Argue Rationally and Take Responsibility for Your Arguments
In a New York Times op-ed titled ���Stop Saying ���I Feel Like,������ Molly Worthen says we need to pay attention to a recent evolution in language. In the last decade, people have begun to preface their claims with ���I feel like.��� And, she says, ���[M]ake no mistake: ���I feel like��� is not a harmless tic.��� She argues that our shift towards couching our claims as subjective opinions reflects, and will increase, our inability to engage in ���civilized conflict.���
Natasha Pangarkar, a senior at Williams College, hears ���I feel like��� ���in the classroom on a daily basis,��� she said. ���When you use the phrase ���I feel like,��� it gives you an out. You���re not stating a fact so much as giving an opinion,��� she told me. ���It���s an effort to make our ideas more palatable to the other person.��� ���
This linguistic hedging is particularly common at universities, where calls for trigger warnings and safe spaces may have eroded students��� inclination to assert or argue. It is safer to merely ���feel.��� ���
Yet here is the paradox: ���I feel like��� masquerades as a humble conversational offering, an invitation to share your feelings, too ��� but the phrase is an absolutist trump card. It halts argument in its tracks.
When people cite feelings or personal experience, ���you can���t really refute them with logic, because that would imply they didn���t have that experience, or their experience is less valid,��� Ms. Chai told me.
���It���s a way of deflecting, avoiding full engagement with another person or group,��� Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, a historian at Syracuse University, said, ���because it puts a shield up immediately. You cannot disagree.���
Democracy is premised on civilized conflict. The greatest advance of the modern age has been our ability to argue about society���s most pressing questions without resorting to physical violence (most of the time). Yet the growing tyranny of feelings in the way Americans talk ��� about everything from how to fund public education to which presidential candidate to support ��� exerts a subtler kind of coercion on the public sphere���.
We should not ���feel like.��� We should argue rationally, feel deeply and take full responsibility for our interaction with the world.
Read the rest of the article.
