List of Fully General Counterarguments

Some of those don't appear to be fully general counterarguments.

for example: "Meta: The opponent is using fully general counterarguments."

does not work if your opponents counterarguments aren't examples of fully general counterarguments.

After all, this isn't just a list of things people can shout.That would just be a list of annoying arguments.

A few more FGCAs. Some of these aren't really arguments, but anyone mounting an FGCA is unlikely to be concerned about epistemological propriety, and all of these things can be used together in support of each other.

1. "Check your privilege."

2. "Check your premises."

3. Psychologising the opposition.

4. "This is settled science."

5. Emphasis and reassertion of the thesis.

6. "Oh. My. God."

7. "*facepalm*"

8. "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!"

9. Satire.

10. Parody.

11. Pretty much anything, said in your own echo chamber. NB. Link to your allies' actual postings, but not to your enemies'. A link to the top of their blog is better.

12. Cite some other blogger and say they've completely eviscerated the enemy.

13. Irregular verbs. ("We are right/You are wrong." "These studies prove/Those studies are flawed." "We have the support of.../You are in the pocket of...")

And a Fully General way of generating all of these and more: bottom-lining. Nail your desired conclusion to a wall marked "TRUE" and your opponents' to a wall marked "FALSE", and ask the virtual outcome pump in your head to fill in the empty space on the walls. There is no conclusion, however absurd or repellent, that you cannot do this with. The smarter and better educated you are, the more puzzle pieces you have available to play with and the more easily you can invent new ways to put them together. Related quote from Foucault's Pendulum.

"You are one of the many people in your cult who assert P. But there are also a lot of people in your cult who assert ~P. Therefore, people in your cult believe the contradiction P & ~P, and you are all idiots who should quit your deceptive mind-killing cult and join mine."

"Yeah, I used to believe that too when I was your age."
"Yeah, I used to believe that too when I didn't have the education / resources / cult-membership to know better."
"Yeah, I used to believe that too until I realized it was stupid."
"Yeah, I used to believe that too when I hung out with bad people."
"Yeah, I used to believe that too when I was high all the time / before I'd ever dropped acid."
"Yeah, I used to believe that too before I converted / deconverted."
"Yeah, I used to believe that too when I was rich / poor."
"Yeah, I used to believe that too before I got therapy / Jesus / a copy of The Fountainhead."

Another one:

"Yes, everyone thinks they're a special snowflake that this doesn't apply to."

I think it would be good to separate the analysis into FGCA's which are always fallacious, versus those that are only warning signs/rude. For instance, the fallacy of grey is indeed a fallacy, so using it as a counter-argument is a wrong move regardless of its generality.

However, it may in fact be that your opponent is a very clever arguer or that the evidence they present you has been highly filtered. Conversationally, using these as a counter-argument is considered rude (and rightly so), and the temptation to use them is often a good internal warning sign; however you don't want to drop consideration of them from your mental calculus. For instance, perhaps you should be motivated after the conversation to investigate alternative evidence if you're suspicious that the evidence presented to you was highly filtered.

I'd add one for the internet age which I know myself to be guilty of using on occasion though not without some justification:

"Your perception of [groups behavior]/[scale of problem]/[frequency of event]/[fraction of people who agree with you] is largely a product of the filter bubble in which you and your social circle interacts"

It's technically true of almost everything and of almost everyone's perceptions but as such can be applied in almost any argument against either side.

The iterated "but how do you know that" also works as a FGC, or gets your opponent to admit he is relying on an unjustified assumption.

The Big Lebowski: "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man".

What are known ways to avoid FGCAs?

Observing that it Proves Too Much. If it is Fully General, it always does.

I like this idea, and I'd like to see it developed further. I don't see any reason why FGCAs shouldn't be catalogued and learned alongside logical fallacies for the same reasons.

I guess the important distinction would be that certain FGCAs can be used non-fallaciously, and some of these seem to have valid use-cases, like pointing out confirmation bias and mind-projection fallacy. Others are fallacious in their fully-general form, but have valid uses in their non-fully-general forms, so it is important to distinguish these. (e.g. pointing out vagueness or that something is too complicated and has too many dependencies for a given argument to have much weight.)

Great post!

