Rational Argument

I grew up in a politically conservative area. It was conservative in several senses, the most important being a kind of evasion of political discussion. Political pronouncements were perfectly acceptable, as long as they were within line with what was the conventional wisdom, but disagreement with that wisdom was NOT considered tactful--this is one reason I start to hyperventilate when people talk as though "political correctness" was an invention of the left.

Something that people don't always understand is that evasion of conflict is fundamentally conservative--you can't have social change without change, after all. That doesn't mean that all conflict is the same, and that's sort of what this post is about: degrees and kinds of discursive conflict.

It was the late sixties and early seventies, and I had the sense that people around me didn't want to discuss Vietnam. There was just a kind of laying down of the law--that if we didn't fight them there, we'd be fighting them on the beaches of Santa Monica. No kidding--that's what people said. Why Santa Monica? I'd wonder. Why not Huntington or Haggerty's? That was such an obviously loony response, and so thoroughly evaded the questions I had, and it was generally said in such a loud voice, that this was clearly not a discussion going anywhere helpful. And then I happened to go to India, and all these people (including a beggar in a loin cloth) wanted to talk to me about Vietnam. They were vehement, and passionate, and very informed. And I had better discussions with them that I did at home, and that struck me as very weird--why, in America, with its emphasis on free speech, do we have so many cultural stigmas against disagreement?

Americans seem to have a bifurcated view of political discussion. Either you have a community (which is in perfect agreement), or you have conflict (which has disagreement). Community is good, and conflict is bad. Conflict is screaming, and vehement, and vicious, and different only in degree (not kind) from violence. So, the only real difference between a verbal disagreement and a physical battle is the degree of vehemence with which people fight.

This is rhetorical fatalism. It presumes that, when people are passionate, they cannot be persuaded through reason, so you don't try reason, you try various forms of verbal intimidation. Those don't work, which seems to confirm the premise (that people can't be persuaded). Or, to put it another way, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. You think you can't persuade people, so you fight, and strive for just getting the other person to give up. "Reason" becomes "things with because clauses" or "assertions with something that looks like evidence" attached. And they're weapons. You don't persuade people, not because people can never be persuaded, but because the strategy you're using is not persuasive.

This bifurcated view (conflict=verbal violence; community=agreement) is also all wrong, one of those conglomerations of wrongness so mangled and mungled that even sorting out the ways it's wrong (and the wrong-headed ideologies that contribute to it) is incredibly complicated. I'm not doing that here, but I will mention a couple of books that do a good job of explaining what's wrong with equating disagreement and a battle: Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent; and Tannen, The Argument Culture. If you're looking for something more philosophical, I think Mouffe, The Return of the Political is really brilliant, and she's relying heavily on Arendt, The Human Condition which is beautifully explained by Pitkin, Attack of the Blob.

But, the fact is that a really vehement argument often does turn into (or maybe even starts out as) something that just makes people feel awful. So, people have proposed solutions.

First, since the arguments that make some people feel icky are generally vehement, then good arguments must be not vehement! Bad premise, bad conclusion.

This is not only a bad argument (although it is that), but a dangerous and damaging one. The short version is this: when I started doing research on proslavery rhetoric, the thing that stunned me was that the most common argument that proslavery rhetors made about abolitionists was that they should be censored because abolitionists made slaveowners feel bad. This line of argument continues to today--any discourse that makes people feel bad is bad, and should be stopped.

But, of course, however you do this, only the feelings of some people count. If I criticize Hugh, and that makes him feel bad, then I should be silenced, right? But now I feel bad, too. So, Hugh should be stopped from making me feel bad by having me silenced.

Or maybe we shouldn't be so sensitive.

But, there's another version of this. Basically, being told that you're wrong makes you feel bad, so what people who want to avoid bad feelings do is to say that you should never be direct about telling someone you think they're wrong. You avoid words like "but," and you don't contradict, and you don't hurt anyone's feelings. Well, you know what? There's no way to tell someone that you really think it's bad for them to be a slaveowner without hurting their feelings. And you know what else? That's fine and dandy. Slaveowners should feel bad.

The problem with trying to have a discourse that doesn't hurt anyone feelings is that you've just thrown out the possibility of a critical discussion. Criticism hurts. Unless you dress it up so much that it's no longer criticism (which William Ellery Channing tried, and it still made slaveowners mad), criticism hurts people's feelings. So, the first step that people who talk about productive conflict say is that people should not intentionally make personal attacks, but, equally important, people shouldn't take criticism of their ideas personally. The responsibility is reciprocal. Still and all, that doesn't get you very far in terms of distinguishing good and bad conflict, I think (although it's a good start).

