46 How to Win Every Argument
(The candidates tend to be more exotic in the USA; this might explain
it.)The fallacy will give you hours of innocent fun (and a fair
amount of guilty fun) in running down the alternatives to what
you are proposing. We appear to have a kind of double vision
which leaves us short-sighted on virtue but hawk-eyed for faults.
To you this is but opportunity. When you pick on a couple of
alternatives and expose their imperfections, the audience will be
turning those defective eyes away from your own proposal. They
will assume that you would not run down everything else as
mean, foolish, wrong and wicked if your own ideas were no
better. They will be mistaken.
No design for a new building ever meets with universal approval, but
look at the alternatives: a glass-fronted matchbox, something with all
the pipes on the outside, or a moulded concrete monstrosity.
(Whereas the one you approve of lets in water, sheds tiles on passers-
by and needs a king's ransom to maintain. But they won't see that if
you keep them focused on the damned alternatives.)Definitional retreat
A definitional retreat takes place when someone changes the
meaning of the words in order to deal with an objection raised
against the original wording. By changing the meaning, he turns
it into a different statement.
'He's never once been abroad/
'As a matter of fact, he has been to Boulogne. '
'You cannot call visiting Boulogne going abroad!'