The Tomb's keeper recently drew attention to one or two rhetorical tricks I'd missed in my notes on rhetoric. For instance, the old 'as you know perfectly well..' riff, used to suggest, among other things, that you're interlocuter is merely obfuscating and trying to pull the wool over your or even his own eyes. Well, I thought perhaps that I'd get round eventually to assembling all these invaluable little tips, this inventory of received ideas and defence mechanisms, into one mini-blog or separate page. And I shall do this, anon. In the meantime, here are a few add-ons:
University, your opponent is at. Bear with me. In the realm of doxa, the university is entirely seperated from the Real World (qv) and populated by Student Revolutionaries. This image of the university is unassailable, and safely entrenched beyond refutation, so don't worry. It is thus rather useful if you can insinuate a connection between your opponent and the University (the University of doxa, that is, not any particular institution). Moreover, there is, belonging to this University of Doxa, an equally mythic 'undergraduate' who reappears endlessly in statements such as: 'this is an elementary undergraduate error'; 'As every undergraduate would know..' , 'one can find this kind of thing in any standard undergraduate essay.' 'if this were an undergraduate essay.. etc' and so on and do forth. This poor mythic undergraduate has been kept at university for countless years by the requirements of rhetoricians and polemicists.
Self-Appointed. You outmanoeuvre your opponent's arguments by disputing his very right to make them; you by-pass his/her opinions by implying s/he has no authority to hold them. The rule is roughly this: any judgement made about you, any criticism of your arguments or your style, has been made by someone who has appointed him /her self rather than, presumably, being divinely or officially appointed. If you prose is criticised for its sloppiness it is by a 'self-appointed literary critic'; if your arguments are dismissed as irrational it is by the self-appointed rationality police; If your opinions are deemed offensive it is a self-appointed commissar of political correctness; if your taste in literature or art is ridiculed as vulgar it is by a self-appointed arbiter of taste; If your arguments are found to be false it can only be by a self-appointed Truth tribunal etc. You may run into problems if criticised by someone who is genuinely divinely or officially appointed (The Pope, High Court judge), but simply dismiss them as arguing from authority.
Goaded. (qv raw nerve). If an opponent responds to your comment, he has necessarily been 'goaded' into responding and is thus exposed as a fool. Your superficially inept or silly remarks are retrospectively revealed to have been a trick designed to 'provoke a response', and your opponent has 'fallen for it'. This ingenious 'trick' may itself provoke charges of puerility, but these are either 1. covered by the terms of the trick itself, or 2. evidence that your interlocutor is a self-appointed (qv) arbiter of 'maturity' .
Pseudo- A prefix which attaches to intellectuals. So tenacious is this attachment (which can be dowloaded from doxa.com) that intellectuals can never be mentioned without it. Indeed, many argue that only pseudo- intellectuals exists. The real thing is a mere mirage or retroactive illusion created by the prefix pseudo-.
Pretentious. Anything which cannot be paraphrased into journalese, (almost) anything French, anything not yeilding some sort of immediate and calculable return, anything which one cannot imagine being spoken by a 'bloke down the pub', (almost) anything you can imagine being spoken by an intilletukal.
Intolerable difference. It is axiomatic that your opponent does not, nor ever will, be objecting to the content of your opinion. He is necessarily stung by and unable to tolerate the sheer difference of opinion, and his arguments simply express this fact. (copyright J.Hari.)