But there are also relatively few people who are prepared to follow the life-begins-at-conception argument all the way back to its logical conclusion, which is that any kind of birth control that affects a fertilized egg should be illegal.
Endorsing the argument-2 conception of argument, Gilbert 1997 (cf. Carozza 2007) proposes a radical move in this direction, understanding argumentation as an attempt to overcome disagreement, propounding a corresponding theory of "coalescent argument".
The three main features of this case against war and sport metaphors, then, are (1) that they encourage a conception of argument as an adversarial activity, (2) that they promote unacceptable argumentative performances, and (3) that adversarial conceptions of argument are optional, that there are other conceptions of and metaphors for argument that are not only be accurate but more acceptable.
In Kant's conception, an argument of this kind begins with a compelling premise about our thought, experience, or knowledge, and then reasons to a conclusion that is a substantive and unobvious presupposition and necessary condition of this premise.
The thumbnail version of this worry about such metaphors is that they promote adversarial conceptions of argument that lead interlocutors with those conceptions to behave adversarially in argumentative contexts.
Conceptions of argument, too, it is held, lead us to behave accordingly, and that behavior makes those conceptions true of the activity.
First, both Paleyan "design arguments" and ID theory take for granted an essentially mechanistic conception of the natural world.
It is less clear that this requires the radical re-conception of argument he proposes.
This said, I argue here that war and sport metaphors, despite their promotion of adversarial conceptions of argument, are not only permissible descriptions of arguments but are uniquely well suited to describe the business of argument exchange.
Hence, there is no single conception of good argument or argumentation to be discovered behind the core fallacies, and any attempt to force them all into a single framework, must take efforts to avoid distorting the character originally attributed to each of them.
Academic writers who have given the most attention to the subject of fallacies insist on, or at least prefer, the argument conception of fallacies, but the belief conception is prevalent in popular and non-scholarly discourse.
