Gish gallop explained

The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by abandoning formal debating principles, providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments and that are impossible to address adequately in the time allotted to the opponent. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's arguments at the expense of their quality.

Name origin

The term, "Gish gallop", was coined in 1994 by anthropologist Eugenie Scott, who named it after American creationist Duane Gish. Scott argued that Gish used the technique frequently when challenging the scientific fact of evolution.

Strategy

During a Gish gallop, in a short space of time the galloper confronts an opponent with a rapid series of specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies that makes it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of the debate. Each point raised by the Gish galloper takes considerably more time to refute or to fact-check than the amount of time taken to state each one in the series. This technique is known online as Brandolini's law and frequently is referred to as "the bullshit asymmetry principle". That element of the technique also is referred to as spewing a firehose of falsehoods.

The technique wastes an opponent's time and may cast doubt on the opponent's debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved, or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.

Countering the Gish gallop

British journalist Mehdi Hasan suggests using three steps to beat the Gish gallop:[1]

  1. Because there are too many falsehoods to address, it is wise to choose one as an example. Choose the weakest, dumbest, most ludicrous argument that the galloper has presented and tear that argument to shreds ("the weak point rebuttal").
  2. Do not budge from the issue or move on until having decisively destroyed the nonsense and clearly made the counter point.
  3. Call out the strategy by name, saying: "This is a strategy called the 'Gish Gallop' — do not be fooled by the flood of nonsense you have just heard."

Generally, it is more difficult to use the Gish gallop in a structured debate than a free-form one. If a debater is familiar with an opponent who is known to use the Gish gallop, the technique may be countered by pre-empting and refuting the opponent's commonly used arguments before the opponent has an opportunity to launch into a Gish gallop.

General and cited sources

Notes and References

  1. Mehdi. Hasan. Stay Tuned with Preet, Debating 101. March 16, 2023.

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