...an informal fallacy originates in a reasoning error... — Baden

Exactly. However, my (very convoluted) point was that it was neither a reasoning error, nor a valid reason. It was more of an aside, a personal opinion. Not that one can use that loophole to sneak in garbage. But the response was so tame that is not the case. Good point, though.

But, yea... we are way off the turnpike, if the OP wants to guide us... :monkey:

:up:

Yes, it's not just a matter of emotional reactions, but I think that emotional reactions are of relevance to the topic. The emotional reactions are emotional reactions to something, so that something is also of relevance. What has been said is of relevance, as is how it has been or might be interpreted, and as is how it should be interpreted. — Sapientia

Here's how I understand your view of (philosophical) discussion:
1. There's the plain language of what people say. Logic has a place here, and truth.
2. There's how people react to what people say, and that might be colored by emotional reactions, misinterpretation, etc., none of which has anything to do with logic and truth.

The very model of philosophy for you is saying the emperor has no clothes, speaking the unfiltered truth and if people find that impolitic or impolite or if they misinterpret it, that's on them. Have I gotten this wrong?

In my view, this view is cripplingly simplistic. There are layers between (1) and (2), and everything I've written relies on that fact.

More or less. So, tell me about these layers and why they should matter.

Here's a quickish first response, but figuring this out was the whole point of the thread! (It's not all perfectly clear to me -- just pursuing a hunch, as I've said.)

For an argument that there is such a layer, here's an intro to implicature.

A: Should we go for a hike later today?
B: It's supposed to rain.

The plain language of B's response is a non sequitur, but we know, or rather we presume, that it isn't. How does that work?

If A assumes that B is following the principle of cooperation, then A can work out that B probably means that if it's going to rain then we shouldn't go hiking and it's going to rain therefore no, we shouldn't go.

There's nothing here about emotional reaction. There's also nothing here about interpretation: "It's supposed to rain" means exactly what it appears to. It does not, for instance, mean "No" in this particular case, even though B means "No" by saying "It's supposed to rain."

There's some logic here, but "It's supposed to rain" does not on its own logically entail that we shouldn't go hiking, and that's why there's room to cancel the implicature: "It's supposed to rain -- but let's go anyway." But if B does not want his response to be taken as "No", then he has to cancel the implicature. If he just says "It's supposed to rain", it will be taken as "No". Logic alone does not get you here: you have first to assume that B's response, which appears to be a non sequitur, is not.

So this is one of those layers. There are principles, rules, conventions that we rely on in using language that are neither just logical, dealing only with the plain language of what is said, nor extra-linguistic like emotional reactions.

There are a couple of ways this shows up in doing philosophy. One is that philosophy, being an almost exclusively verbal activity, depends on such conventions of language use. We try to bring everything out into the open and rely on logic and plain language as much as possible, but there may be limits to that or there may be things we miss. (Will come back to this.) Another issue is that to evaluate a position, we often turn to verbal evidence of one sort or another -- "If you're right then it would make sense to say ..." Gotta be careful there, because our intuitions about "what it makes sense to say" are not based only in logic and plain language but also in these other conventions about how we use language.

Example of the latter. Austin claims that in normal circumstances it makes no sense to say either "He sat in the chair voluntarily" or "He sat in the chair involuntarily" -- only in special circumstances would we reach for those adverbs. He's sidling up to the issue of free will, but note this is also an implicit rebuke of the way philosophers use the law of the excluded middle. You might feel compelled to say that one of these sentences must be true and the other false. What's uncomfortable here is that either way you'll be opting for a sentence whose plain language you're cool with, but whose ordinary use carries baggage you don't want. You'll have to reject something.

Which gets us back to our other issue, I think. How do you justify your choice of what to reject? What kind of justification do you have to give? A question like "Have you stopped beating your significant other?" isn't a loaded question in the sense that it only pretends to offer a choice but only one answer is okay; it carries a presupposition. If you can figure out the presupposition -- easy to do in this case, but not always -- you can deny that, but that means refusing to answer simply "yes" or "no".

I think there's some other stuff going on in philosophical discussion too. I should answer your questions about my position, but it's easy to come up with a question a philosopher won't want to answer (because of what it presupposes, for instance). But I'm also supposed to convince you, by meeting some unspecified standard of yours, not mine, and that standard might not be simply logical but include, say, answering your questions. Much of this sort of discussion has to flicker between figuring out what the words themselves mean and entail, etc., and what you mean by saying them, so we bounce between layers of conventions a lot. Getting clearer about that was my goal in this thread.