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The Logical Rudeness (and a little bit of Plain Rudeness — generally a somewhat angry and mocking tone) were strong in someone I was recently debating about the desirability of indefinitely long lifespans.
They make an argument. I offer a counterargument. This may go back and forth a few times, but in the end, they would usually then switch to another argument without acknowledging my last counterargument at all. And then, later, they'd often switch back to the same point they made before and refused to acknowledge my counterargument to it, as though I had never said it. Very frustrating.
(This is why I'm not interested in going into politics anymore. This is the structure of pretty much every political debate, and I have a very low tolerance for it.)
I think I'm going to start asking people to accept this precondition if they want to argue with me: When one of us makes a point, the other must offer a counterargument or explicitly concede the point. We're not allowed to move to another point without doing that first. Concede or refute, don't ignore. And if one of us later reuses an argument we previously conceded, the other person gets to dismiss it without repeating their refutation.
I was thinking of adding "withdraw" as an option (Abort/retry/fail? Concede/refute/withdraw?), which would be like pleading no contest in a trial: it would say "I don't necessarily accept your argument, but I won't contest it for now". You'd be stating your intention to act as though you had conceded it, with the caveat that you still don't believe it's correct. I can see some advantages of this — it might be appropriate in cases where a point is relatively minor to the subject of the debate, when it's not worth getting into something too deeply if there isn't already agreement — but on the other hand, we probably shouldn't have a norm that allows people to get out of changing their minds too easily. Any thoughts on this? Perhaps the standard should just be that if you don't expect you'll care to continue supporting a given argument after you've made it and heard possible counterarguments, you shouldn't use it in the first place.
Tapping out
It sounds reasonable to me...
...but a problem has just occurred to me: what if one debater is convincingly correct, but the other persists in invalid refutations? The third option might be less "nolo condere" than "I rest my case".
To be clear, I meant "withdraw" as "I withdraw this particular argument", not "I withdraw from the debate". It sounds like you're talking more about the latter. But that might be more useful anyway, now that I think about it.
Of course, in situations like that (and in debates in general), it might be helpful to have some other people observing it so there can be an outside reference for what's "convincing".