples I just gave you, there are certainly things the people involved could have done to get a handle on the actual issue. 

As far as the husband and wife arguing over capital punishment, it could devolve into the husband calling the wife naïve and the wife calling the husband heartless and them not speaking to each other for the rest of the night. But what if one of them stopped and said something like, “Wait a minute, let me see if I understand what you’re saying.” And then repeated what they thought the other is trying to argue, not to make fun of it or denigrate it in any way, but to really verbalize what they think the other person is saying.  And then the other person did the same thing. Is this difficult to do in the middle of a disagreement? Certainly; but it can be done, and It can get them to recognize that they are indeed using different moral and legal standpoints to judge whether capital punishment should be used. If they can each verbalize the other’s standpoint, then they might recognize that they are actually being heard by the other person. And that makes it easier for each of them to explain themselves as well as to acknowledge that the other person might have good reasons for thinking the way they do. Here’s the thing--Even if they still disagree, at least once they’ve acknowledged that the other person has a valid viewpoint (even if they think theirs is better), it’s much more likely to be an interesting and lively discussion than a fight where they end up calling the other person stupid. 

With the mother and daughter arguing over whether Bernie Sanders is a communist, after a couple of days had passed with them not speaking to each other, the daughter finally took a step back, put aside her feelings and asked her mother why she believed that communism and socialism were, as she said, “the same thing,” and this time she really listened to her. She learned that the experiences her mother had had back in the 1980’s with an East German friend who had survived both communism and socialism, and they were both horrendous experiences for her friend, had combined those two things in her mind as being equally bad, and basically she ended up thinking that those forms of government were the same thing. It’s true that many people equate communism with socialism, and when they think of socialism it’s not the democratic socialism of Scandinavian countries, it’s the authoritarian socialism of a place like Venezuela, and boy, nobody wants to be in Venezuela right now. The daughter realized she would probably never change her mother’s mind on this topic (in fact her mother said she was too old to change her mind now), but at least the daughter had a clearer understanding of why she felt that way and a deeper respect for her mother’s life experiences. She realized she didn’t have to “win” this argument; that she and her mother had so many other things in common, this wasn’t a deal breaker for their relationship.

In the mom and teenage daughter example, once the daughter accused the mother of driving short distances when she probably could have walked, instead of immediately focusing on the way she said it, the mother could have said something like, “Well, maybe so, but that doesn’t have anything to do with you being perfectly capable of riding your bike to the store.” What she’s doing here is refusing to get off topic and moving the argument back to the original claim; now, the daughter might just go off in a huff or she might ask for a ride to the store, which is maybe what she wanted in the first place even if she didn’t originally say it. Then of course the mother can repeat the claim that she can ride her bike. If the daughter then accuses the mom of being mean, she can simply say, “Maybe, but you can still ride your bike to the store.” Trust me, at some point the daughter will give up. She won’t be happy, but she’ll figure out that if she wants to go to the store she actually will have to ride her bike. And by the way I’m not ignoring the way the daughter talked to the mom, of course I’m not. However, it needs to be addressed separately from the original issue, otherwise the mom will just end up getting sucked back into an endless argument. So later, when everything has calmed down, she can mention (in a calm, rational manner) that the way the daughter spoke to her earlier about her driving habits was inappropriate and rude, and that the mom is much more likely to give the daughter a ride to the store if she just asks nicely. By the way, this is a tip that I learned when I was teaching family communication for our county’s parenting project. When it comes to dealing with kids, just keep moving back to the original issue, don’t get sidetracked by a different one.

Now, for the social media example, this is a little bit different. I need a disclaimer here—I’ve come to understand that rarely is anything resolved by arguing about it on social media, so my rule of thumb is to avoid posting things that could lead to an argument (unless you find my pet bunnies, my love for Disneyland, or what I made for dinner to be divisive). However, we do spend a lot of time lately talking to people on various social media platforms, and these platforms are ripe for abuse, manipulation and disinhibition (which is defined as a lack of restraint or a loss of inhibition leading to someone saying something online they might not say in a face-to-face encounter). And that can lead to the kinds of arguments that start out on one topic and end up somewhere in crazy town. So here’s what I think--rather than have a panic attack reading all the comments and trying to play whack-a-mole with them, the original poster could certainly try to steer the discussion back to the original issue, maybe give an example or two from the article they’re referencing (which as you probably know most of the people commenting never take the time to read, and yes I’ve been guilty of that as well). Anyway, this could actually result in people finally addressing the original issue, but it also may be ignored completely because people have already taken sides on their particular off-topic issue and are dug in. You could delete the post entirely, or you could delete individual comments that have strayed from the topic. You know, though, I hesitate to tell anyone what to do here, because people have different levels of tolerance for this kind of thing. I must say, I have several friends who address divisive topics extremely well, and keep their comment sections fairly civil and the discussions on topic. I’m very impressed by that; I just think it would take so much energy on my part to do that, I wouldn’t be able to get anything else done. But that’s just me—you do you.

And finally, now that I’ve pointed out to you how often politicians pivot from the original issue and move it to one they like better, I bet you start noticing it a lot. I really also hope you notice how the interviewer handles it. Some interviewers just let the politician change the subject and riff away, but a good interviewer will keep coming back to the original question, rephrasing but asking the same thing, and finally calling the politician out on their unwillingness to answer the question. Now, admittedly, sometimes interviewers ask what are called loaded questions in an attempt to trip up a politician, but that’s a different issue that we will talk about in a different episode. Hey, see what I just did there? I mentioned that this other issue exists, but I didn’t get sidetracked by it.

So, what can we take away from all this? I think the number one thing is to first recognize that arguing past each other is very common, and to be on the lookout for it. Sometimes it’s unintentional, sometimes it’s deliberate; sometimes you don’t realize what happened until after the fact, and it may or may not be possible to revisit that argument with the person and try to fix it; but even so, you’re starting to understand how these things can go off the rails. If you can stop in the middle of a disagreement and figure out what the real issue is, that’s awesome; then you need to be able to verbalize it, consistently come back to it, and refuse to get sidetracked by tangential arguments. If you can see that someone is intentionally trying to change the topic, you can say something like, “Well, we are discussing topic X right now. We can discuss topic Y later.”

You also have to be willing to try to figure out what the other person is saying. So phrases like, “Let me see if I understand your point here…is it (restate what you think they are saying)?” If the other person can see that you are making an effort to truly understand their viewpoint, that you’re actually listening to them, that can make a big difference. 

And that’s all for this episode; make sure to check out the show notes; I’ve put lots of links to great, easily accessible resources about this topic that will help you to think it through. I’ll see you in episode 3.