Creative Energy II: When a Voice Speaks You, Research Time, 07/12/2017

Sorry for not having uploaded a post earlier today. I didn’t have time to write one because I was too busy writing. I’m working on my own piece in reply to a debate unfolding at the Reply Collective over the nature of the social. It might provide the discussion a new kick of energy to explore some intriguing theoretical territory.

I’m also fully prepared for my contribution to result in puzzled looks and scratching heads. My philosophical work has inspired both of those reactions in more or less equal proportions for as long as I’ve been in the field.

As it is, some more reflections on Deleuze’s philosophy (and meta-philosophy) today.
• • •
So about those incredibly difficult ideas. Tuesday’s post ended with a description of a type of inadequate philosopher – an inadequate thinker, really.

Call such a person a Master Debater.

There are few things more obnoxious than a self-declared Master
Debater. Yes, I know he'd say that's not an argument. And my response
would be to remind him that I never intended to make an argument.
My intention was to insult him.

I’ve written about these types of people before, in a post that remains one of my most popular. I think it’s because I very accurately described the essence of a specific type of extremely annoying person. These days, such a person can also be quite dangerous politically.

If someone takes to heart that the primary purpose of philosophical reasoning is critiquing and evaluating arguments, then he’s reduced all the world’s traditions of philosophy to a debate club about some of the weirdest ideas in the world.

Example. You ask whether Kant’s arguments for the specific limits he describes on legitimate human thought are logically valid, or look for critical or knockdown counter-arguments.

There are aesthetic aspects of philosophical thinking too, where you study the concepts and ideas of philosophical greats as creative artworks. This is the best approach to being a historian of philosophy – your methods carefully read philosophical texts to understand precisely their concepts.

Problem is, historians of philosophy tend to think that there’s only one true reading of a philosophical text or great figure. Or at least, that’s how much their papers tend to snipe at each other’s interpretations.

Example. Describe in detail the conception of the human mind that Kant develops in his Critical period.

Becoming-Cosmos

Trying to become a primary literature philosopher is a different kind of process entirely. This is where the artistic meets the practical – you’re developing frameworks of thought to interpret and understand the world from mundane human experience to the fundamental nature of the cosmos. What would you call such a person?

Let’s start with that idea, person. A person is an individual sapient creature. Most of the people we know are humans. A historian isn’t a historian all the time – sometimes she’s a cook, an athlete, or a daughter. Likewise, an obnoxious philosophical debater isn’t an obnoxious debater all the time – sometimes, he’s a dog owner, a father, a lawyer.

He’s always obnoxious, but that’s another matter.

When these people start on their historical research projects, or launch into a debate, they’re adopting a persona – the historian of philosophy, the master debater. Likewise, the developer of philosophical concepts adopts a persona too, the philosopher.

Philosophy, says Deleuze, creates a particular kind of persona, though. A feedback loop starts to develop between the philosopher and her concepts. Immanuel Kant the professor and long-distance power-walker were ordinary personae. But philosophically, the concepts Kant later developed would influence his own thinking.

Not necessarily like an inference early in an argument or a logical proof would influence a later conclusion. When you develop a framework for thought, you begin to use that framework in your own thinking, analyzing its details by developing new aspects and applications.

Maybe you begin to see your own framework for thought through that framework itself. Maybe the wider application brings new additions and complexities to the simpler way of thinking that began the whole enterprise.

Example. The average philosophical reader in the 1780s and 90s couldn’t have foreseen a work like the Critique of Judgment coming based on the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant couldn’t either.

But thinking from the new perspective Kant developed, he wasn’t an ordinary philosopher anymore. He’d become the first Kantian too. Think on that for a day (or two).

Creative Energy I: The Problem With Philosophy, A History Boy, 06/12/2017

I’m getting back on my wander through What Is Philosophy? with a few of his difficult ideas. Gilles Deleuze’s approach to philosophical thinking showed me what I thought was the best way to deal with the whole tradition.*

Like looking for pictures in the clouds. I can see a pattern of light
that suggests Deleuze's face, as water flows over two rocks at the
centre of the frame, by the bottom edge.

