Nobody here, apart from me, does analytical philosophy. It’s all Continental here – anybody can say pretty much anything, and purpose is not logical debate but to somehow “improve understanding” by providing different ways to think about things.
Analytical philosophy is form of intellectual combat, similar in some respects to chess. It has a limited set of opening positions, and its history is the history of all the different openings that people have invented, and how one move leads to another move. So learning philosophy is, in part, learning all the well-known openings. This is one of the reason why people not trained in analytical philosophy are so bad at it: they nearly always attempt to play well-known openings, thinking that their own wits and knowledge will be enough to ensure they win, even though trained philosophers are several steps ahead of them and know how to defeat all the obvious opening strategies.
But just like chess, the back-catalogue of previous games is limited, and sooner or later you end up in territory which is either genuinely new, or uncommon enough such that neither side knows where the various lines of play lead to. And at this point you really do have rely on your wits and your knowledge, and sooner or later one of the participants will end up in trouble. This is where learning how to lose matters. Because when this happens, the natural human reaction comes from the ego – it feels like a loss of control, and a direct threat to one’s own worldview and, if the debate is in public, a loss of status. People with no training in philosophy react in very predictable ways at this point. They don’t even consider backing down and admitting they’re unsure of what to say, or don’t understand the argument anymore. So instead they start bluffing, strawmanning their opponent’s positions, attacking them personally with ad-hominems and tu-quoques. More recently, online, the response is to stop thinking for themselves and get AI to draft a response instead – which often gets posted without even being read by the person who posts it. And if their opponent calmly replies with another question they can’t answer, they frequently get angry and abusive, or just disappear. This does not happen in a philosophy classroom. When you have a debate like this and you are surrounded by other philosophers (either in person or online) then you cannot get away with these emotional responses. That is because they are well understood by the audience as signs that somebody has lost the argument and can’t cope with this fact, and also because the audience is aware of the fallacies and can see for themselves who is winning the argument and who is losing. Learning to be a philosopher is therefore learning how to monitor your own thought processes and emotions, and at the first moment you begin to realise that you might be out of your depth, or have made a mistake, YOU ADMIT IT. You come out and immediately say “OK, that’s a great point, and maybe I need to think this through.” At that point you do NOT lose status. You gain it. Other people respect you more, not less. But if you keep going, even though your argument is all over the place (maybe you’re trying to use one word to mean two different things, or your logic has gone wrong somewhere, or somebody has pointed out a hidden assumption in your own argument that you weren’t aware of, etc…), then you do lose status. The audience know that you lost, and you weren’t capable of admitting it, and that means you’re not very good at philosophy.
The level of misunderstanding can be illustrated by the career of Hilary Putnam. Putnam was famous for having changed his position on several important questions, and many non-philosophers try to weaponise this against him. It’s happened right here on this forum: “Hilary Putnam? You mean that guy who was once a realist then changed his position twice? Ha! What an idiot he is.” No he isn’t. Being able to admit you were wrong, and change your mind, is not a sign of intellectual weakness. Rather, it is the idea that changing your mind is weak that is the real intellectual weakness.
Oh…and Dvdjsph…smileys aren’t arguments. They are another classic sign of somebody who doesn’t like what they’ve read, can’t think of an intelligent response, but need to somehow try to demonstrate to the audience that they could win the argument, even though they can’t actually think of an intelligent response. It comes under the category of “bluffing”, as described above. You’re “posturing” – acting as though you are intellectually superior, when in fact you’ve got nothing worth saying to contribute. You yourself are very bad at losing an argument gracefully, as demonstrated by the attempt to ridicule me with a smiley, and also demonstrated by your continual bad faith communication. You are by far the most seriously afflicted individual here, with respect to what I am describing in this post.