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Conversations: What If You're Wrong?
_J_
PedantRegistered User, __BANNED USERS regular
PedantRegistered User, __BANNED USERS regular
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIC4P8oLBHAApothe0sis wrote:
Agreed. So, let's do that when we aren't.
Conversations within which conflicting thoughts are presented tend to not be about what people think they're about. For example,
"Should people be allowed to own hand guns?" is actually a conversation on
- Individual Rights vs. Group Rights
- The well-being of the individual vs. the well-being of the state
- Whose interpretation of the 2nd amendment is correct
- By what criteria do we determine if a thing is harmful
"Abortions?" is actually a conversation on
- Are zygotes / fetuses persons?
- By what criteria do we discern whether or not a thing is a person?
- Which is more important: The well-being of the mother, or the well being of the fetus / potential child
- What is the relationship between legality, morality, and spirituality / religion
- What is the relationship between a doctor's responsibilities as a doctor, and the doctor's personal beliefs
"Is X ethical / moral?"
- What is the correct ethical / moral system
- How do we determine the correct ethical / moral system
- What is the relationship between ethics / morals and legality
- How do we navigate cultural differences with respect to moral / ethical systems
The result is a conversation that amounts to either an intellectual circle-jerk of agreement,
or a bemusing scuffle between individuals hurling veiled primary assumptions and conflicting definitions at one another.
This happens all the time, we routinely talk about it in [chat]. We talk about it in digressions within threads. This is not new information.
What I hope to be new information is the conclusions we reach through a discussion on the topics for this thread:
1) By what rubric do we discern the correct first principles in any discussion?
2) If we are unable to discern the correct first principles in a discussion, then what?
In short: How do / ought groups of persons resolve fundamental differences between particular individuals in their explanations of reality?
Here are the three generalist, kinda, starting places, to find a starting place:
1) Theory > Practice
This is what we find in situations such as Ptolemaic astronomy We start with a core assumption, and explain phenomena based upon that assumption. Ptolemy assumes our universe to be a geocentric (eccentric) system. Due to this assumption, he crafts an explanation of a universe with earth at its center (kinda) and a gigantic spirograph pattern of orbital cycles, epicycles, retrograde motion, etc. around it.
We Know that Earth is the center of the universe, damn it, and so this story must explain the apparent observed motion of the sun, moon, and planets.
2) Practice > Theory
This is...difficult. We start with a practice, and then craft a theory, based upon that practice, to explain that practice. The problem is that we pretty much always understand a practice in terms of an explanatory schema we have assumed. That's, arguably, what understanding is. Here is a simple example:
Practice: I hit this rock on that thing, and fire happened.
Unnoticed assumptions: We've assumed indexicality, along with a subject / object distinction between "I" and "the rock" and "that thing". Utilizing "and" posits an assumed relationship. So, we hit a thing with a rock, and we already have at least three assumptions going. This before we even start considering how to explain our thing-rock fire.
3) Fallibilism
This is a sloppy reinterpretation of #2. It admits that we start with assumptions, but allows for revisions to those assumptions in order to accommodate new experiences that conflict with those assumptions. Again, though, we have a similar collection of problems to #2: What counts as a new experience? What is a genuine conflict, as opposed to a misunderstanding? Can fallibilism, itself, be dismissed? What counts as an assumption?
This is what we find in situations such as Ptolemaic astronomy We start with a core assumption, and explain phenomena based upon that assumption. Ptolemy assumes our universe to be a geocentric (eccentric) system. Due to this assumption, he crafts an explanation of a universe with earth at its center (kinda) and a gigantic spirograph pattern of orbital cycles, epicycles, retrograde motion, etc. around it.
We Know that Earth is the center of the universe, damn it, and so this story must explain the apparent observed motion of the sun, moon, and planets.
2) Practice > Theory
This is...difficult. We start with a practice, and then craft a theory, based upon that practice, to explain that practice. The problem is that we pretty much always understand a practice in terms of an explanatory schema we have assumed. That's, arguably, what understanding is. Here is a simple example:
Practice: I hit this rock on that thing, and fire happened.
Unnoticed assumptions: We've assumed indexicality, along with a subject / object distinction between "I" and "the rock" and "that thing". Utilizing "and" posits an assumed relationship. So, we hit a thing with a rock, and we already have at least three assumptions going. This before we even start considering how to explain our thing-rock fire.
