I've been studying the informal fallacies and it dismayed me to discover that lawyers typically USE, instead of AVOID, many of these fallacies... precisely because it wins cases. Their purpose is to win, not to be the most correct.
Winning is thus a perverse incentive in truth discovery. Maybe conflating competition with truth discovery was a bad idea? I guess, it's impossible to dispassionately plead a court case when livelihoods are at stake, and thus competition is inevitable...
I would like to think that if I was a lawyer arguing a case, and I knew that using a certain fallacy would work, I wouldn't use it... but who knows.
I've been studying the informal fallacies and it dismayed me to discover that lawyers typically USE, instead of AVOID, many of these fallacies... precisely because it wins cases. Their purpose is to win, not to be the most correct.
Winning is thus a perverse incentive in truth discovery. Maybe conflating competition with truth discovery was a bad idea? I guess, it's impossible to dispassionately plead a court case when livelihoods are at stake, and thus competition is inevitable...
I would like to think that if I was a lawyer arguing a case, and I knew that using a certain fallacy would work, I wouldn't use it... but who knows.