Claim: The best test of an argument is its ability to convince someone with an o

[Claim: The best test of an argument is its ability to convince someone with an opposing viewpoint.
Reason: Only by being forced to defend an idea against the doubts and contrasting views of others does one really discover the value of that idea.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim and the reason on which that claim is based.]

With diverse cultural, educational, economic backgrounds, people are faced with different opinions in daily and professional life. In this situation, some people choose to prove his/her ideas by convincing someone with an opposing point. Admittedly, people can find the intrinsic value of their points by doing so, there are some defeats if applying it too radically. Besides, the way to find the value of an argument is not limited to challenge it.

When a debate is hold, two controversial camps are defending their viewpoints by demonstrating the weakness of the opposing one. To be more specific, by comparing the differences of one stand with another, debaters of one camp may find their view can be applied more widely than the other and their argument is sounder in assumption, condition, and application. Such as the legislation of homosexual marriage, one argues that this policy should be applied to all countries since everyone has the very human right to decide whom they want to marry. While the other counters that it does not work in some developing countries for it is too modern and may threatens the traditional religious culture. By showing each opinions and reasons in this way, the two camps can discover their merits of views respectively. The first perspective put more emphasis on human rights and the second check the issue’s application in different cultural backgrounds. It is in the course of debating that one could be aware of the strengths and weakness of their choices and devote to perfecting it and expressing it in a more qualified way afterwards.

However, some debaters may go to another extreme for the sake of persuading others to believe their beliefs. They may be good at playing word games, listing endless flaws of others’ views and positive effects of their own ideas. As a result, the debaters debate for the merely success of debate and fail to catch the purpose of debate: thinking about an issue in various perspectives and thoroughly. Moreover, the failure of the opposite debaters does not mean that their argument is nonsense but the debaters is not good at persuading or the theme of debate is more favorbale to the winner. For example, even though Galileo could not persuade his contemporaries to trust his Heliocentric and faced a threat to be blamed by the churches, this theory has far-reaching influences in the history of science.

Besides, one argument’s values lies in itself and debating is merely one way to discover it. Another important way to show its truth is by putting it in the history context to see whether it is applied to the past, present and future. In this sense, only when this argument is outdated and finishes its application, can we have a whole assess of it. The law of all women must wear dresses in workplace had been prevailed in France for a period and there must be many proponents of it in the past. However, this law does not work right now in France and has been abandoned by the government due to its failure to match the modern age. From this example, one argument may be proven to be right and has value once but its value need to be reexamined with time going by.
To sum up, the process of debate has its strengths of discovering the value of one idea, but we cannot put the weakness of it aside. The test of one value has various methods, such as examining it in different eras and spaces. We could not focus on only one way to justify our views.