Aikin, Talisse & adversarial sharting

Aikin & Talisse ask whether arguments must be adversarial at 3 Quarks-

One way to think about argument is to think of it as a fight.

An argument may escalate into a fight- indeed, the thing may be merely a pretext for one- but is not itself a fight. In inviting a fellow savant to enter a philosophical debate, there is a reasonable presumption that the thing won't end with your trying to kick each other in the goolies.

 The point about a fight is that what matters is if you can damage the other guy more than the other guy can damage you. If he cries Uncle, you win. It doesn't matter that, as it turns out, he was right. Your wife really is a ho-bag. Pity she gets paid only in used chewing gum wrappers.

In fact, it’s the default interpretation of how things went if someone reports that they’d had an argument with a neighbor or a colleague. If it’s an argument, that means things got sideways.

That may be true about a certain sort of American. The sort who has a gun rack mounted on his pickup truck. But, even in America, there are plenty of communities where arguing is a means of bonding. Most happy marriages are one long argument.

In logic, though, arguments are distinguished from fights and quarrels.

Only because they are already so distinguished in natural language. An argument is not a fight. Two people may be in complete agreement about everything and still try to beat the shit out of each other.

Arguments, as collections of claims, have a functional feature of being divisible into premises and conclusions (with the former supporting the latter), and they have consequent functional features of being exchanges of reasons for the sake of identifying outcomes acceptable to all.

Arguably not. All premises are necessarily false because they are based on an inadequate, wholly sublatable, structural causal model of the world. A conclusion is itself a proposition whose truth value is completely independent of the falsity of whatever premises some shithead used to arrive at it.

So arguments play both pragmatic and epistemic roles – they aim to resolve disagreements and identify what’s true. The hope is that with good argument, we get both.

Anything can play all sorts of roles in the eyes of a stupid enough beholder. Nobody with any sense thinks 'good arguments', as opposed to well-formed judgments, exist.

If argument has that resolution-aspiring and truth-seeking core, is there any room for adversariality in it?

Arguments have scope for adversality just like farting. What is important to remember is that it does not pay to get into a farting competition with a younger man. They have better sphinchter control and are less prone to sharting.

No doubt farting too can have a 'resolution-aspiring' and 'truth-seeking' core. The only thing that keeps me from applying for euthanasia is the hope that Amartya Sen gets into a lift with me and the lift suddenly stalls and I fart noisily till he admits that he is actually Gayatri Spivak Chakroborty and his Capability Approach was a practical joke.

There are two reasons to think it has to. One has to do with the pragmatic background for argument – if it’s going to be in the service of establishing a resolution, then the resolved sides must have had fair and complete representation in the process. Otherwise, it’s resolution in name only. That seems clear.

Sen is welcome to fart back at me but, because he is much older than me, he is likely to have poorer sphincter control and thus is at greater risk of sharting and ruining his pants.

It is a poor argument which can as easily be used to in connection with something cerebral- like maieutics- and something vulgar- like farting.

The second reason has to do with how reasons work in general.

Then it isn't really a second reason at all. It was already at work in the first reason.

Consider the thought that reasons for something regularly play a sorting role between a specified range of alternatives.

Lots of different things play a 'sorting role'- habit, convention, emotional state, mimetic effects, signalling and screening mechanisms, advertising, 'priming' and 'nudge' effects, how much you had to drink, the hotness of the girl you are trying to impress, the scotomization of the Gramscian Nomenklatura by Neo-Liberal elites, etc., etc.

For example, the evidence that your friend is having iced tea with her lunch is that she has a tall glass of light brown liquid in front of her.

Nonsense! The evidence is her saying 'I'm having iced tea.'

But that’s because that evidence distinguishes iced tea from water, a soda, or coffee.

No. The evidence only distinguishes between a light brown liquid and a non light brown liquid. That's how evidence works. Looking at the pictures on the drinks menu may help narrow things down to kombucha, root beer or a host of other brownish cocktails.

But notice that it doesn’t distinguish it from Long Island Iced Tea, which looks just like iced tea, but is a very different lunch drink.

So, Aikin & Talisse admit that evidence based on color only distinguishes things on the basis of color.

You’d need other evidence to tell those two apart. Hence that evidence of what the drink looks like is evidence only against a certain class of possibilities, but it’s not evidence when there are other possibilities under consideration.