3) Fallibilism
This is a sloppy reinterpretation of #2. It admits that we start with assumptions, but allows for revisions to those assumptions in order to accommodate new experiences that conflict with those assumptions. Again, though, we have a similar collection of problems to #2: What counts as a new experience? What is a genuine conflict, as opposed to a misunderstanding? Can fallibilism, itself, be dismissed? What counts as an assumption?
This isn't even a question limited to "How ought I talk to people on forums?" It's one of the core questions of the human condition:
What if I'm Wrong?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPJQw-x-xhoExcept, at the end, we don't automatically hop to "Darwinian Empirical Science as we understand it right now." We question that, too. Because our interlocutors question it.
Many of us have been conversing on this forum for over 10 years about a variety of topics.
Perhaps it is time that we try to explain what we think we've been doing.
Apothe0sis wrote:
So, let's do that.
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This is the only thing that has stopped me from having an aneurysm from the constant barrage of sensationalist pitchfork inducing headlines that assault you through every form of media. The correct response to "Congressman X voted against a bill to save babies" isn't that asshole doesn't want to save babies, it's I wonder what was in that bill that was meant to save babies, and which part the congressman disagreed with.
I derive much of my political positions from Enlightenment thought, especially Locke and Mill, as interpreted though the American tradition.
Among the central ideas in cliff note form: (men should be interpreted as human for this)
Representational Democracy justified:
-All men are created equal, with inherent ownership of only their own selves
-As all men are created equal, each has equal right to the natural resources and space that they inhabit and no inherent authority over others
-Since men are inherently, or otherwise strongly, social and survival and prosperity requires cooperation and trade, men group together to pool resources, skills and trade
-In order to facilitate that cooperation, regulations regarding those shared resources is necessary, including defining ownership
-In order to enforce those regulations and to settle disputes (including violations of the personal integrity and rights such as violence), government is needed
-As no individual has unilateral authority over others (see #1/#2) the government must derive its authority from the consent of the governed
-The consent requires defined limits on powers, and the authority must not violate justification for government (enabling regulation of shared resources and protecting the natural rights/personal integrity of the constituents) **
-As individuals must carry out the authority and determine the specific details of regulations* and no individuals hold this authority inherently, the legislature and executives must likewise be selected by the governed. As carrying out and determining the regulations and laws aren't necessary determined by the same qualities, they should be separated.
-In order to allow for true consent, the populace must be able to discuss the merits of different individuals, proposals and societal conditions. Restricting this perverts the consent of the governed and makes the government lose legitimacy.
-As such any legitimate government must not restrict freedom of thought or expression if it could in any way inform or express any aspect of the world, human nature or society.
-The law must apply equally to all individuals, as it is founded on the concept of individual equality, and must be rational, as only reason can reach the same conclusion (equal result) consistently given a set of facts. The law can treat individuals equally, while a man can't. There must therefore be the rule of law and not man.**
*
**
edit added ** and last lines since it wasn't fully fleshed out
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
The hunt for immutable first principles is an attempt to hoist ourselves beyond our contingencies. It is a hope that we find something that does the work God used to do, namely present itself as big and powerful and our side. We are finite inquirers, and we can no longer hope to ally ourselves with the infinite. In light of this situation, fallibilism is the best we can do. Novelty and conflict speak for themselves, and trying out new concepts and ways of speaking / living / being is their test. Evaluating fallibilism from a rationalistic perspective makes it look silly, of course. But it's how we all live and get along in this world.
To the thread's broader question: we will never find an assumption-free starting point from which to begin. Philosophy and arguments more generally always find themselves in the middle of things, because philosophers and arguers are always already in the middle of these same things. We could not reason if we did not know concepts, and we would not have concepts without a community to give them and their relevant norms of use to us.
Edit: With all that said, of course most folks on this forum will agree that flourishing individuals are better than decaying ones, happiness is preferable to dismay, a world with less suffering is better than one with more. We're all liberals in that sense. The hard work comes in trying to talk about, work with, and live near one another. We cannot hope to find a position that allows us to win any argument, to take on all comers once and for all. And yet, there is value to be found in the struggle, in thinking and talking through issues with our fellows.
