The Art of Refutation

"Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it." - Karl Popper

How do I refute? A seemingly simple question yet all of us get it wrong every now and then. Learning how to refute is extremely important because if we don’t do it properly, we will be just telling ourselves lies to convince ourselves, let alone solving the problem or coming to a conclusion.

The Hierarchy of Disagreement

The pyramid you see above is called as the “Hierarchy of Disagreement” and was popularized by Paul Graham. It gives us a great introduction to this subject. Name-calling and Ad Hominem are extremely common especially in the social sciences and politics and if it’s not pointed out can completely destroy the conversation. We won’t even notice the problem. However, as we scale up the triangle we keep improving and actually start to address the problem. Better arguments give better results. There’s more clarity and understanding on both sides. Explicitly refuting the central point is the peak of the pyramid.

David Deutsch’s Favorite Forms of Refutation

The pyramid is a great introduction to “The Art of Refutation”, as I call it myself. Physicist and author of “Beginning of Infinity” and “Fabric of Reality”, David Deutsch gives us an excellent insight into refutation.

You can read the thread neatly compiled by Nivi here. If you aren’t on Twitter here are Deutsch’s favorite forms of refutation.

• The argument disproves itself when applied to itself.

• The argument could explain anything.

• The argument ends the growth of knowledge.

• The argument is an infinite regress.

• The argument is easy to vary.

• The argument confuses two different models for explaining the same thing.

• The argument confuses the language with the meta-language.

• The argument simply recapitulates the argument it intends to replace but also adds unnecessary complications.

• The argument does not provide an explanation for the proposed theory.

• The argument proposes a regularity or impossibility in the universe which is therefore an untested law of physics.

• The argument has immunized itself against criticism. (This is not an outright refutation but still worth noting.)

• And last but not the least, the argument does not take into account the future growth of knowledge.

All of these are excellent. I would recommend all to read the “Beginning of Infinity” and “Fabric of Reality” to understand these better.

The Straw Man and Taleb

We also haven’t explicitly mentioned an extremely common form of fallacious refutation. The Straw Man Fallacy. A straw man fallacy is a form of argument and an informal fallacy of having the impression of refuting an argument, whereas the real subject of the argument was not addressed or refuted, but instead replaced with a false one.

Another important tip by professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb is to debate the audience, not the person, as one can never truly convince the person. They can however change the stance of the much less invested audience.

Try not to fall for name-calling, ad hominem, straw man etc. A debate where we fail to refute properly simply becomes a conversation where arguments are brought up by people just to convince themselves.