"You sense that you are in an argument when you find your own position under attack or when you feel a need to attack the other person's position. It becomes a full-fledged argument when both of you devote most of your conversational energy to trying to discredit the other person's position while maintaining your own. The argument remains a conversation, although the element of polite cooperation in maintaining the conversational structure may be strained if the argument becomes heated." (#60 1407)

"Understanding a conversation as being an argument involves being able to superimpose the multidimensional structure of part of the concept WAR upon the corresponding structure CONVERSATION. Such multidimensional structures characterize experiential gestalts, which are ways of organizing experiences into structured wholes." (#60 1458)

"In the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor, the gestalt for CONVERSATION is structured further by means of correspondences with selected elements of the gestalt for war." (#60 1461)