* Traditions. Only one thing bugs me about Deleuze, that he makes philosophy itself a Western creation. Western philosophy is one tradition of a general feature of human society that develops anything you could call a tradition of wisdom. Creating frameworks for understanding the world is much more fundamental to human thought than this one contingent Hellenic vector.
• • •
I felt like I had to get that note out of the way. It was bugging me all the way through reading this book. That was the biggest difference between when I first read What Is Philosophy? and when I read it again this Fall. 

A man develops a way of thinking about philosophy that makes it central to some peculiar essence in humanity itself – the wisdom that separates us from the animals. That makes us an order above the other animals.

One man, steeped in the left-wing politics and intellectual environment of a country coming to grips with the loss of its empire – the spectre of radical equality. He’s also a keen mathematician, a careful student of sciences that depend on calculus – he understood intimately how fundamental dynamic differentials were to reality. 

A pure materialist who understood how profoundly stupid that metaphor of the clockwork mechanism really was. One of the very few. So he roots humanity’s remarkable nature in our ability to develop frameworks of thinking self-consciously – we can build intellectual machines to change our instincts. That’s the power of philosophy!

One man, steeped in profound ethnic national
culture, with deep feelings of connection to land
and soil, as if it were in his blood, understands
his chosen field of thought, philosophy, in the
same way – mystic wisdom of a people who
speak with the voice of being itself, revealing
its nature through the prophecies of a sage. A
sage we now call philosophers. This, he
thought, it what makes us an order above the
animals.
Deleuze's dark and terrifying mirror.

Yet it begins in Hellenic Greece. Like we wouldn’t have been doing that for the hundreds of thousands of years it took us to diverge from all the other hominids. 
• • •
There’s such a strange paradox that I see in philosophy. Maybe it’s just from my own experience, which is unlike anyone else’s. Maybe my experience is more typical. I’d like to know whether I’m on to something when I say this.

Side A. Here’s my experience of philosophy as it tends to be taught. You analyze texts to understand their arguments, you critique that argument using the different rules of reasoning. Has Descartes made a good argument that we cannot trust our senses?

Side B. The key works in the history of any tradition in philosophy are not always all that concerned with point by point rebuttals back and forth. But it’s very tough to get to the intensity of thought where you’ve built such a profound conceptual mechanism that you influence the character of your whole culture’s thought for centuries after.

Too many higher education programs teach philosophy as if it were training in argumentation. Now, that’s important, but it shouldn’t be taught as the primary skill, as the essence of the discipline.

The problem is that when you hear the professionals talking philosophy – the professors, grad students, nerdy upper-levels – they’re all arguing. It’s professional, it’s clinical, it’s sometimes a little too cold, it’s expert, it’s insightful. But it’s all the back and forth of argument, critique, counter-argument.

We’re not doing what the people we talk about did. Next couple of posts this week, I want to work out some ideas about what we should do to fix that.

Lives Deprived of Flesh, Research Time, 25/07/2017

Yesterday, I wrote about an article I’m working on to be published at the Reply Collective. It’s a rather complex study of what philosophical creativity is. It includes an analysis of Rebecca Tuvel’s article on the possibility of transracial human existence.

I read the article, and I didn’t actually think it was very good. I think Tuvel had the right to write the article, contrary to a lot of the more intense opposition to her work. See, Tuvel’s critics made the mistake of thinking that her goal was ever to write anything at all about real transgender people’s experiences.

Tuvel’s article doesn’t ever discuss real experiences, and if her approach there accurately reflects all her work, she never does. She practices an entirely abstract conceptual analysis.

Would you trust anyone who had a simple, clear answer for everything?
That kind of person is usually a con-man, whether he's wearing a
plaid leisure suit or a televangelist's perfect makeup.

She contrasts and analyzes a series of abstract arguments from principles and claims. These arguments are about what it would take to change genders and races. They have nothing to do with the actual experience of real transgender people – if they did, their ideas would be nowhere so clean, orderly, and simple.