No. It is still evidence. We can't rule out that she is drinking tap water which is brown because the pipes are rusty.

Consider another case, but this time with practical reasons. You’re deliberating about where to go for dinner – it’s late and you’re hungry. The curry place that’s in the neighborhood is preferable to the curry place that’s further away. But if you’re deliberating between the curry place in the neighborhood and the burger place also in the neighborhood, the fact that they are in the neighborhood doesn’t really matter either way.

Yes it does. Suppose you say 'let's go to the Burger King around the corner' and I say 'no, let's got to the 'Curry in a Hurry' next to it. ' Then, if a third party says 'Burger King has moved across the road next to the porn shop' we agree to go to the Burger King coz the Porn Shop has a 100 yard restraining order against me.

So, that the restaurant is in the neighborhood is a reason when it distinguishes one place from another, but it’s not a reason when it doesn’t. That’s how reasons work.

No. Neighborhood is not a homogeneous identity class. There's a difference between going into a place next door to a Porn Shop and visiting a similar place next door to a Church.

Algorithmic decision processes have limited applicability even in the computer checking of mathematical proofs. There may be a method of giving Mathematics  'univalent foundations' but we can't be sure.

This contrastive role of reasons seems pretty intuitive, and it pays all sorts of other dividends when it comes to explaining how reasons can have the bite they should have in some cases but not others.

Sadly, no company will pay you any dividends if you start explaining to them why you are biting the ankles of their executives if they carry some attache cases but not others.  What is more likely is that they will get restraining orders prohibiting you from coming within 100 yards of any of their places of business.

But here, we are concerned only with its dividends in the adversariality debate. The thought is simply that reasons must have contrastive force, and that contrastive force comes only when you’re sorting between contrary options.

Farts have contrastive force. Some are noisy but not particularly smelly. Others are silent but deadly. Some are wet. You need to have settled on the option of emitting it when seated on the toilet otherwise that's another pair of pants ruined.

If reasons have contrastive force, it is likely that they are more like farts than anything which should weigh upon a decision process.

Structural adversariality is writ into the nature of reasons, how they work and how we deploy them.

If this is true, it is equally true of the nature of farting. That's a good reason not to draw attention to it.

You don’t need a person occupying the position of the contrary position, but rather you just need to think out what that position is and what reasons could count in favor of or against it.

 One can practice competitive farting all by your lonesome. What? That isn't 'sad'. It isn't 'pathetic'. I am not a 'total loser' & BTW & FYI I do have a life and it is satisfying and fulfilling in ways you will never understand.

Think of the way we really master concepts and ideas.

Then think of all the ways your life sucks donkey bollocks while guys who never mastered a fucking concept or idea in their lives are knee deep in pussy while you are cyber-dating a shut-in who will dump you the moment she gets lipo.

We see debates about them, or we learn about their histories and see their developments and what reasons refined them into the form they have now. That’s contrastive work, the work of structural adversariality refining down what the concept is and should be, given the role it is playing in sorting some range of possibilities from others.

But, at the end of the day, Philosophers remain as stupid as shit.

There is plenty of pushback to this idea that argument is intrinsically adversarial, and it’s worth thinking through two of the most influential forms this thought takes. The first is that if argument is adversarial, then there is no ground to distinguish argument from the mere quarrels we’d thought argument was different from.

This is silly. We have an adversarial justice system. Barristers don't snatch each others' wigs off and try to scratch each others' eyes out. We have plenty of grounds to distinguish arguments- of the sort lawyers make- from cat-fights or grudge-matches or gang wars.

The second is that if we think of argument as adversarial, then that thought will have bad consequences for how we argue.

This is only true if we are shit at arguing. Suppose your brief gets thrown by the thought that the prosecutor doesn't like her. She gets flustered and says 'even though my client is a horrible man who bites people's ankles, he should be beaten to death, because he has got rabies, not get let off once again with a paltry restraining order.' On the other hand if your lawyer was good at arguing then there won't be any bad consequences.

Those are distinct but clearly related criticisms, and we’ll address them in order.
The first objection is that if argument is like battle, then since all’s fair in love and war, all’s fair in argument.

