Free Making the Connection: Strategies to Build Effective Personal Relationships (Collection) by Richard Templar, Jonathan Herring, Sandy Allgeier, Samuel Barondes

argument to watch out for. It uses two unproven facts to bolster each other and give each credibility. Consider this:
“God exists because the Bible tells us so. We can trust the Bible because it is the word of God.”
    All of this may be true, but this argument is not a good one! Arguments from logic require us to start with a fact that is true and reason from this. The difficulty in this example is that A is only true if B is true, and B is only true if A is true. Another example of a circular argument is this:
“I’m better than you at arguing. You always end up agreeing I’m right. You should accept I’m the better arguer.”
    Concealed questions
    A clever technique that is sometimes used is to ask a question that contains a hidden fact. In answering the question the person is thereby assumed to accept the fact. The best-known example is:
“Have you stopped beating your wife?”
    Whether the man answers yes or no he is admitting that he has beaten or is beating his wife. More subtle forms would be:
“Has your unethical approach affected your profits?”
    This can be a crafty device to get the hidden fact accepted. Lawyers in courtrooms use this technique a lot. The question:
“Who was the woman you were with on the night in question?”
    assumes there was a woman and can trick the witness into accepting that fact if they’re not very careful. If the witness replies, “I don’t want to say; it’s private,” the witness has admitted he was with someone.
    This is a clever trick to learn if you want to get other facts from your opponent to further your argument. So if you’re wondering whether your wife is really going to her exercise class at the gym, or whether she might be having an affair with Brian, you could ask, “How is Brian these days?”
    Literalism
    One of the most annoying kinds of arguments can be those with people who rely on literalism. Literalism is the joy of lawyers and insurance companies. They base their argument on the literal meaning of the words they have used, rather than how those words would be understood by ordinary people. Hence you get the argument:
“We told you we would supply you with a new car, but we did not claim it would work.”
    You can spot a literalist by some tell-tale words: “Let’s look at my exact words ...” or “All I said was ....” The annoying thing is that their arguments can often carry much weight in a court of law. In a contract dispute they will only be bound by what they promised to do. Indeed, if you’re in a dispute over whether you have broken your word it’s well worth thinking carefully about what you said you would do.
    So what can you say to your literalist? One response is to see whether you can turn the tables on them. Maybe you agreed to pay them, but never said when you would. This way you can turn the tables on them and say: “If you are going to take your obligations literally, so will I.” That may lead to an agreement to read the contract in a sensible way.
    Alternatively, you could ask what they meant people to think when they said what they said. A good response to a literalist is to suggest that had they wanted to say what they claimed, they could have done so clearly. Consider this:
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Getting it right
Shazia:  “All I said I would do is that I would give you a refund. I did not say it would be a full refund.”
Mary:   “But anyone who is told they would get a refund would think it would be a full refund.”
Shazia:  “Ah, but you must listen to what I said.”
Mary:   “I did. If you had wanted to be clear you could have said it would only be a partial refund. By not making that clear I relied on the normal meaning of the word refund.”
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    Mary is making some good points here. She may not persuade Shazia, but she’s making her argument well.
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    Sometimes it is best to give up arguing with literalists.
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    Hostile association
    This form of argument is to cast doubt on a viewpoint because it is one