Detangling Logic and Rhetoric

What's the difference and why does it matter?

Having spent most of my life with undiagnosed autism, I have been in a constant state of confusion when it comes to social situations. Every interaction, I analyze what went wrong, what I could have done better, and what the other person likely felt and thought as a response to my actions.

And still, sometimes, despite my best efforts, I receive feedback that I can’t reconcile with my own self-image, or am told I caused harm when I didn’t intend to. I take this feedback seriously. I always do. One common example is being told I’m “condescending” or “arrogant,” when my self-esteem is really quite low.

That this blog is so sparse is a testament to that. I widely expect a negative or neutral response when putting something out into the world, and it has taken some strong mutual support to pull me out of the haze.

My ultimate point is, if this happens to you—if you also struggle with conflict situations, need to construct social flowcharts out of deficit, and have trouble predicting how other people will respond to the things you say—here’s one particular concept I’ve found helpful to process and analyze social situations.

Today it’s how logic and rhetoric are used in social settings.

Definitions

Logic: The study of determining whether something is true.

Rhetoric: The way language is used to communicate ideas.

Obviously, these are wide fields of study and these definitions don’t encompass all of it. I’m trained as a mathematician, so my education was restricted to specific forms of logic and rhetoric. I know more about formal logic, in the sense of proofs, where you start with an assumed axiomatic system and use restricted operations to determine what else is true given those axioms.

I’m also trained to use a restricted style of rhetoric—flat, boring, and bone-dry—that places as much emphasis on the deductive reasoning as possible.

This is by choice, of course. This is what I prefer. Extreme focus on the process of reasoning, with little else. To people who think rhetoric is something you “spew,” this may come off as a dispassionate sort of anti-rhetoric, but it’s a style of rhetoric all the same. Its social purpose is to convey that you care more about determining what is true and what is not above all else, and for it to be effective, it relies on the tacit assumption that whoever you are talking to wants to engage in this type of exchange.

If you try to use it in casual conversation, it also makes you sound like an arrogant prick.

Why focusing on logic directly makes you sound like an arrogant prick

Now the mysterious “social contract” that people with my disorder are constantly guessing at rears its head at last. There are a few unspoken rules at play, and I’ll lay out a few of them here:

Being right is less important than not being an asshole

This is a social rule that, in my experience, most people with social difficulties struggle with. You’ve probably seen it online. People are chatting along, and then someone jumps in with an unnecessary correction, or a minor criticism about wording. Very rarely do these asides have to do with logic—the second is explicitly challenging rhetoric—but it’s not hard to predict that the other people involved in the discussion will likely feel annoyed.

What they are responding to is a breach of the social contract: they are likely attempting to share ideas, and the act of having to come to a screeching halt and focus on the correction gets in the way of the exchange they were enjoying. They may also see it as a way of introducing conflict in a situation where that conflict could have been easily avoided. It could be taken as a sign of targeted disrespect, where the correcter is attempting to establish intellectual dominance over the people they correct, and in fact, that is often the case in online discussions.

There is a meaningful difference in challenging someone’s rhetoric (as above) vs. their logic. But, socially, most people do not distinguish between the two.

You could seek to correct someone’s reasoning with the best of intentions. Say, because you see them going down a dark path, and you would like to get them revisit something so they don’t harm themselves further. For example, perhaps a friend is in an abusive relationship and you want to convince them that the abuse wasn’t their fault. It’s possible to start from a few axioms and derive that from first principles. Is it helpful? Not for most people.

Many of us in that case have had our friend argue back, or shut us off entirely because they understood the challenge as not being respectful to their own modes of thought. This happens because:

Focusing on logic makes people feel stupid

This one I can directly pin on a state of math education that focuses more on punishing mistakes and training workers than teaching children how to reason and explore.

Our society places high value on logical thought, while simultaneously rewarding arithmetic shortcuts that prevent students from developing critical thinking skills, and rewarding people who have misplaced confidence in their own ability to use logic.

Put that all together, and the average person wants to think of themselves as logical, but doesn’t fully understand what that means.

Well, you might think. That’s fixable, you might think. People learn at their own rates, and if you could express well enough what the problem was, you can draw on your shared commitment to logic and have a productive discussion about the problem.

This is actually hit-or-miss according to temperament. The problem is, in my experience, the block that keeps people from learning formal reasoning is not intellectual, but emotional. In order to learn something, they have to first admit that they do not already understand it. People who highly value intelligence might experience someone else pointing out a minor reasoning error as emotionally painful, even when the true intention is to respect their individual thought by presenting a specific concept.

Like I said, the intention of using this style of rhetoric is to place focus squarely on the reasoning involved, and nothing else. My point is that it doesn’t do that in a social setting. Instead, it often inadvertently induces feelings of inadequacy in the other person because they feel they’ve been caught out for making a mistake, which they then have to deal with in addition to the problem at hand.

I’ve had limited success giving disclaimers before I proceed (“There might be another factor influencing this here, are you in the mood to discuss that?” or “Oh, I see what you’re getting at; here’s an approach that might strengthen it further,” for example), but sometimes the success depends on how the individual conversant processes conflict rather than what you say.

Formal logic is also notoriously restrictive, and restrictions on what can and can’t be used feel bad socially. If someone catches on that you’re filtering out their statements for information and independently evaluating whether they’re consistently using fallacious reasoning, they’re probably not going to want to talk to you because they feel punished.

