This feels like a very immature understanding of argument. The entire framing is wrong, even if it's both understandable and a very widely held viewpoint.
I credit my mom for teaching me very early on that the POINT of argument is to come to a decision or understanding, not to determine right or wrong or assign any credit or blame. She was insatiable in running down every technicality. I learned to ask her, "okay, so how does that help with what we're doing?", which she usually had no answer to. That might sound antagonistic, but it was really just a personality thing. She would say, just as matter-of-factly, that it didn't help, it just was true. She has no malice, and no intention of "being right". She just couldn't help but be pedantic. Something about the way her mind works. Luckily, she's working as a quality control supervisor for a warehouse, where the details are essential. Nice when things can work out like that.
The point crystallized for me when I met one of the best developers I've ever known. He would calmly and firmly insist on his absolute correctness until you were blue in the face. But the second you gave him even a hint that he could be wrong, he would run down your point to its conclusions and then adjust his stance without ever changing disposition. You were wrong without question until you gave him any reason to believe you weren't. At that point, he validated his argument against your new information and changed his position without any equivocation or excuses. Just "oh, okay, you mean this? Now I see what you mean. Yes, you're right, that will work.". Sometimes he would laugh at himself for not getting it, and he would always be upfront about being wrong if you insisted he acknowledge it. But he didn't offer up any humility because now we had an answer and could move forward. No reason to dwell on the wrong stuff. It's still my favorite working relationship. I get so tired of the effusive repiping of the whole argument to assign right and wrong that is so common in corporate spaces. Feels like such a waste of time, once you've experienced true absence of ego. I still think of him as a kind of compiler. Provide exactly the right info and get what you want. Provide the wrong info and there will be no way to move forward until that is reconciled. As a dev, it's a breath of fresh air from humans who are often so far from strict logic.
> The entire framing is wrong, even if it's both understandable and a very widely held viewpoint.
Setting aside a few levels of irony in arguing with arguers on arguing, I think there are multiple framings for arguments. Things go off the rails all the time when neither party is aligned on what kind of argument the current one is.
Programmers and engineers tend to carry around this worldview that every conversation is about correct information or future decision-making, but everyone is operating on different planes. God help you if you go into an argument with the spouse implicitly about acknowledging how your actions made them feel armed with facts and logic about how this is irrelevant because the problem is solved or there is no new action to take.
Fair point, but I see that as kind of a simplification? It's a perspective, rather than a refutation, but I see any argument about how you made someone feel as either a mistake or an argument about something else.
No perfectly logical actor would ever argue with how someone is feeling. It's impossible for a second party to know or rationalize, and the person with the direct evidence is giving you their best representation of the feelings. To argue that someone doesn't feel what they say they feel is tantamount to ignoring direct evidence which negates any practical value of the argument. It's this not worth having.
On the other hand, if what you are actually trying to argue is whether they are being truthful, or reasonable about their feelings, those are arguments that do have a practical result of deciding something or understanding something better. The more you dig in to why people are feeling the way they are feeling, the more you can reckon with what that means for whatever the disagreement is. Of course, it cuts both ways; if someone telling you that they feel a certain way makes you feel a certain way, it's only reasonable to interrogate why you are feeling that way about it. But then, that gets further toward the most salient part: most of the time when it comes to feelings, an argument is the wrong tool for resolving disagreement. In my experience, open ended discussion that focuses on each individuals' feelings without consideration for correctness is more productive than any sort of confrontational method like an argument.