a few more thoughts on arguments and the like

My latest attempt at a fruitless trip to the new campus in search of Prince of Networks was foiled by an apparently demagnetized ATM card. None of the machines will take it. What a pain.

In the meantime, I want to expand briefly on my earlier remarks about the status of “arguments” in philosophy. I’ve dealt with this fairly extensively in the final chapter of Prince of Networks, less in response to analytic philosophy than in response to Meillassoux’s claim that there needs to be an argument against correlationism rather than a mere attempt to dismissively psychologize it. (I think the picture is a lot more complicated than those two options, as explained in the book.) However, I think I can do an even better job explaining my point than I managed to do in the latest book. Not in a single blog post, necessarily, but perhaps in a series of them.

According to a particular usual view, on one side we have argument, clarity, reason, rationality, and democracy. This army of virtues opposes, on the other side, the grim forces of poetry, rhetoric, sophistry, and authority. But in fact, such oppositions badly oversimplify the true situation. I’ve often discussed some of these themes on the blog, but not all of them.

*For one thing, clarity is not enough. Vividness is needed. To be clear, all you need to do is avoid ambiguity and state the facts of the case as known. This is certainly a virtue, and the ability to do it fluently and consistently should be prized. However, it is not the only virtue.

The main problem with clarity is that it is normally a result of thinking, not a starting-point of it. In the initial stages of attacking any problem, the state of things may not be clear at all, and the “clarifying” type of mind may actually have a tin ear for the new ambiguities at play in the new situation. There are plenty of examples from intellectual history, even in the hard sciences, of people having strange intuitions that flouted scientific orthodoxy, but they went with them anyway, and they were justified by later results.

Looking empirically at my own life, the ideas of which I am now proudest generally took around 2-4 years to advance from “weird and vague surprise” stage to “can be cogently argued against hostile interlocutors” stage. Perhaps the timetable differs for others. But unless someone is thinking exclusively in words (a bad idea, in my opinion, since it suggests that such thinking occurs with the primary aim of beating others in arguments) then there is going to be some sort of time lag where you are struggling for just the right words to say something. And that lag might easily be several years or more. One should simply be moving toward a precise verbal formulation, and at a certain point if that proves impossible then maybe the idea wasn’t as good as you thought it was.

However, I still think emotion is the most powerful cognitive tool we have, precisely because it is so difficult to express or communicate. I find it important to pay attention to our slightest emotional reactions as we think, because this is generally the best road map to where the true insights lie. When we are in channels of thought that move smoothly and easily, sometimes this is because we or our predecessors have done a lot of hard work to build an expressway step-by-step through the underbrush. But at other times it’s because we’re not seeing with our own eyes, but using one side of an existing dichotomy to bludgeon the other side, or using a word as a convenient weapon to exterminate something else that we happen not to like.

What is important, while thinking, is to pay attention to the surprises across which we stumble, and these will rarely be immediately expressible in verbal form. Say that you’re running through something in your mind, aligning certain terms on one side of a divide and other terms on another side. And suddenly you realize that it doesn’t work. Or suddenly, a thought-experiment doesn’t turn out quite the way you expected. And it might not even be clear at first exactly why this is, and it may take a dozen or more diagrams in a notebook, or twenty or more visualizations, to figure out what went wrong. And you start trying to communicate it to others, and something about how you’re saying it isn’t quite right so far. Keep working on it, though, and in a couple of years you will have the moral authority of an insight gained from complete sincerity followed up by months or years of hard work.

This is why what Cameron called a “philosophical position” is worth more than thousands of isolated “arguments.” It is so easy to walk into a room and topple somebody’s domino-fortress. The hard thing is to follow up on an idea over many ears, pursuing its ramifications, and following the twists and often reversals into which it leads you. Simply do this genuinely, and what you do will automatically be appreciated. At the end of the day, people have a pretty good nose for the difference between facile bullshit artists and people who really care about what they are saying.

*I’ve spoken before about rhetoric. This is often interpreted as meaning “verbal trickery, as opposed to cogent argument.” But that is not what it meant classically, or what it means in reality. For Aristotle, rhetoric deals in enthymemes, which are unstated syllogisms, or tacit forms of knowing. Following Heidegger, tacit forms of knowing have gained a renewed importance. An “argument” is an attempt to sideline rhetoric by putting syllogisms in clear form, accessible on the surface of consciousness. Good work. Except that this can never be done completely. There is always a mass of unstated assumptions lying beneath any explicit proposition, and a good writer will manage to hint at this underbrush in ways that link it with one’s more accessible, tangible statements. My own view, as readers of my books know, is that reality itself is never accessible, and that for this reason we hint obliquely at real things rather than modelling them in the form of palpable traits. This makes rhetoric very important to me, for philosophical reasons, and I think it is a real problem with analytic philosophy as a paradigm of human thought that it sees the sole problem of writing style as consisting in “how to be as clear as possible.” The school as a whole lacks stylistic elegance and, to repeat, any hint of suggestive power. But is Nietzsche really a worse philosopher than Quine? Is Bergson? Do you really want to make these claims?

*As far as authority… In one scenario earlier today, I imagined Leibniz or Bergson appearing in a question period and being cut to shreds by some super-arguer grad student who pokes holes in their arguments. I added that I would want this student to shut up so that I could listen to Leibniz and Bergson.

“Aha!”, someone will say. “The argument form authority! This is undemocratic.”

No. Authority can mean a number of different things. If the grad student in question were cutting apart Dr. James T. Pompous, Higginbotham Professor of Epistemology, then of course I would love to see that happen. I’d be laughing as much as anyone if that occurred.

But I would also love it if some unknown new philosopher showed up and outgunned Leibniz or Bergson. Indeed, it would be the treat of a lifetime to see such a thing occur.

In other words, the point is not that higher-ranking people should not be challenged by lower-ranking people. Such ranks are always fluid. The point is that genuine philosophical endeavor should not be gratuitously hassled by pettifogging, insincere objections whose primary aim is to make all positive statement impossible. The people to whom we should listen are the people who habitually put their own necks on the line.

For now I just want to add that there is nothing especially democratic about “argument” either. It almost always favors the more aggressive and intransigent party, and also almost always favor the party whose ideas are closest to currently plausible mainstream opinion, since many of their assumptions will be allowed to pass without argument, as seemingly obvious. For instance, scientific naturalism will always get way too many breaks in any dispute just because it seems so extremely plausible in the year 2009 compared with more metaphysical-sounding doctrines. But there are many other examples.

This is far from an end to the topic. I will have much more to say about it in the years to come.