Speculation starts a conversation, facts end it

My advisor said this once, paraphrased, and it’s been an autism game-changer, especially for small talk.

Take that perennial discussion topic, the weather. There’s a reason “how ‘bout that weather, eh?” is more successful than a flat “it’s raining,” and that’s because the former open-ended statement is easier to respond to.

People enjoy talking to you more when they can predict how the conversation will go, including how they’ll feel after the conversation ends. I’ve had great success inducing successful small talk by repeatedly employing this principle—often, if I see the conversation dying down, I’ll drop a discussion starter like “why do you think X is happening?” and then dip out entirely.

If someone came in with a full explanation that no one knew how to respond to, that would be very cool, but it would mean the group would have to find a new topic, and that can feel unsatisfying.

Now, back to logic. This is not to say logic is fact—and indeed I’m a strong proponent of considering the possibility that you may be wrong at all times—but that it has the opposite impact of speculation. Speculation lets you branch out in a thousand different paths, and the fun of it is seeing which path the conversation takes. Logic is about starting with a thousand paths and narrowing it down to one. Sometimes that can be enjoyable in coversation, but everyone has to have agreed to that first.

In the case of logic, specifically, you are not merely introducing a fact, but an abstract concept that others may not be familiar with. People generally need to mull abstract concepts over alone before accepting them. In that moment, then, awkward silence may ensue. Another response would be to challenge the reasoning with counterexamples or alternate pathways. These asides can be productive, but, sadly, due to the way people are encouraged to form belief systems, are more likely to be hostile to disagreement and based around concepts other than formal reasoning, which I personally do not enjoy talking about.

When I started my training, I thought I could use my dedication to proper reasoning to improve my interactions with others, but learned that most people don’t want to talk to me the way I want to talk to them. But I hope it’s clear that my focus is on trying to develop my rhetoric to be more effective.

Moving on from anti-rhetoric

I believe the key concept here, if you want to take one thing away from this essay, is that logic is best thought of as an internal process, and rhetoric as an external one.

Logic is best applied when you can give your full attention to abstraction, think through all examples, identify flaws in thinking—and that’s best puzzled through alone. At least at first. It helps to identify other sources and read through them, but the act of reading and understanding is also something you do alone, not socially.

If your reasoning involves something that impacts you emotionally, or has a degree of uncertainty that makes it closer to a heuristic model than a formal proof, I personally prefer an iterative strategy. You construct an initial model, test it, refine it, test it again, explore what works and what doesn’t, and have to be prepared to drop it at any moment. This can involve a social aspect with trusted sources but will be hard to pull off in an open setting like the internet.

As I’ve alluded to above, this is how it works for others, too. They need time to wrap their minds around a new concept, and in order to fully respect their capacity of thought, this also has to be done alone. It’s possible to support someone in thinking through a concept as an aid, but that should only be done if they agree that they want you to do that, otherwise it’ll be experienced as unsolicited advice and dismissed.

Rhetoric can be used to redirect the focus of a discussion around the process of reasoning, but (a) it requires genuine respect for the intelligence and emotional well-being of everyone involved and (b) in some cases, even if you do everything perfectly, it may not be possible. Logic is best performed with absence of emotion but rhetoric must acknowledge and address the emotional component of an interaction, even to mediate a dispassionate discussion centered on reason alone.

(I have a heuristic for identifying and avoiding situations in which productive discussion is not possible, and countering those indirectly, but that’s for later.)

Improving rhetoric: social predictive modeling

In this context, I would like to introduce the idea of a social predictive model. I use social predictive models to make up for my own deficits in this area—since I can’t do this naturally, I use a formal structure to predict how what I say to others will influence their internal mental state and the flow of discussion.

Effective productive rhetoric involves many moving parts. It’s like a game of chess, but the outcome isn’t to “win” over the other person, it’s to have a mutually beneficial exchange. I can’t come out with a statement equivalent to “moving your rook forward will always work,” because it’s very dependent on context. Here’s the general sense of it.

For every interaction, especially if conflict may arise, I set a goal. These goals most often revolve around supporting or encouraging others.

Consider a friend sending you a writing sample. You might set the goal of encouraging your friend to keep writing, while also helping them strengthen the piece further to increase the chances of their success.

If this is the first time this happened and you simply handed that sample back to the friend with red marks, that might make your friend feel discouraged, conflicting with the goal you set for the interaction. The focus then becomes their feelings of inadequacy or vulnerability rather than the writing sample itself. This is the problem the “compliment sandwich” tries to address.

One thing you might think to do is starting off on the same page: “anything you’d like me to look for while reading this?”

You might think of monitoring their reaction for signs of distress, and not giving any more feedback if they’re not in the mood.

You might think of presenting any subjective or style-dependent suggestions in terms of your own preferences or emotions: “that concept actually inspired me to try and frame it a couple different ways to see what impact it has on the reader, want to hear them?”

In all three cases, the presentation takes into account the other person’s internal state and whether you’re directing the interaction around the goals you want to achieve. It succeeds where my natural preference for rhetoric fails: in order to keep strong emotions from ruining a productive discussion, you have to understand your influence on those emotions.

If you have any thoughts to add on the above, please do let me know. The social flowcharts are constantly evolving.