2. Everything else is context and fluid, because the individuals involved are not static unchanging things but are both influenced by and able to influence their environments to some degree over varying amount of time depending on circumstance.
3. I'd like it if we tried to reduce suffering by things that can suffer, but I'm including theoretical entities (like future people and the unconscious) here so return to 1.
First principles to this degree are meaningless because of 1 and 2. Mostly 1 but 2 explains why we can't just recycle arguments without examining them and deciding if we think they should be used (i.e. 2)
There's a reason we have these problems...
agreed, we share much more beyond first principles
i don't think many people believe in the cogito at this point though
cogito ergo not sum! Don't believe in the cogito in what sense? Just curious, I was mostly using it as it's the most recognisable "let's get to the firstiest of first principles principle" to form the most extreme end of the scale.
To connect that to the topic, you will often see people who agree on many intervening premises but disagree on a fundamental underlying premise in a way that disrupts the entire discussion and is often never directly addressed. I am never sure how to address this because it prevents fruitful discussion but also totally derails the conversation.
But that doesn't mean that it's constructive - or even possible - to exhaustively reiterate starting principles every time. I agree with Apothe0sis here:
-
For any given conversation, we probably agree on more underlying principles than we disagree.
In the example of abortion, we probably agree that 1) some entities are persons 2) it is hypothetically possible for us to know what is a person and what is not (even if we don't agree on the definitions right now) 3) persons are valuable 4) we should endeavor to avoid killing persons.
I've never seen an abortion debate devolve into anything like "I'm cool with abortion because I just don't see anything wrong with killing people" or "who gives a shit? consciousness is an illusion and we're all just dancing carbon automatons anyway."
And we can't necessarily assume we know what the disagreement-of-principle actually is. There are two common good-faith disagreements (and a whole lot of bad-faith ones) in abortion debates. The good-faith ones typically are:
1) Fetuses are not persons.
2) Fetuses are (or might be) persons, but it is okay in the case of abortion to kill a person. (IE, the Violinist argument).
If I'm a pro-lifer, I could come into a thread with a long post about how fetuses are persons, but I might be unaware of (2) or unprepared for it. My fetus personhood manifesto would then be a colossal waste of time.
And that's just assuming only the common good-faith disagreements. If we want to have a rigorously assumption-free argument, everybody in the debate would have to reiterate all of philosophy starting from Thales just in case there's some asshat in the audience who wants to make an argument from the moral worthlessness of persons or some other obscure starting point. I'd probably also have to copy and paste a shitload of Bertrand Russell and WVO Quine just to make sure we all agree what the definition of "is" is.
That exercise is all for naught if people aren't honest about their assumptions. Frankly, people are often dishonest about their assumptions. Rationalizing on opinion with post-hoc justifications is one of the classic human follies.
I would much rather start from the top and drill down. That gets us to the crux of the disagreement much faster, and has a better chance to expose post-hoc rationalization.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Nick's strategy of assuming interloquitors to be genuine, rational entities is a must for productive, cordial debate. We start by assuming that any position is a possible source of value.
The general equality supplied by Pants* protects the group from tyrants, and allows multiple viewpoints, concerns, and varieties of evidence to be considered. We hope for the consent of all, and so acknowledge the views of all.
Rorty saves us from a God and those who quest for Certainty. We lose any sense of Absolute Authority, refocusing the responsibility, and fault, on ourselves. There is no Right answer, just our answer.
And then...
Tastyfish recognizes that, if Rorty is right, then everything is, inherently, meaningless. Entities that create meaning (us) posit meanings and interpretations onto those things into which we bump. Meaning results from the interplay of meaning creator, and *reality*. But now we've raised the question of what counts for our concerns. When we declare suffering to be bad, we then have to discern who suffers...
To which Apothe0sis replies that we, as a group, already have shared beliefs. We have many things in common. When we first ask, "What suffers?" the reply is, "Us!" Because we know that we suffer.
But now we're back where we started: A kind of base tribalism centered around that about which we each most care. Everything is fine while we remain in accord, but if difference arises, what happens then?
As Tastyfish noted, time, and, it turns out, discussion, is a flat circle. Round and round we go, hoping for agreement this time.
What causes that agreement? Where does it come from?
When someone shifts from, "Hells no" to "You...actually make a good point. I think you're right." what happens?