This is not an objection. It is shitting yourself in public. At a marriage ceremony when the officiant says 'does anyone have an objection to this wedding go ahead?' if you stand up and say 'I object because the groom is married to me. I have not granted him a divorce.' that is an objection. By contrast, if you stand up and shout 'Death to America!' while noisily shitting yourself then you have committed a public nuisance. You have not registered an objection.

Thus, cases of name-calling, exclusion, and general misconduct are not in principle criticizable from this perspective.

Nor is shitting yourself.

Adversariality in argument is the problem, and identifying it as the core of argument makes the problem with the practice the practice.

So this whole line of argument is analogous to shitting yourself noisily.

Our reply is that saying that argument is intrinsically adversarial isn’t to say that adversariality is all there is to argument, only that argument must have this adversarial edge of sorting contrary views.

Shitting yourself may have 'an adversarial edge' and may sort out contrary views as to who can shit themselves in public more noisily and noisomely.

Note that nothing about that role for reasons requires (or even encourages) that the sorting be done with hate or mockery.

One can competitively shit oneself in a spirit of humility and loving kindness.

In fact, the key is that adversariality itself here helps identify when the reasons given really are justifying reasons, because it’s in that contrastive role that the reason’s force is revealed.

Really? Is that what is happening in the discussion re. the validity of the Mochizuki proof of the abc theorem? I can tell who the adversaries are. I can't tell whether they are presenting 'justifying reasons' because my I.Q is the same as my chronological age. It may well be that one of the smart people involved in this dispute will reverse her position. This does not mean she has become adversarial to herself.

Without the contrasts, it’s not clear how the reasons pick anything out.

Reasons which arise out of an alethic Structural Causal Model are operationalizable in a highly utile way. Anything else cashes out as misology or mischegoss.

And, in fact, the rules of adversarial exchange allow us to identify when there are errors of the performance – just as sporting contests have fouls, so do argumentative clashes.

But, if the discourse is protocol bound, 'fouls' can arise by accident or oversight. Adersariality doesn't matter.

The second objection is that if we think that argument is adversarial, then we’ll prime ourselves for improper performance in these exchanges.

It is equally likely that we will take greater care to observe the relevant protocols rather than risk losing on a technicality. Indeed, according to the numerous legal dramas I watch on TV, prosecutors and Police Chiefs are more scrupulous, not less so, precisely because we have an adversarial, not inquisitorial,  Justice system.

As we see it, this objection is an instance of what we’d called a version of the Owl of Minerva Problem for philosophical reflection – that refinements of our concepts create new hazards in our deployment of those concepts.

Surely, the Owl of Minerva problem is that philosophy is playing catch up with the Natural and Social Sciences. That which it seeks to understand has already happened. Refinements of shite concepts are still shite deploy them how you may.

In this regard, we think the objection is close to right – focusing on the adversarial edge of argument can distort how we argue, and thus can yield improper performance.

How we argue depends on how smart and scrupulous we are. Long run, a good arguer does not need to have an adversary. She has an 'internal opponent'. Maths works that way. People like Andrew Wiles detect errors in their own proofs and work hard to repair them.

So thinking that argument is about winning can yield the temptation to straw man the opposition or to refuse to hear their arguments.

Short run, the temptation is to cheat and take short-cuts. Long run, you'd have better off playing with a straight bat. Look at Roy Cohn. His dad was a Judge. He ended his days disbarred and remains a byword for sleaze and malpractice. 

Our reply is that this is where the tools proposed by those who think that argument isn’t adversarial are useful. Those who’ve proposed other metaphors for argument – barn raising, mutual interrogation, cooperative inquiry – provide us with ways to refocus ourselves on the shared practice of argument and the value our deliberation together adds to it.

Why not simply say that there is a set of protocols which makes any type of rational or collaborative effort more productive? By contrast, saying stupid stuff which could apply just as well to farting as to philosophy is a waste of time.

Just as focusing on how and why one is friends with another person can mitigate the temptation to escalate a disagreement, the same holds with argument.

Wow! How fucked up are Philosophy Departments? Do Professors really need to be told to play nice with each other? Do Presidents of Universities really spend a lot of time getting Philosophers to stop pulling each others' pig tails or slashing each other's tires? Are these pedants put in separate corners and commanded to think about all the nice things they have done for each other or which they could do together in the future? Is the main reason 3 Quarks publishes Aikin & Talisse is because they have a history of conducting drive by shootings on each other's houses? Collaborating on philosophy papers is part of their Court Mandated Anger Management Therapy.

