I'm declaring war on two words -- words that, when spoken back to back, are almost never a good sign. When I catch myself saying them, I'm usually at one of my least intellectually honest moments. When I hear other people saying these two words, I strongly suspect I have caught them at one of theirs. So what is this reliable signifier of bad logic and self-deceit?

"But still."

Just typing it makes me cringe, conjuring vague but painful memories of all the times that I know I have used these words to abdicate my responsibility to be reasonable.

To zoom out just a bit, the preceding conversation tends to go something like this:

Speaker 1: "Spiders are awful. I kill every spider I see. Planet Earth would be a much better place without them."

Speaker 2: "But spiders are absolutely necessary for keeping insect populations in check. Without them, insects would consume our crops and swarm our homes and spread disease and just generally make our lives unbearable."

Speaker 1: "Well, OK, but still, I wish there were no spiders."

Of course the spiders are just a placeholder here -- you may substitute any opinion and any reasonable objection to that opinion, and "but still" remains equally execrable. It pops up in discussion of politics, philosophy, religion, ethics -- you name it.

How many times have you heard this or a similar phrase at the turning point of a conversation -- often, in fact, at the point where it becomes clear that further discussion is useless? "But still" is one of the clearest, most conspicuous maneuvers of intellectual dishonesty (or at least intellectual laziness) that I ever employ in conversation, and I believe the same is true for others who use it in the same way. When is this ever a good thing to say? When is "but still" ever something you can be proud to think? If I catch myself saying "but still," I'm at the point where I realize that I no longer have a very good reason for holding the opinion or assessment that I do, but I nevertheless refuse to give it up. It's as if the occupants of a fortress wave a white flag of surrender to the siege-laying forces outside, then still refuse to open their gates and come out. It signals surrender for the purposes of the discussion, yet refuses to surrender the point of fact in question.

There's an understandable reason we are apt to resort to the "but still" statement: Changing your opinion is hard. It hurts. Opinions take work to forge and articulate, and often by the time we're able to explain them out loud, we're also too committed to them to give them up easily, even if faced with insurmountable objections or counter-arguments. Whenever we cling to admittedly flawed arguments in the blunt refusal to accept new information, we're very likely partaking of an intellectual ritual known as "motivated reasoning," which will be the subject of my next blog entry.

In the meantime, join me in a little bit of attempted self-analysis. Monitor your arguments and watch out for the "but still." It makes even the best of us sound foolish and intractable. Much better to undergo the painful task of accepting good objections and letting them do their work on our points of view.

Note: This is the first entry in a series of blog posts I'm calling "How Not to Think," in which I attempt to chronicle in plain and simple terms the way our brains sometimes default to less-than-ideal strategies for settling questions of "is" and "ought."