“Give Them an Argument: Logic for the Left”

“Doing that mental exercise of seeing if you could rephrase somebody else’s argument in your own words—that alone might be one of the single most useful things that you can do to reason better and to respond to people’s arguments better.”

After growing up in a college town in the Upper Midwest, Dr. Benjamin Burgis headed to Aquinas College in Michigan, where he was active in organizing anti-war protests and graduated in 2003. Dr. Burgis then earned an MA in philosophy at Western Michigan University. Since then, he has written and published fiction work, such as his prize-winning novella, Three Perspectives on the Role of the Anarchists in the Zombie Apocalypse. Nowadays, since earning his PhD, Dr. Burgis teaches philosophy at Rutgers University and is the author of the recently published book Give Them An Argument: Logic for the Left, a book which aims to provide readers with knowledge of formal logic and informal fallacies. In this interview, Professor Burgis joins Logan Chipkin to discuss the fundamentals of argumentation logic and reasoning—and to apply these to evaluating various political philosophies.

You explain many forms of argument in your book. Early on, you describe the reductio ad absurdum argument. What is this, and how is it used in argumentation?

Reductio ad absurdum is when you’re drawing out an inconsistency in somebody’s position or one that results from somebody’s position. For example, if you assert that “A” is true, and it follows that “B” is true and “C” is true, but it it turns out that both “B” and “C” can’t be true. I think that this is one of those things where it’s easy to do this cheap mic drop that claim, “Aha! See, you’re wrong!” The more constructive way to think about it is that if there really is this inconsistency that results from your position, the first thing to ask is, “Am I actually wrong? Is there some way of massaging this so that these two things aren’t actually inconsistent, that maybe when I’ve thought about it more carefully, there really is a way to think about it such that they can both be true?” But if it really is true that there is this inconsistency, then you have to go back to the drawing board.