7. Not Every Disagreement Is Equivocation: He Is Honest, So How Could He Be a Killer? 35 Lessons in Critical Thinking: Think Like a Debater

35 Lessons in Critical Thinking: Think Like a Debater

Pang Ying

Transcript

Hello, I’m Pang Ying. Welcome to Episode 7 of Think Like a Debater.

If you watched Zhan Qingyun on I Can I BB, you may know she repeatedly trended online for supposedly equivocating. Preparing this episode, I searched Weibo and asked viewers when she had been accused. Careful investigation found far too many occasions:

an opponent argued what is, Zhan what ought to be, and people called it equivocation;
she compared choosing a high-paid disliked job versus a low-paid loved one to the Butterfly Lovers, and was accused again;
she used martial-arts fiction to argue against pressing a chaos button for an ex; some disliked the example and again shouted equivocation.

Whether her analogies were weak is debatable, but that is not equivocation.

Let us vindicate Zhan.

What Is Equivocation?

I first searched Weibo for the term and discovered that comments often equivocated about equivocation. Here are two statements.

First: equivocation is analogy; I loved analogies when debating.

Second: debate persuades people by equivocating.

No, friends. Let us see what the term means.

Logic textbooks say: equivocation substitutes one concept for another within the same process of thought.

The same word or phrase appears twice in one argument but carries two different concepts, violating the law of identity.

Equivocation Through Polysemy

There are several common methods.

First, a polysemous word shifts concept A into B, sometimes deliberately to deceive. This standard form is called equivocation in English.

Begin with a 2019 civil-service exam question.

A young writer asks a magazine about a submission. The editor says it shows some foundation but the language is still immature and childish. The writer asks whether it could be treated as children’s literature.

The same word “childish” carries two concepts: low skill in the editor’s statement, childlike innocence in the writer’s reply.

The exam asked which option shared the error. The answer: A asks whether blue ink can write a “red” word, then writes the Chinese character meaning red. The color and the word are exchanged just as meanings of childish were.

More examples. Last episode said a valid syllogism has exactly three terms, with a middle connecting the other two. Consider:

Episode editor: hyl、李兔

2021.10.26

Audio in Chinese