Too much of contemporary philosophy mistakes this simplicity and clarity for a superior way of understanding the world because it’s so simple and clear. But the world isn’t easy – it’s a messy, difficult, painful place, and the truths of lived experience are hard to understand in all their curving, multifaceted dimensions.

Any conclusion that you come to easily, you should suspect. Just as you’d suspect a salesman whose pitch is too slick.

When I read Milton Friedman, I feel the same way.

Hell of a record scratch right there. But I see the same kind of reliance on the ease of abstract arguments, turning away from real complexities that would make your conclusions more difficult to hold. A philosophy informed entirely by the most simple, abstract arguments is completely inadequate to understanding any exceptions.

Here’s an example from Capitalism and Freedom that makes for a wonderful illustration of Friedman’s over-abstraction. It’s part of a larger argument about how education should work, and how people’s preferences for their children’s futures affect educational outcomes.

His writing on monetary policy and the role of
currency in national economies is genuinely
enlightening. When he stays in the boundaries of
his scientific discipline, Milton Friedman is a
remarkably insightful thinker.

Friedman considers why wealthy people have fewer children than poor people. His reasons are – what’s the word? – kind of ridiculous. He says that a central reason why wealthy people have fewer children than poor people is because the advanced education that wealthy people often receive is more expensive and requires greater investment.

Poor people, meanwhile, have more children because their education will be paltry. Poor people, after all, will only ever do simple work like manual labour or front-line service work. Since they don’t need as much education and training as the children of wealthy families who become doctors, engineers, and Ivy League university professors, poor families can produce more children at lower cost.

Yes, this is what he says. Capitalism and Freedom, chapter six, pages 86-7 of my edition. This is seriously Friedman’s argument in one of his most popular books. How on Earth did a man who would put this argument to paper win a Nobel Prize?

He abstracts away from the real, complex situation of actual families to focus specifically on his arguments for how to improve America’s education system. In doing so, he turns away from letting messy reality disprove his most infamous premise – that all people act optimally rational all the time and that all families are precisely planned.

Turning away from real complexity toward the simplicity and ease of an abstract argument makes your thoughts into lies of distortion. The simplicity of Friedman’s abstraction in this example erases the real injustices of education access and family planning capacities across wealth levels.

The simplicity of Tuvel’s abstraction in her paper this Spring erases the real injustice and suffering that transgender people face. Worse, it implicitly equates them with the deranged saviour complex of America’s most famous self-alleged transracial person.

The imperative to “Keep it simple, stupid!” does not always apply.

Free Speech Martyrs in History I: The Greek, Research Time, 08/02/2017

So what are the justifications of free speech, when you go back to John Stuart Mill himself?

You can start with the standard Mill that everybody gets in their undergrad classes. Freedom of opinion and its expression, even and especially when it’s unpopular, is necessary for a functional society for the following three reasons.

We learn about the heroes and martyrs of freedom and justice as if
freedom and justice were the same. While they go together, and each is
the condition of the other's possibility, they aren't the same. Here's
Nelson Mandela, one of the world's most famous rebels against
injustice.

1) Some opinion contrary to the popular belief is actually the truth, and can correct a mistaken mainstream.

2) Some opinion contrary to the popular belief is false and the mainstream is true, but the challenge of those contrary ideas is needed to keep a popular truth from calcifying into an oppressive dogma.

3) Both the popular opinion and its challenger are true, and no one understands either well enough to see how they properly complement each other. But with enough work, determination, and hard public thought, the two sides of the issues can reach a new perspective where their alliance becomes natural.

Already, I’ve gone beyond the usual account of Mill’s justification of freedom of opinion. The textbooks* rarely go beyond Reason One: Some minority beliefs will turn out to be true after all.

* I really do think that humanities textbooks – the collections of excerpts and short essays, not the actual full books – are written under the presumption that students are stupid. This is why I never used a textbook in any low-level classes where I could make that call.