Because it seems like that is the answer to the question. Find the source of agreement, and then just make that thing produce more agreement whenever disagreement occurs.
But what is the thing that produces agreement?
*Phrasing
Edit: I wrote this before Feral replied. I'm sure he falls in line.
Self awareness is a really wierd thing in biology, with the concept of a self requiring a much higher level of brain function than what 99% of the people in the world would consider as being the baseline of a 'self aware entity'.
Plus you've also got the issue of time - "I" is an incredibly complicated concept, especially if we're not talking about a single point entity. I might be aware of things, but the things that I'm aware of (including my own existence) don't exist at the same time as my awareness. We've also not got an infallible system for confirming past data - as an AI, I might be aware of myself at the moment of creation, but that self is not me and the thing that is aware of itself is something entirely different.
There's also the issue of a universe made up of "probabilities" far as our conscious scale goes. So we can also question 'am' - you might think, but you're not always.
It's also likely to be more relevant, people's beliefs don't fit on a nice two or even four dimensional axis, so expecting that you'll find it easier to come up with with a fundamental set of rules to govern what is important in being human than slant someone's view on a specific topic within their overall worldview is madness.
To do otherwise is basically deciding to stop having any arguments about what to do right now, until you've come to a consensus on how human experience should proceed. It#s less 'perfect being the enemy of good' as 'the Platonic Ideal is the enemy of it's own shadow'.
It is more practical and expedient to work from the point of contention backwards. "Why do you think fetuses are people?" is likely a more helpful question to answer than "How do you know there is an external world?", in an abortion discussion. Sure. Your first part, and conclusion, trouble me, though.
Do you think it is impossible for a person to map out their entire belief system as a network of consistent beliefs?
It is difficult, and may require many dimensions or networks or layers or (whatever organizational metaphor you prefer). The difficulty does not imply impossibility, though.
That is what I take to be involved with the notion that one's conversation partner is reasonable, rational, arguing in good faith, etc. They are honestly presenting their beliefs, and they have put forth the effort required to make those beliefs coherent.
This is the premise with which we play in ethics courses. You ask an undergrad how a fetus is a person. They say X. You say, "Ok. Cow fetuses have X, too. Are cow fetuses persons?" The undergrad then say some stuff.
Without that assumption of consistency, it seems to all be ad hoc rationalizations propping up what are, at best, emotive impulses.
I believe most people's belief systems amount to this. The idea of mapping out my belief system into a small set of assumptions and preferences is ludicrous to me, especially given that I will frequently devil's advocate myself into accepting a different viewpoint than I had when I started the discussion.
I mean, none of us are going to "solve" the questions we discuss. People generally aren't convinced to change sides unless they've been misinformed ("actually, global warming does do X, [cite]" "oh, then I no longer disagree with you"). So the best we're going to do when things get down to philosophical differences is enjoy the futile process of trying to sway each other's emotive impulses. None of that is helped by laying out principles and agreeing on definitions--the attempt at rigor can take all the fun out of a conversation while providing no actual progress (because no actual progress can generally be made), as anyone who's seen _J_ try to fix a thread can attest. (Sorry, @_J_ but you know it's true.
If this is true, then why is cognitive dissonance a thing?
Striving for consistency, if we are fundamentally inconsistent, seems weird.
It's more that we do strive for consistency, but at the same time accept that it's almost impossible to be 100% consistent in our views because people are complicated. Trying to be more consistent is good, but demanding 100% consistency is a recipe for madness.
The vast majority of our beliefs are held secondhand, thoughtlessly stolen or borrowed from one another. We call this process enculturation, education, or just growing up. It's incorrect to say that we are "fundamentally inconsistent"; rather, most of our beliefs remain unexamined until they fail us in conversation or the quotidian business of living. They may be consistent or not, and we rarely care to check. When someone calls us on inconsistency, or when the world pushes back against our beliefs, we occasionally begin the hard work of remaking what we believe--that is, we reinvent ourselves. Other times, we undertake various kinds of self-deception: cognitive dissonance, repression, and dogmatism are prevalent. Perhaps to believe other than we currently do would be too painful or require too much work. Logical tension is often preferable to experiential difficulty.
