•

if you're a logician, then argument means something like:

•

a set of two or more propositions

•

at least one of which is a premise

•

at least one of which is a conclusion

•

a rational structure in which premises give reasons for conclusions

•

argument can also mean people fighting

•

a proof in a geometry book is an argument

•

an angry bar fight is an argument

•

if you wanted to pick the one thing in the universe that is most unlike a proof in a geometry book, an angry bar fight wouldn't be a bad choice

•

so why do we use the same word for both?

•

Alcibiades didn't like Socrates at first

•

those what-is-x arguments seemed oversimplified

•

Alcibiades came to like Socrates

•

but there was something attractive about Socrates

•

speaking well and dueling well with words was something that mattered very much to the Athenians

•

particularly the members of Alcibiades social class, the aristocracy

•

Socrates fascinated them

•

similar to martial arts movies in which Socrates would take down seemingly stronger men

•

the aristocrats didn't want to be Socrates, they just liked watching him argue to observe and learn from him how he could dismantle people's understanding of the world and show it to be flawed

•

but Alcibiades may or may not have been morally improved by being exposed to the mastery of argumentative skills of Socrates

•

a better metaphor for Socrates is playing Reversi

•

turns people's statements into their own opposites

•

Glaucon says to Socrates

•

people feel tripped up by your arguments

•

they consider them a game played with words

•

if one thinks words are just game tokens, then Socrates argumentation style can seem frustrating

•

but no one admits this since they don't want to admit that their words don't have something

•

but if what you say can be shown to logically be contradictory, this means you have to change what you say in order for it to not be contradictory