So this is the popular mainstream opinion about what Mill had to say about freedom of opinion. And it’s a pretty accurate view of the general popular dogma about freedom of opinion – don’t oppress my opinion, because it might turn out that you’re wrong, I’m right, and I’m entitled to my opinion anyway.

This is Kim Dae Jung in the 1970s, at a rally speaking against South
Korea's dictator Park Chung Hee. Kim spent his life as a crusader for
democracy in Korea, and went from serving several years as a
political prisoner to serving a five year term as President of the
Republic of Korea.

Except you aren’t entitled to it. Because only a few pages after going through these three reasons for freedom of opinion, Mill describes how you aren’t entitled to your opinion. It’s because every opinion should be open to critique, not just from other arguments and analyses, but from real facts that could disprove your opinion.

You’re free to form your own opinion, but you aren’t entitled never to have that opinion challenged or critiqued. That goes for mainstream popular opinion, and the opinions of isolated cranks and rebels.

But Mill is more often treated as a resource and a justification to shut down any oppression of opinion. On Liberty is, in many ways, an argument against silencing opinions. And there are many reasons why opinions can be silenced.

Mill lived in the 19th century, after all. There were plenty of dictatorships kicking around 1850s Europe – they were monarchies, but had either openly absolutist rulers or powerless parliaments. And there were plenty of oppressive theological disputes throughout Europe too.

So there were plenty of institutions and governments who were oppressing plenty of ostensibly free opinions. With all that in mind, who’s the first example Mill cites at length of a society harmed by the suppression of opinions critical to the mainstream?

A historically accurate depiction of Socrates.

The death of Socrates, the foundational story of Western philosophy. Mill depicts Socrates as the man who would have been a personal founder of a Greek Enlightenment, if the Athenian assembly hadn’t executed him for sedition against popular dogma.

The image of Socrates in the narratives of Plato – and the image that inspired the entire Western philosophical tradition – is the challenger of unquestioned dogma. And that dogma was false, or at least so simple as to become flimsy as moist tissue.

The least question could knock away the foundations of popular Greek moral dogmas. All it took was one reasonably insightful persistent critic – someone who wouldn’t give up pressing for deeper conceptions of what was taken for granted.

Socrates was a martyr for freedom of opinion in Mill’s telling. But look at the content of what he said and did. Socrates’ demand was that his society justify their moral beliefs – don’t just believe dogma because it’s given to you, because dogmatic belief leads to injustice. He was an advocate to build a more just, fair, enlightened society.

Which is different from freedom. Which is truth. . . . To be continued

How Hard It Is to Know What You’re Talking About, Composing, 12/05/2016

Back in my academy days, I used to have some really frustrating conversations with other philosophers. In short form, we always used to talk past one another. 

I would use a word one way, and my conversation partner would be used to it meaning something different. We’d get into this ridiculous argument where each of us thinks the other is completely out to lunch. 

Sometimes philosophical arguments end up as intense as
a Klingon bat'leth battle to the death. Then we all have a
laugh about it and have made a bunch of new friends.

One of these conversations was once actually over the meaning of the expression “talking past one another.” And yet the actors I work with keep asking me where I learned to write comedy dialogue so well. Girlfriend, you don’t know shit.

We’re all well-informed intelligent people. So why do we end up in these stupidly counter-productive conversations? I think the answer lies in the nature of disciplines. Every knowledge tradition has its own specialized vocabulary. 

In those vocabs, words that are easily understood in everyday conversations often take on specialized technical meanings. And each disciplinary community is its own diverging path, so the technical meanings of a common word in one community might end up being wildly different than the technical meanings of the same word in another group.

That’s a perfect recipe for misunderstanding, frustration, and the slow-burning resentment of mutual hostility. 

Fairly frequently, I’d find that the most intense and entrenched quarrelling camps in different sub-disciplines of academic philosophy came down to these conflicts of definition. No one in either camp could get to a point of critical distance from their own debates to realize that they were talking about different processes with the same words. 

