I suspect that I lost the second person way before horses even became an issue. When he started picking on my words, “horses” and “different world” and “hypothetical person” didn’t really matter anymore. He was just angry. What he was saying didn’t make sense from that point on. For whatever reason, he stopped responding to logic.
But I don’t know what I said to make him this angry in the first place.
Leaving aside the actual argument, I can tell you that there exist people (my husband is one of them, and come to think of it so is my ex-girlfriend, which makes me suspect that I bear some responsibility here, but I digress) whose immediate emotional reaction to “here, let me walk you through this illustrative hypothetical case” is strongly negative.
The reasons given vary, and may well be confabulatory.
I’ve heard the position summarized as “I don’t believe in hypothetical questions,” which I mostly unpack to mean that they understand that hypothetical scenarios are often used to introduce assumptions which support conclusions that the speaker then tries to apply by analogy to the real world, and that a clever rhetoritician can use this technique to sneak illegitimate assumptions into real-world scenarios, and don’t trust me not to sneak in assumptions that make them look stupid or manipulate them into acting against their own interests.
I don’t know if that’s a factor in your case or not, but I have found that once I trigger that reaction, there’s not much more I can do… they are no longer cooperating in the communication, they are just looking for some way to get out. If I press the point, I merely elicit anger and defensiveness and a variety of distractors.
The best way around this I’ve found so far, and it’s only hit-or-miss, is to avoid the stance of “here let me show you something” altogether.
I am a lot more successful if I adopt the stance of “I am thinking about a problem that interests me,” and if they express interest, explaining the problem as something I am presenting to myself, rather than to them. Or, if they don’t, talking about something else.
At the risk of sounding like Robin, the fact that this is successful leads me to believe that at least sometimes, what’s really going on is that I’ve stepped on some status-signaling landmine, and the reaction I’m getting actually translates to “I refuse to cede you the role of instructor by letting you define the hypothetical.”
And suggesting that this might be what’s going on works about as poorly as you’d expect it to were it what’s going on. Of course, that’s precisely what makes status-signaling a fully generalizable counterargument, so I take it with a grain of salt.
“I refuse to cede you the role of instructor by letting you define the hypothetical.”
You know, come think of it, that’s actually a very good description of the second person… who is, by the way, my dad.
I am a lot more successful if I adopt the stance of “I am thinking about a problem that interests me,” and if they express interest, explaining the problem as something I am presenting to myself, rather than to them. Or, if they don’t, talking about something else.
This hasn’t ever occurred to me, but I’ll try it the next time a similar situation arises.
I suspect that I lost the second person way before horses even became an issue. When he started picking on my words, “horses” and “different world” and “hypothetical person” didn’t really matter anymore. He was just angry. What he was saying didn’t make sense from that point on. For whatever reason, he stopped responding to logic.
But I don’t know what I said to make him this angry in the first place.
Leaving aside the actual argument, I can tell you that there exist people (my husband is one of them, and come to think of it so is my ex-girlfriend, which makes me suspect that I bear some responsibility here, but I digress) whose immediate emotional reaction to “here, let me walk you through this illustrative hypothetical case” is strongly negative.
The reasons given vary, and may well be confabulatory.
I’ve heard the position summarized as “I don’t believe in hypothetical questions,” which I mostly unpack to mean that they understand that hypothetical scenarios are often used to introduce assumptions which support conclusions that the speaker then tries to apply by analogy to the real world, and that a clever rhetoritician can use this technique to sneak illegitimate assumptions into real-world scenarios, and don’t trust me not to sneak in assumptions that make them look stupid or manipulate them into acting against their own interests.
I don’t know if that’s a factor in your case or not, but I have found that once I trigger that reaction, there’s not much more I can do… they are no longer cooperating in the communication, they are just looking for some way to get out. If I press the point, I merely elicit anger and defensiveness and a variety of distractors.
The best way around this I’ve found so far, and it’s only hit-or-miss, is to avoid the stance of “here let me show you something” altogether.
I am a lot more successful if I adopt the stance of “I am thinking about a problem that interests me,” and if they express interest, explaining the problem as something I am presenting to myself, rather than to them. Or, if they don’t, talking about something else.
At the risk of sounding like Robin, the fact that this is successful leads me to believe that at least sometimes, what’s really going on is that I’ve stepped on some status-signaling landmine, and the reaction I’m getting actually translates to “I refuse to cede you the role of instructor by letting you define the hypothetical.”
And suggesting that this might be what’s going on works about as poorly as you’d expect it to were it what’s going on. Of course, that’s precisely what makes status-signaling a fully generalizable counterargument, so I take it with a grain of salt.
You know, come think of it, that’s actually a very good description of the second person… who is, by the way, my dad.
This hasn’t ever occurred to me, but I’ll try it the next time a similar situation arises.