My friend Nic is a music fanatic, just like me. We usually like the same types of music but when a disagreement arises, the conversation usually becomes heated pretty quickly. The other night we were listening to the Beatles White Album when I announced that I thought that the Beatles are one of the most influential bands to have ever existed. Just with that remark, it was on. Nic instantly shot back, “Nirvana is the most influential band, what are you talking about?” From there, things got a little ugly, which made it the perfect argument to discuss in this blog.
The argument all began with a claim. My claim was that the Beatles are the most influential band ever, while Nic’s claim was that Nirvana held the trophy for most influential. My position on the issue was obvious, I felt that the Beatles influenced a generation and that their music still exists and is recognized in the world today. Nic felt that Nirvana created the punk genre and that they crossed a generation gap unlike any other band has before. My initial impulse when the argument began was to try and immediately shut Nic down and prove that I was right. To do so, I began using logical fallacies to make me look smarter (even though none of what I said truly helped the argument). The argued, “Their was a musical show in Las Vegas all about the Beatles, so they must be more influential”. Nic argued back with evidence about how many albums Nirvana has sold and used a warrant that Nirvana’s music was overall “better” that the Beatles. I countered with another fallacy attacking Nic’c character “You don’t even know what real music is, so how would you know if Nirvana is better or not?” I then went on to create an analogy..that was completely and utterly b.s. I said, “ The Beatles are created basically created music. They are the God of the entire music world”. With that statement, the argument was basically over because we both realized how stupid we sounded.
The strengths in this argument were probably our verbal back and forth. We never interrupted each other and we let each other get our points across. However, our weaknesses were that we didn’t really use any true techniques that would benefit our proving our claims. Ethos, pathos and logos would have definitely helped to develop our argument further.