I feel like philosophy in the universities would be a lot more productive if more people realized that you weren’t supposed to argue over the precise meanings of each aphorism late-period Ludwig Wittgenstein said. You were supposed to read Philosophical Investigations like a guidebook on argumentation styles to avoid.

Wittgenstein is another thinker who I think
people take the wrong messages from.
There's an enormous number of academic
books and articles arguing over the precise
meanings and implications of his work, and
whether his various ideas are right or wrong.
But he wrote guides on how to recognize
whether a problem is real or a result of
confusion. The real dispute comes over
which of those guidelines you think should
apply when.

I discuss one example of these disciplinary wars over nothing for a moment in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. Short version. It’s part of a discussion of very primordial forms of subjectivity. The kinds of perception that single-celled organisms do. 

There's a dispute in philosophy of mind over the nature of cognition, between those who think it’s about forming linguistic propositions and those who think it’s about practical action in the world. Following Manuel DeLanda’s really quite insightful distinction that not enough people take seriously, this dispute comes down to no real difference.

One talks about how to create signification, semantic meaning. One talks about how to create significance in the world, practical value. They’re entirely different processes, but these academics think they have conflicting views of the same process because they call the topic of their study ‘cognition.’ 

I close the argument with a joke that I probably think is a lot funnier than it really is, about two groups of people talking past each other. 

“It’s as if a group of silver miners walked into an office full of statisticians at Google, to tell them they’ll never discover the data they’re mining without proper drilling equipment, while the data miners are incredulous that the silver miners achieve anything without programming skills.”

As I read back through Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity to prepare for my panel on it in Calgary at the end of the month, I’m noticing some of my own argument techniques more explicitly than I used to. And this is a style I use quite a lot. 

Deflating an intense dispute within a discipline by showing that it’s based on a category mistake. That there isn’t really a substantive difference between the two (or more) sides. Just a different set of definitions, people using the same words to refer to different problems and processes, then getting into fights when they talk to each other. 

Or rather, talk past each other. Another thing I noticed over the years is that none of these critiques ever go over that well. And discussions in philosophy can get very intense and heated. But we usually all make up and have a beer afterward. Nobody takes it personally.

Except when I make one of these fundamental criticisms. Saying that the basic foundations of a disciplinary dispute are based on a very simple misunderstanding, and that realizing this makes your debate fade away into utter meaninglessness or trivia?

That seems to upset people quite a bit.

A Real Spectre II: Spiralling Writing, Composing, 09/09/2015

Continued from last post . . . So where do these ghosts of Marx come from? Well, I only just started reading Spectres of Marx, so I can't exactly tell you that. As of when I'm writing this post's draft, Jacques Derrida is only just introducing an analogy to Shakespeare's Hamlet to describe the concept of being haunted.

Pictured: The inescapable, unfulfillable obligation
of memory: the ghost, spectre, haunting.

I've skimmed throughout the book, so I know that he comes back to this narrative of Hamlet's relationship with the ghost of his father the king many times throughout the book. It'll illustrate some other aspect of how a set of ideas can haunt a society each time it comes up.

This is basically how Derrida writes. And I think it's the foundation of why people, particularly in philosophy, think he's confusing. It's been called meditative writing. I give it a more descriptive name of writing in a spiral.

Most of the time, when you've taken philosophy courses, or been introduced to philosophy some other way, you learn that it's written as arguments. We're all familiar with the argumentative essay.

You state a thesis, then assemble a series of premises and inferences. You infer further propositions from your premises, and infer more propositions down the chain, until your essay ends with an inference to your thesis.

For a book-length work, four or five premises will sometimes interact in different ways throughout a complicated argument. And you might have more than one thesis. But the process is basically the same. It moves in a straight pattern of steps from premises through inferences to conclusions.

Spiralling writing works a little differently. It's less about proving a thesis and more about understanding a concept. So you have your basic idea at the beginning when you introduce it. But it's hazy, unspecific, difficult, or opaque. So you move forward by explaining the idea.

