[Lecture Seven] Objective Communication
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 2 hours, 36 minutes
Course summary: In this course, Dr. Leonard Peikoff explores the nature of intellectual communication. The course blends student work and examples with Peikoff’s own commentary to elicit the principles of effective communication in writing, speaking, and arguing. In these lectures, he identifies the essential issues unique to the nature of each method of presenting ideas and offers guidance about how to craft one’s thinking around the specific way one will deliver it to an audience. Read more »
In this lecture: Dr. Peikoff explains the principles of communication in the context of arguments. He explains how to know when you should argue a point, how to identify and not concede an opponent’s premises, choosing a point to answer, and avoiding spurious facts. The lecture concludes with a mock debate featuring Dr. Peikoff and Harry Binswanger as well as a student debate, both with analysis by Dr. Peikoff.
Study Guide
This material is designed to help you digest the lecture content. You can also download below a PDF study guide for the entire course.
| Why is free-flowing argument a near certainty in life? |
| What are the two proper goals of spontaneous argument? |
| What moral issues, if any, are involved in the choice to argue with someone who holds a contrary view? |
| What context is necessary to judge someone’s intellectual honesty? |
| How does the hierarchical nature of philosophy help in arguing? |
| What approach can one take to identify the level of philosophic disagreement one has with an opponent? |
| What creates the mistaken desire to accept an opponent’s premises, even temporarily? |
| What error in philosophy is indicated by this polemical approach? |
| How should one go about selecting an essential point to focus one’s argument on? |
| What questions should one ask if an opponent presents a barrage of contested facts instead of ideas and argument? |
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 2:19:51 | Is that your Toyota parked on the street with the “A is A” license plate? |
| 2:20:10 | What do you do if you cannot think of a response, but you know your opponent is ultimately wrong? |
| 2:22:34 | I’m sorry to say that I still don’t understand why Excerpt K is an example of rationalism. The assignment is: all women are evil, some men love women, therefore some men love evil. All this says is “if x, then y” and the argument is sound. It just dawned on me that the above syllogism is a non sequitur, i.e., these men who love women may not love them because women are evil. Is this why it’s rationalism? |
| 2:24:39 | On choosing essentials of arguing against the draft, could you home in on “unfair” to get to the essential point instead of “unpatriotic”? You can still by means of “unfair” get to what is just and what is fair and therefore take it to a broader philosophic issue. |
| 2:26:08 | Could you elaborate on what you mean by “the epistemological credentials of facts”? |
| 2:28:29 | In my early days of defending capitalism, if I were confronted with an opponent who said that capitalism leads to monopolies and unemployment, etc., I would have answered: “maybe so, but you still can’t get around the fact that men have rights and, if rights lead to monopolies and depression, then tough.” |
| 2:31:46 | During the last session you used the term “true fact.” Was this intentional or would you agree that the expression is a tautology, redundancy, and pleonasm? |
| 2:33:04 | Rodin’s figures are not examples of Romanticism, as was claimed by the speaker on Romanticism some time earlier. |
| 2:34:03 | I was disappointed that the criticism of my talk on the sanction of the victims was primarily on the content rather than the method of speaking. |