MANILA, Philippines — I heard a radio commentator once say that the art of argument nowadays has been reduced to who can say something the loudest, the fastest, the longest. It’s not necessarily the most reasonable, not necessarily the most coherent — but it is necessarily the most widely propagated, and usually also the most widely believed.

I share this observation. But I don’t know if it was always true.

I went to one of those middle-class high schools that did not have football or fencing in the Physical Education curriculum, and didn’t have a proper debate team. The teachers sent me and three unsuspecting classmates to a debate tourney against experienced debaters. They didn’t tell us much anything. We didn’t even know why people said “hear, hear.” All we knew was that we had a topic, and we had to argue for a side, whether we believed it or not.

Debate was about the art of the argument, they said. And boy, the other kids were good.

We were eliminated in the first round.

I’d like to think of myself as a non-combative kind of person. Sure I have a lot of opinions, but I don’t argue with people unless I know they are interested in reasoning with me, not just in proving me wrong. This is what I like about Philosophy.

One of my favorite professors used to go all Socrates on us, asking leading questions. He didn’t seem to ever be trying to prove a point. What he was trying to do was get us to examine what we ourselves were saying. He’d ask us to clarify what we meant, give an example, consider the alternative.

Once, in the middle of a long drawn-out argument with him, I recall stopping and asking him if I was giving the right answer at all, because if I wasn’t, I’d rather stop than waste time and saliva. He smiled and said that his concern was that I go about the right process. He told me to keep going.

While I was writing my undergraduate thesis, I read a book entitled “Metaphors We Live By” written by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Basically, they were trying to prove that people’s thoughts and ideas — the concepts upon which we build our lives and which determine our behavior — are shaped by metaphors.

One of the book’s favorite examples was the concept of argument. When we talk about argument, we talk in terms of attacking a position, or being defensive or offensive. We talk about winning or losing an argument. Lakoff says that these terms are all charged with the idea of combat—that we think of argument as war, and this war metaphor is at the root of why we argue the way we do—big and loud and angry.

On the other hand, if we changed the metaphor that shapes our idea of argument, we might go about it in an entirely different way. If we thought of argument as a dance, for example, rather than war, think what wonders it could do for us: each party in opposite sides of an argument would be partners instead of adversaries.

The effort would be cooperative: they would be trying to help each other, instead of tearing each other down. The technique of argument would be just as important as its content: it would require grace and elegance, and would prescribe a standard of excellence. It would have to be tasteful. It won’t just be about outcomes, but about the process.

It would take a cultured eye to appreciate it in its more subtle points. It could even be a performance, an art form.