This Friday, I'm doing an interview with KZYX radio in California to promote Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, and I might talk about how I use this spiralling technique in my own philosophy writing. The book is about a few different concepts, so here's a rough guide to how one spiral runs there.

A central concept is a half-neglected idea in North American environmental philosophy, the intrinsic value of nature. I introduce the idea in that context, particularly focussing on how it was developed by its most profound advocate, Arne Næss. I also talk about how it was criticized by the academic establishment, why those critiques were so successful in marginalizing the idea in the discipline.

Then I describe how this idea of the intrinsic value of nature can work, which is by distinguishing ethics from morality. The words are usually interchangeable in the academic discipline, but some members of the tradition distinguish them. Benedict Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze.

Morality is, in this explanation, about the rules and laws through which a society governs its social behaviour. Morality is a source of authority. Ethics would be about identity, who you are and what that who is. The intrinsic value of nature doesn't make sense as a moral principle, but it does make sense as an ethical principle.

You're literally meditating on a concept, thinking it through, and making a story of how you think it through.

Begin with an idea. Introduce it. Examine a problem that the idea stumbles into, given what we understand of it as it's been introduced. Figure out a solution to that problem. Explore how that solution changes how we understand that idea. The introductory version is still part of how we understand the idea. But we also have this more comprehensive understanding: we now know more of what the idea can do.

This is how meditative writing works, clarifying piece by piece a big, complicated concept. So how do I see this spiralling or meditative writing in Derrida? He was a main developer of the technique, so how is it most effective? To be continued . . .

Why Exactly Are We Having This Argument Anyway? Research Time, 08/08/2014

A still from In Plane Sight, a landmark 9/11 conspiracy
documentary. One of my ideas for argumentation theory is
a deflationary paper: If the goal of rational argument is to
construct a position that cannot be denied, then the
conspiracy theory is the prime case. Any reason you raise
against believing in the conspiracy can be dismissed on the
ground that it is a product of the conspirators to distract
from their plans. If it is irrational to believe falsehoods,
then you are irrational to believe the lie that Al Qaeda
destroyed the WTC. The conspiracist would dismiss your
dismissal of conspiracy thinking as inherently irrational as
itself irrational on the same ground: your conception of
rationality is flawed because you believe the falsehood that
the conspiracy is false. Airtight, isn't it?

I finished Michael Gilbert’s book, Coalescent Argumentation, last night. As I’ve said in earlier posts where I’ve described my reactions to his ideas, argumentation and disagreement have long been side interests to me. I have published one essay in argumentation theory, broadly speaking, but the subject is, disciplinarily speaking, so far outside my major areas of focus that I probably won’t publish specifically in it again.

But I do have a few thoughts on Gilbert’s ideas that I think are worth airing. One is that I rarely read books whose authors are so firmly set in the academic world. This is just a trivial observation philosophically, but one with a little more bite in the context of the politics of post-secondary education. Right now, I’m in the process of revising my Collective Vision statement for the SERRC, a short essay that’s getting a complete overhaul to become something of a manifesto for what I hope is a growing movement, in which I would like to play a healthy role over the next years, to liberate critical knowledge producers in the humanities disciplines from an increasingly compromised university system. 

In this context, I find Gilbert’s book, originally written in 1997, to be quite naïve in many ways. For one, a plurality of his examples of arguments are in university settings: faculty members of different ranks and job securities discussing affirmative action, students disputing grades. It reminds me of the essays I’ve read, written since philosophy was institutionalized in universities, that when referring to a raw experience in the authors' daily lives, often describe the inert clutter that they stare at on their desks. It speaks to an insularity of one’s life that can separate your thinking, often against your own desires, from the ability to engage with the world.

Gilbert’s take on argumentation theory makes for a brilliant example of this hopeful but hopeless naïveté. He explicitly pitches his framework for a theory of coalescent argumentation as a way for the theory of argument to engage with and reflect the ways that people actually argue in real life. He identifies four modes of argument: the rational/logical (giving reasons and drawing conclusions based on the implication laws and theorems of formal logic), emotional, visceral (making statements, premises, and conclusions using gestures and other non-verbal signals), and what he calls, in a neologism, kisceral (intuitions, hunches, and gut feelings). This framework is a tool to analyze how people act in different moves of real-life arguments. Its analysis aims to identify the goals of people in a dispute and eventually bring or guide them to agreement.

