How come there is so much rich literature on physical fighting, from martial arts texts to military histories, but so little on verbal fighting? As in fighting dirty, not respectful debate or dialogue. Mockery, taunting, baiting, bad-faith logic... is there a manual of all that?
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The analogy to 'respectful debate and dialogue' on the physical side is literature on sports/athletics I guess, which is also rich.
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This feels more like an inventory of unsporting behaviors rather than actual strategy/tactics of bad-faith verbal conflict
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I’m not sure we need a handbook for bad faith logic. It seems to be a widely employed skill in the population
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I don't think it is deployed *as a skill*
A baby's flailing is not the same as punching
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Plato? All of the Socratic dialogues are about identifying postulations or contentions based on bad logic, with the dialogues whittling down why the arguments are poor. That's, y'know, kinda the value of the humanities. :-)
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Nope. Not what I'm talking about. That's more like sports, not active conflict. And no, that's decidedly not the value of the humanities, anymore than soccer training is military training.
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This is a good start. BTW, is there much literature on "fighting dirty" in the martial arts? Most of it seems to be focused on fighting fairly.
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Rhetoric ain’t it
All military and police training is fighting dirty. Only competition martial arts have honor/fairness as ethos.
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Good question. W my 9 year olds I’ve had to equate verbal violence with physical violence.