Second, another way to think about this is that, since vehement criticism makes people mad, and since mad people don't reason well, good arguments can only be had by people who aren't emotional about the issues--vehemence and feeling bad are both prohibited.

Another bad premise leading to another bad conclusion.

The problem is that you can't hope to have a public sphere of people disagreeing without their emotions getting involved. A discussion of slavery that didn't involve how slaves feel about it is an incoherent (and essentially irrelevant) discussion. Feelings are reasons, and a feeling-less discussion is, actually, an unreasonable one. It is irrational.

Now, that may sound weird, as the common notion is that rational=emotion-free and emotional=irrational. But, that's a poisonous legacy of a bastardized version of logical positivism (which, even in its legitimate forms is not helpful for thinking about public discourse). Again, this is a long argument, and I'll say that I think Martha Nussbaum is really helpful (especially the essays in Love's Knowledge). But, basically, the point is that it would be irrational, for instance, to try to think about what career a person should have without taking into consideration how they feel about things like working outdoors versus in an office, working with people or alone, the sight of blood, and so on.

Third, since icky arguments tend to be distracting, misleading, and fallacious, then a good argument must be one that consists of arguments that follow the logical forms.

If "logical" means "unemotional," then this is just a variation of the second option, and just as vexing. If not, then it still isn't much help. Going as far back as Plato, logicians have tried to figure out how to apply the rules that work so well in regard to geometry to public affairs. Aristotle said they don't apply--math is capable of certainty, because you can begin with a universally valid first premise, but politics and ethics don't follow from universally valid first premises. That made people nuts (and was one reason that Aristotle's writings were banned from the University of Paris till Aquinas made his thinking more acceptable--but even Aquinas had his troubles). So, various people have tried to find universally valid first premises for political and ethical discussions ever since. (They get into a tricky place with "universally valid"--they have to decide whether something is "universally valid" even if not everyone accepts it.)

The problems with this line of pursuit are really interesting, but, again, too complicated to follow here. The short version is that formal logic doesn't apply to political and ethical arguments because an argument can be formally valid and still untrue, and true although formally invalid.

Premise: Chester is a dog.
Premise: All dogs are canines.
Conclusion: Chester is a canine.

If either of those premises is untrue, then the conclusion isn't true (if, for instance, Chester is a cat, or if Chester is a "dog" in the sense of being ugly or unreliable.)

Gazillionth, I'll skip a whole bunch of intervening ones, including the notion that rationality is bad, so people should just rely on feelings, or that verbal disagreement is pointless, so just hit people who disagree (a surprisingly popular notion). It isn't generally helpful to try to distinguish a rational from an irrational argument by looking at single arguments; you have to look at them in context.

Now, to some extent, you can look at a single argument--does it appeal to consistent premises throughout (is it internally contradictory). And that's a little helpful, but it falls into the formal problem pretty fast (that an argument can look formally good and yet be completely untrue). Even more helpful is to look at argumentation--that is, the whole process in which the argument happens, and the person(s) who is(are) making it, and the person(s) to it's being made.

What makes an argument rational, in this sense, is that the person(s) making it can articulate the conditions under which s/he would abandon it.

An "irrational" argument is an assertion (with or without reasons attached) that a person will not abandon, regardless of evidence--the belief cannot be disproven or tested. There's nothing inherently wrong with irrational beliefs--I have plenty of them--but there also is no point in trying to prove them wrong. Because they can't be proven wrong. That's their nature.

I'm perfectly happy to tell people about why I think democracy is the best form of government, and I can cite chapter and verse. But, fundamentally, nuffin you say is going to make me abandon that belief. It's the foundation for all sorts of other beliefs (most of which are up for debate--what is the role of representation in democracy? what kind of representation is most democratic? and so on). But, I'm perfectly willing to grant that my faith in democracy is irrational. As I said, nothing wrong with that, but it means we won't have a rational debate about democracy--we might have an interesting exploration, or a really fun talk, but not a rational discussion.

But, that isn't enough as a definition. There's another set of traits, but that's for another post. The short version of that is that a debate is rational when the rules apply equally to all parties--when the "rules of argument" (whatever they are) apply reciprocally. So, however "inaccuracy" is defined, it is defined the same way for everyone. (In other words, I can't slam you for inaccuracy if your facts are no more accurate than mine.)

(to be continued)