He opposes this to what he called the Critical-Logical school of argumentation, which focusses only on those elements of disputes which are traditionally taken to be rational. Argumentation is understood as essentially antagonistic, and the goal of arguers is to defeat their opponent and in so doing demonstrate the rational superiority of their position. The Critical-Logical school is also the style of argumentation that produces jackasses. 

This is the form of argumentation and informal logic that, despite the attempted impact of Gilbert’s work, remains the dominant form of teaching informal logic and philosophical argument in the discipline’s undergraduate university programs. Despite Gilbert’s hopes to transform argumentation theory, his ideas remain trapped in the place of an outsider.

This is a shame in an even greater sense, because Gilbert, like many theorists of argumentation that I’ve encountered over the years, expresses a deep social and political hope in their sub-discipline. He believes that the study of argument and education in argumentation can actually aid the resolution of disputes and prevent the escalation of violence in conflict. 

I have heard and read proponents of traditional Critical-Logical argumentation theory similarly express that their goal is to help people express their conflicts more rationally. This is why they stress the verbalization of all premises and contexts for an argument, and decry emotional and instinctive appeals and moves. Gilbert pitches his argumentation theory as a way to teach people how to come to agreement in apparently intractable conflicts. The Critical-Logical perspective would be immediately prescriptive about argument, instructing us from the start on what makes a proper argument. Gilbert's coalescence concept is ultimately normative as well, because it is a means to settle disputes. But he takes there to be far more descriptive work to be done to understand all the facets of how arguments develop and unfold. 

These are all, from their various perspectives, profoundly admirable goals. But I still have doubts about whether the broad political goals of argumentation theory can be applied wholesale to the conflicts of the world at personal, community, national, and global scales. Call it my lack of faith in the naïve hopes of a university town.

Institutionalized Sophistry, Jamming, 21/07/2014

I think a reason most ancient Greek sophists could get away
with such cheap rhetorical tricks in their city assemblies is
because democratic political culture of this sort hadn't yet
developed a worldly sense of cynicism in the West. So
people were more easily bamboozled.

In terms of individual page views, this post from last July is still my most popular. I even noticed that, with no help from my own social media feeds, it experienced a sudden surge in page views this May. It’s about a terrible problem that philosophy departments and programs face because they tend to attract a particular type of undergraduate student. If you’ve hung out in a philosophy student society long enough, you’ll see them: they’re combative, arrogant, finding any excuse to argue with people. They are precisely the people that drive a lot of women and generally kind people out of studying philosophy, and most of them will feel good about having done so.

Having spent most of my twenties encountering such people, I became thoroughly tired of them by the time I began my doctorate in philosophy. Whenever I encountered such confrontational and argumentative people in the classes I taught, I quickly shut them down with the two weapons against which they can’t defend, a smile and an open mind. I even encountered the occasional philosophy professor whose confrontational attitudes had survived his (and it was always a man) impetuous youth. 

I mention this dislike of the undergraduate sophist that philosophy departments tend to produce now and then because of a curious comment in Michael Gilbert’s Coalescent Argumentation that demonstrates how correct my old professor David Hitchcock was when he said I’d like that book.

Gilbert describes just the same attitude of argumentative hostility that I just have, but identifies it specifically as arising in critical reasoning classes. These classes are the bread and butter of most philosophy departments in universities that allocate budgets according to course enrolment numbers. They’re relatively simple courses as well, which focus simply on the rules and techniques for examining and analyzing arguments, the composition and relation of premises to conclusions in day-to-day argumentation.

