Premise & Debate

The first concession in any argument is rarely a word; more often, it is a doorway. One enters it politely, removes one’s hat, admires the wallpaper, and discovers—some minutes later—that the house belongs entirely to one’s opponent.

A frame is not merely a frame. It is the gilded border around a portrait, the choice of lighting in a courtroom, the little brass plaque beneath a taxidermied tiger reading *harmless domestic animal*. Accept the plaque, and the tiger has already eaten.

The premise is its quieter cousin: a small, well-dressed assumption seated at the head of the table, pouring claret into everyone’s glass before anyone has had the bad manners to ask whether the bottle is poisoned. “Granted,” says the unwary gentleman, and thereafter spends the evening furnishing a mansion built on quicksand.

A man may lose a debate on facts and retain his dignity. He may lose it on rhetoric and retain his trousers. But to lose it by accepting the enemy’s arrangement of the furniture is to be found, at midnight, applauding from inside a cupboard.

Better, then, to examine the frame before admiring the picture. Better still, to decline it with the mild serenity of an ambassador refusing a third helping of boiled turnip. A premise may be false, crooked, irrelevant, or merely vulgar. None of these conditions obliges it to be entertained.

The old logicians understood this. Before charging the castle, they inspected the map; before answering the question, they asked whether the question had been smuggled in wearing a respectable hat. Civilization, after all, is largely the art of declining invitations to other people’s traps.