It’s important to remind ourselves that there are goods on the docket beyond being recognized as right or winning a particular exchange.

Why? Are you guys still tempted to go to town on each other with machetes? What greater good is there on the docket save that of both of you staying out of jail or the mortuary?

We share a culture, we have a relationship, and we want to see ourselves as fair and open-minded.

But if we want to be seen as smart or useful, we should take up a STEM subject while working nights as an ambulance driver.

Those things matter, and some metaphors of argument are better at refocusing our attention on the things that prevent us from escalating the argument. But these tools have their use only because they obviate the escalations that argument’s intrinsic adversariality inclines us toward.

A better outcome arises out of punishing those who break protocols. The reason people don't 'escalate arguments' more is because they might go to jail or lose their job or their reputation if they do so. Stupid people with anger management issues may be responsive to metaphors. Equally they may not. But they can do little damage if they are locked up in prison.

The result is that we think that argument really is intrinsically adversarial, but it’s good not to focus on that feature but rather on other ways argument can be cooperative or on the relationships we maintain in the background of the disagreement.

What does 'intrinsically adversarial' mean? If there is 'scarcity' such that if one wins then another loses, then one might say a thing is 'intrinsically adversarial'. But this is not the case with argument. It is more in the nature of a public good- i.e. is non rival and, more or less, non-excludable. Thus if a Surgeon finds an argument- viz. the germ theory of disease- for sterilizing his scalpel before operating on a patient, he is not prevented from doing so just because other surgeons accept that argument and follow suit.

On the other hand, we may say that a Surgeon loses financially if her methods are copied by her rivals. This is a case of 'market failure'. We may want to create a protocol bound mechanism such that an 'externality' is internalized. Something like this has already happened. A Doctor who discovers the cure to a disease does not keep it secret. She rushes to get the thing peer-reviewed and, hopefully, will be rewarded both reputationally and financially for her wonderful contribution to Human Welfare.

That’s a double-mindedness that may seem impossible, but it’s no more difficult to maintain than the double-mindedness we must have when we appreciate the ‘creative tension’ between artists or excellent competing athletes.

This sounds like Girardian 'mimetic desire' and isn't necessarily a good thing. Seinfeld is good and Beyonce is good in a different way. We don't want a world where all the guys talk like Seinfeld and all the girls twerk like me.

There is a seamlessness to a Seinfeld or Beyonce performance which is a holistic quest for excellence. It is not driven by rivalry.

And it is akin to the regard we have with our own thoughts when we think that the norms of critical thinking must be applied to them – we think our beliefs are true, otherwise we wouldn’t believe them,

Nonsense! We believe Mom's cooking is the best in the world and that baby is the most beautiful baby ever precisely because we know it isn't true. That's why our beliefs in this respect are sacred to us. Suppose there was a great line outside Mum's house of people clamoring for her idli-sambar, I wouldn't think Mum's cooking was what made her special. It would be something else- the way she laughs or the way she sings when alone in the Puja Room.

but we must also think that we haven’t got all true beliefs, since we need to think critically about how we’ve formed them.

Rubbish! Beliefs are about intentionality. Propositions are about alethia. We don't need to believe a proposition. What matters is whether it is useful to act as if we do.

The good thing about argument, of course, is that we outsource that critical reflection to our critics.

The same thing can be said about farting. But, whether our critics find our farts more noisy than smelly or the other way round, no 'good thing' has actually transpired. Rather we are wasting our time in delinquent behavior.

And in that respect, we should be thankful to them for being our critical adversaries.

Should we really? Suppose I hadn't spent all my time thanking connoisseurs of my farts while at School I might have learnt something there. I could of been a contendah. Instead I'm a middle aged guy who has to buy incontinence diapers because the only way I know how to maintain my social status is through competitive farting of a type which increasingly ends in a humiliating shart.

Something similar happened to Philosophy because it ignored David Lewis's suggestion that philosophy's terms of art are Schelling focal solutions for coordination games. All that remains is the business of figuring out protocols to give it univalent foundations such that it can keep abreast of developments in STEM subjects. Philosophy ought not to be adversarial. Rather it is a case of kids in Special Ed figuring out ways to be a little less special. This would help the larger number of even more special and precious snowflakes- people like me- who still pay any attention to the subject.