People aren't defined by their arguments. They are defined by their perspective. Winning arguments change no perspectives (unless you are arguing with saints).

People aren't defined by their arguments. They are defined by their perspective. Winning arguments change no perspectives (unless you are arguing with saints). The reason they don't is that ideas are not trees. There is no root node. We are not deductive thinkers. We do not trace out the implications of ideas to their ends because they have no ends. More often, we learn ideas that ripple a little in the neighborhood while the rest of our knowledge remains unchanged. Further, in some cases, the evidence may be mixed, and our idea graph won't change at all. Kuhn would probably say that there is no way for a scientific revolutionary to argue with a conventional scientist because the purpose of a revolution is to change the context to a different set of concerns, a different language, a different problem. Einstein couldn't argue with Newtonian physics in Newtonian terms. The point of general relativity isn't to refute the central point of Newtonian physics (whether you think that's the inverse square law or gravitation or the laws of motion, etc.). You might say Einstein was "refuting" some naive conceptions of space and energy, but no one had proven they were naive before he exposed them. Einstein provided a fertile perspective that allowed others to see the old science and data in a new way. But this has nothing to do with winning arguments. It's DH{NaN}. Acting like Einstein's work is a rung up the ladder to Final Physical Knowledge is a positivist view akin to the belief that evolution is creating the ubermensch (in some objective sense). There are lots of local minima out there. There is always another perspective to take on the same data. Refutation should be reserved for stuff that's obvious to clear-thinking people. Of course, that begs the question...