In this thread, "the assumption of consistency" is about what happens in conversations. We expect people's words to relate in particular ways. If our interlocutor believes "the box is crimson," we assume he also believes "the box is red." If these kinds of relationships do not hold, then we are confused and do not know how to proceed. "Striving for consistency" is an attempt to avoid these moments of confusion. So far as I can tell, there is no deeper value in consistency.
Being consistent in conversations would be about having a set of unchanging collective principles(X, Y, and Z are good principles to strive for)
Being coherent would be about having a set of principles that don't contradict each other(IE The human life is infinitely valuable, but death penalty is acceptable).
I think _J_ is talking about coherency than consistency. Cognitive dissonance more of a coherency issue.
Consistent
Coherent
All coherent things are consistent.
Not all consistent things are coherent.
I think I would flip your definitions around. Coherency is a more structured version of consistency.
Ideally, we would have a coherent set of beliefs. We'd likely start, in the best scenario, with consistent beliefs.
I agree that you can be consistently incoherent. For example, I can consistently affirm the value of human life(All men are created equal) while consistently devaluing certain groups of humans(Racism, sexism, etc.). I am unchanging and thus consistent, but when you place those 2 beliefs side by side, you will see the dissonance. Dissonance is a sign of an incoherent set of beliefs.
I also think it is possible to be inconsistently coherent. If you hold your beliefs loosely enough, then you avoid any possibility of being incoherent. For example, I believe it is possible that all human life has value, while at the same time I also believe that it is possible that X group of humans have no value. My beliefs are inherently inconsistent due to the way their probabilistic nature allows me to apply them ad hoc, but as long as the probabilities of human life having value and not having value adds up to 100% they would actually be non-contradicting and thus coherent.
By simply allowing for the possibility that we are wrong, we make our beliefs less consistent, but we actually increase our coherency by allowing ourselves to fix or change incoherent beliefs.
As a matter of hygiene, I would be loathe to use 'consistency' to mean anything other than 'logically (or possibly analytically) consistent.' And on that use, there is an obvious deeper value of consistency, namely, that inconsistent beliefs cannot possibly be true. So to even have a chance at believing the truth, you'd better start by believing something consistent.
When it comes to the topic of the thread, the fact that 'first principles' or whatever may exist does not mean it's always useful or conversationally appropriate to try to start with them--but, by the same token, the fact that it's not always useful or conversationally appropriate to start with first principles doesn't mean there aren't any. So I agree with (what appears to be most people) that arguments are opportunistic; we take account of the dialectic when we decide what to say. However, I disagree that arguments are just opportunistic, and that there's nothing underneath. I see no reason to think there aren't indeed facts about what we ought to do and think, facts that we partially unearth and opportunistically cite depending on what our purposes at the particular moment happen to be.
Just to skip ahead in the Rorty argument about "no deeper value in consistency", addressing the notion of there being something "underneath" our statements and "facts" to which they correspond...
What makes you think there is something underneath, that there are facts we unearth? Why is consistency required for truth?
Rorty - The World Well Lost
Here is a short excerpt that I think gets the point across
Once we start playing with alternative conceptual frameworks, a hazard in conversations within which there is disagreement, we eventually lose the world.
I am pretty sure there is a mind-independent reality, within which there are facts. A true linguistic utterance is one that corresponds to those facts. When we're having a conversation, that conversation is about, in part, the world. Since the conversation is about the world, we need to discern how the world is, in order to verify the claims we make about it. If we junk the world part, for the sake of easing conversation, and limit our inquiry to the conversation, itself, and our emotive disposition towards particular aspects of the conversation (does that sentence confuse me, or not) then we've limited ourselves to only talking about talking, and our feelings about talking, without ever considering the world we presume ourselves to be talking about. Then we lose the world, and our conversation amounts to little more than an intellectual circle jerk.
It's great if my interlocutor believes "the box is crimson" and "the box is red." But the conversation is not merely about the beliefs and their consistency. The conversation is also about the box.
That's why starting with first principles makes sense, to me. If we start with the conversation, the beliefs of individuals involved in the conversation, and work back from there to clarify misunderstandings and disagreement, we may never actually get back to the world about which we presume ourselves to be talking.
For conversations about morality and ethics it's fine to start where we are in conversation, because there are no moral facts "out there" to which our statements correspond. But for conversations that are actually about the world, it makes sense, to me, to start at the world, and work up.