I apologize for mentioning this, but there were a lot of typos in this, which made it a bit hard to read. I want to link this to a few friends who are not LWers, but when I am not familiar with the source of something, typos make me question the credibility of the author (they also provide an easy excuse to discount things people don't want to hear). I don't want that to happen when I show people, so I figured I'd help you out if you feel like cleaning it up a bit. Here's a quick list I put together for you:

• Add comma after "But if (s)he is not aware of that"
• Change "prone of" to "prone to"
• "counter measures" should be "countermeasures"
• "against which" should be "against whom" in "...clever arguer against which"
• Add comma after "humble stance"
• Change "FCGA" to "FGCA" in first bullet of The List and in first sentence under headings of both Self-Sealing Belief and Preventative Action
• The third bullet is empty and fourth bullet seems like it is supposed to contains sub-cases of the missing third bullet
• Under Nihilism, "Live" should be "Life" and the "-" needs to be closed after "including arguments"
• "I don't like your opinion but I you are may have your own."
• "Yur" => "Your" after "Humans are different"
• In "the thing you are arguing about has evolved and exists just because of that, not because it is true or a valid argument." Just because of what? Evolution?
• Opened paren but no contents or close-paren: "...more likely and more stable ("

Another:

"What observation would convince you?"

The beauty of this one is that the better established the idea you're arguing against, the stronger this argument becomes.

everybody is entitled to his own opinon - I don't like your opinion but you may have your own. It's not important that we differ.

Why not call it relativism, because that is what it is?

One particular strategy is the claim of "self" contradiction, when the contradiction is not between statements the opponent makes, but between some statements the opponent makes, and some statements that are deduced or inferred from what the opponent said and your own beliefs and concepts.

The fact that we are disagreeing is a strong indicator that there are contradictions between your priors and my priors and structural commitments on similar propositions, so that finding evidence of such contradictions is not really much of an indicator that you are wrong, let alone that you contradicted yourself.

Particularly when the claim of "self" contradiction comes from A critiquing B's theory without feedback or response from B, it's very easy for A to engage in a self congratulatory kabuki argument against B, then shutter his mind from further consideration of B's argument.

My opponent must be secretly a shill, no wonder my arguments failed to sway his opinion. And I have no obligation to waste my time listening to shills and arguing with them.

Another FGCA (actually more general than that, it's an FGA):

"When I say X, you should update in that direction, because a world in which X is true is one in which you are more likely to hear X than one where it is false."

Donald Trump used a FGC when interviewed today to get out of a trap. I don't recall what he said verbatim but it went something like this:

Reporter: "Have you ever said something you regret?" Trump: "Of course." Reporter: "What was it?" Trump: "Now isn't the time to discuss it."

Another:

Argument by authority, lately reinvented as the Outside View. That may not sound fully general, but it's all in the choice of reference class.

A common one that I see works like this: first person holds position A. A second person points out fact B which provides evidence against position A. The first person responds, "I am going to adjust my position to position C: namely that both A and B are true. B is evidence for C, so your argument is now evidence for my position." Continue as needed.

Example:

First person: The world was created. Second person: Living things evolved, which makes it less likely that things were created than if they had just appeared from nothing. First person: The world was created through evolution. Facts implying evolution are evidence for this fact, so your argument now supports my position.

Continuing in this way allows the first person not only to maintain his original position, even if modified, but also to say that all possible evidence supports it.

(The actual resolution is that even if the modified position is supported by the evidence in issue, the modified position is more unlikely in itself than the original position, since the conjunction requires two things to be true, so following this process results in holding more and more unlikely positions.)

Experts are fallacious, thus you can't trust them

One very common example of this I see abused all the time is the argument in the form of "(X) was wrong about (Y) so therefore experts are worthless!"

Another FGA:

Setting the agenda/framing the discussion.

I don't know who first made the observation, but it's a commonplace of politics that if you can set the agenda, it doesn't matter how people vote.

Any time you find yourself crowing "so you admit that in some circumstances you would...!", you have probably committed this one.

Critical rationalists had a similar concept which they called an "immunizing strategy".

For those interested in the concept, it's probably worthwhile to look there for more info.

With a little poking around, I found a paper that gives a typology for immunizing strategies. I've only given it the most cursory glance. Caveat emptor. YMMV. IANAL.

You're modelling and/or simulating the wrong entity/object/concept, thus committing the ecological fallacy of individual and aggregate correlates

Another Fully General Argument:

"It's not proof, but it's weak Bayesian evidence."