Been a while, yes. I never promised consistency!
Popular culture is always an influence on how we behave. It's not always for the worse, but we should at least be aware of that influence. And I think we're seeing a potentially malign influence in online discussion and content discussion culture with that beloved moment: the Gotcha.
In the canons of literature, you can often find these moments. Whether it's in the sitting room at 221B Baker Street, the parlor of a country mansion where Hercule Poirot or Jane Marple hold the attention of a country squire's guests, or a courtroom where the likes of Perry Mason, Benjamin Matlock, or Jack McCoy seek justice, it's that magical moment where the protagonist employs hard-earned knowledge to catch their quarry in a trap of some form. The truth crashes upon the tissue of lie, obfuscation, or uncertainty the antagonist has formed to protect themselves, all is revealed, and in some cases, the antagonist is compelled to confess to their crimes, assuming the protagonist has not made their admission irrelevant. Performers like Raymond Burr and Sam Waterston have often made these moments of revelation compelling in the visual media. And like anything else in mass visual media, the idea has wormed its way into our cognitive spaces.
The issue comes now with how much people want to pull this off in their day-to-day interactions. Some of us find ourselves unable to resist that urge, we want to be able to unleash The Truth, a veritable Mjolnir of crackling facts, upon someone's ignorance or falsity, to the stunned silence of our foes and the applause of those witnessing. And that makes us susceptible to bad debating practice.
I mean, sometimes you do get such moments. Sometimes, you have someone who expresses falsehoods with certainty and who can be revealed as wrong with some swift application of fact. But it's not always a clear-cut thing. Facts alone are not truth, they can be twisted into fortifying untruth through misunderstanding of what they mean. Some facts are heavily reliant upon a wider context that, stripped from that context, are not so easily marshaled towards the ends of a crushing truth. Focusing on special facts specifically for Gotcha! moments is more likely to distort the argument as a whole, as your entire approach is based entirely on hoping to get your foe to step into your perceived trap. But if the rest of your argument has been perfunctory or weak, a more knowledgeable foe, even one who has an inconvenient fact thrown at them, can turn that weak overall argument against you. Arguments need a wider structure than just that special "Gotcha!"
The Gotcha is itself a narrative construct. It's a moment for drama, not exchange of information or discussion of ideas. The desire to seek and spring that "Gotcha!" on someone has a limited role in such and is, obviously, primarily in adversarial situations like witness cross-examination (hence how popular it is in legal drama). Trying to create a Gotcha in other environments is wasting your time and everyone else's.
But perhaps most of all, seeking the Gotcha makes you prone to accepting distorted facts, even outright lies, because they fit your worldview and would make for a great Gotcha.
You are not Perry Mason, you are not Hercule Poirot. You shouldn't want to be. If you have a position on any topic you feel you need to defend, vigorously, make sure your research for it and argument for it is something sturdy, something that works. Ignore the siren call of the Gotcha.
P.S. To clarify, a Gotcha isn't just some fact expressed with a slight bit of dramatic flair or other form of emphasis, making a sarcastic rejoinder isn't a Gotcha, it's just (potentially bad, likely rude) wit. A Gotcha is not just a matter of presentation but a purported fact with it, wielded to utterly ruin an opposing position in one blow.
