What's a Gish Gallop?

I've recently discovered a new phrase, the "Gish gallop." It seems to me to fill a valuable vocabulary gap in discussions of argumentative styles, fallacies, etc. So I'll preserve my discovery here:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

The term refers to the debater's tactic of throwing out a lot of (individually weak) arguments in quick succession. It can be a devastating trick because it takes a lot less time to make any one claim than it does to do a careful dissection of its weakness.

So, if I were arguing the "pro" side of the proposition, "do pots of gold exist at the end of rainbows," [a deliberately ridiculous example], and I and my opponent each had five minutes for an opening statement, I could say:

1) It is arrogant to claim that such pots of gold don't exist, since it is impossible to imagine that the 'gold deniers' have personally visited both ends of any large percentage of rainbows;
2) something has to be at the end of a rainbow, by definition, so it seems plausible it will be gold;
3) folklore often arises from historical experience, so the Irish of yore must have found such gold;
4) there must be good reasons why gold has been regarded as of monetary value -- indeed, as identical with the underlying value of money -- through much of human experience -- possibly that is because it is what one finds at the end of a rainbow!;
5) lots of people fervently believe in leprechauns and, if leprechauns exist, they must have a means of financing themselves;

and I could throw out whatever else I could come up with. There are devastating counter-arguments to each of these, but my opponent is kept on the defensive if he does run down the list in his response -- he may of necessity, in order to be thorough on some of these points, omit others -- and if he omits anything, I will leap on that and say, "Aha! even the gold deniers can't counter my argument number 27!"

That's the Gish Gallop. It is named in honor (so to speak) of Duane Gish, a biochemist and anti-Darwinian who became notorious in the 1970s and '80s for engaging in public arguments over evolution.

It is important to note that he was a biochemist because Gish gallopers in Gish' own field love arguments from authority, which they pose as a supposed wave of the future. "More and more scientists are turning against this evolution nonsense," they say, "so you should join the avant garde cause of creationism." For the record, then, although Gish did author at least 14 peer reviewed publications on biochemistry, none of them had any connection with evolutionary biology, and he stopped working in that manner when he took us his Higher Calling.

So far as I can tell, the last of Gish's genuine contributions to science was published in 1971, It was in the JOURNAL OF MEDICINAL CHEMISTRY, and it was about compounds of use in the suppression of immune reactions. https://pubs.acs.org/toc/jmcmar/14/12 That is an important subject and one wishes he had stuck to such a field.

At any rate, the practice of the Gish gallop is not at all limited to the cause for which Gish himself employed it. If only it could be so easily quarantined!

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Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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