Counter-Argument:  Four Kinds

English 1302.881
Rich Haswell—Spring, 2005

You engage in counter-argument when you imagine how some readers might argue against your claim, and then write a counter to that imagined argument. 

Counter-argument is extremely common in serious mature writing.  Four common forms of counter-argument can be called refutation, accommodation, concession, and synthesis.  In the following illustrations, the argument against your claim italicized.

Here is a claim without any counter-argument:

Humor is universally appreciated and is commonly used by racial and ethnic groups in their conflicts with one another.

Refutation:  Recording of an argument that would question your claim, and presenting of evidence to invalidate that argument.

Humor is universally appreciated and is commonly used by racial and ethnic groups in their conflicts with one another.  True, there is a certain folk belief that a sense of humor is more highly developed with some groups than with others, and that certain unfortunate groups are altogether devoid of it.  Anthropologists, however, who have lived among strange people long enough to appreciate the nuances of their language, testify to the fact that all peoples have their humor and that they use it to vent their hatreds.

Accommodation:  Acceptance of views that apparently question your claim but that, actually, can co-exist with it.

Humor is universally appreciated and is commonly used by racial and ethnic groups in their conflicts with one another.  Humor, of course, has many social purposes, among them to relax listeners and to indulge in pure amusement.  But all cultures, without exception, consistently also use humor to vent their hatreds.

Concession:  Acceptance of views that require you to modify your claim.

Humor is universally appreciated and is commonly used by racial and ethnic groups in their conflicts with one another.  This is not to deny that some classes within a culture express a disapproval of humor used for such purposes.  Not too many years ago, a certain Secretary of the Interior lost his job because he told reporters an ethnic joke.  But even if within cultures the approval and prevalence of racial and ethnic humor may range widely, still it continues to crop up when people need to vent their hatreds.

Synthesis:  Recognizing that an opposing view and your own view cannot co-exist and that the only solution is to integrate both into a third, new view.

I have been arguing that humor is commonly used by racial and ethnic groups to show their hatred or disdain one another.  But this may be a simplification.  Humor after all is still humor.  Part of its essence is fun and play.  If someone wants purely to vent their hatred for another ethnic group, wants to heighten the division between groups, why pick a form that makes people laugh, often whole groups of people laugh in unison?  It may be that humor is a unique expression of group conflict, one that recognizes differences yet at the same time projects a belief that differences are not important and should be laughed away.

An argument