But critical reasoning as it's typically taught tends to forge or reinforce the aggressive argumentative habits that drive more reasonable people away from philosophy classes. One analyzes an argument, in the typical critical reasoning class, to find its flaws and mistakes. You analyze an argument not to see how it functions, what its aims are, and why it's being made when it is, but only to discover what's wrong with it. More than this, such antagonistic argument is sometimes described as being fun. Most people who have spent any time hanging out with enthusiastic young male philosophy undergraduate students will usually have experienced one person who takes unnecessarily aggressive stands in favour of arguments he (and it is always he) doesn't even really believe in, just to be devil's advocate. Gilbert critiques this model insofar as it reduces all critical thinking to a kind of nihilistic cynicism that's more interested in tearing down what someone else has built than building in your own right.

There's another problem that the book diagnoses in critical reasoning. Critical reasoning classes are themselves often perceived as bird courses, which is really a shame because their basic task — identifying the formal structure of arguments in everyday discourse — can be enormously difficult. When I took elementary logic and reasoning courses in my own undergraduate years, I found these tasks most difficult. You had to cut through a lot of extra material — appeals to emotion, social and political context, the particular relationships of the individuals making the argument — to identify each particular formal element in each person’s argument for his case and the logical rules by which the argument transitioned from one such element to the next.

Gilbert’s idea for reform of critical reasoning would have made this procedure easier in one sense and more difficult in others. One of the concerns of Coalescent Argumentation is to reform critical reasoning classes to make them more practically useful. You don’t understand how an argument actually functions in the world when you strip away all those contextual elements to grasp its essence as its skeletal logical structure. So Gilbert brings the resources of argumentation theory and related academic discourses to analyze both the logical skeletons and the operative political, social, and personal flesh of an argument. As he says in the title of chapter three, his focus is just as much on the arguers as the arguments.

This, however, does make critical reasoning analyses more difficult because you now not only have to extract and analyze the framework of that logical skeleton, but understand as well all the functions and relations of the contextual elements that is physically making that argument in the world. 

Well, philosophy is hard, and so is life.

I’d Like to Have an Argument Please, A History Boy, 18/07/2014

Because I’m a really huge nerd, I’ve been reading an argumentation book for fun. When I was an undergraduate in philosophy, I actually had no idea this sub-discipline of argumentation theory existed. It’s one of the unfortunate parts of the fact that very few people can specialize in everything in a discipline anymore.* When I got to McMaster, I did discover argumentation theory, and found it quite fascinating. One of the department’s professors, Dr Hitchcock, was a specialist in argumentation theory, and my colleague Young Breezy in the PhD program was raised on theory of argument and informal logic in his undergraduate years at University of Windsor. 

* If I was still on a career path in academia, I would have liked to become one of those people who had his specializations, but knew a little of the basics of every field, enough to point an inquiring student in the direction of the major works. I still plan on writing and publishing philosophy independently of the university system, so maybe I still can.

When I did discover argumentation theory, I thought it had a lot of potential for explorations in meta-philosophy. If philosophical discourse consisted of arguments, then the study of argument structure would double as the study of philosophical discourse.

"An argument is a connected series of statements intended
to establish a proposition."
"No, it isn't."

So I found it a little sad that most of the argumentation theory that I read tended to be mostly about colloquial arguing. The meta-philosophical angle was rarely addressed except in asides and quips. I did assemble a paper on disagreement theory that eventually found a home in a young journal of argumentation and epistemology called Cogency, that’s published out of Universidad Diego Portales in Chile. It was an implicitly meta-philosophical paper about the idea that reason itself comes in many forms.

And that little paper received quite a lot of negative peer reviews in my initial attempts to publish it, even though, predictably, I was never able to follow their advice because my different peer reviewers (even for the same journal) gave mutually contradictory feedback. One said my paper wasn’t worth publishing because the notion that there are different types and frameworks of reasoning and reason was actually pretty obvious. Another said that my idea was ridiculous and immature, because the fact that people can mutually understand each other at all demonstrates that reason is entirely univocal and any attempt to describe it as plural misunderstood what argument was.

But today, I’m reading, for my fun book, Coalescent Argumentation by Michael Gilbert. It originally dropped in 1997, and Dr Hitchcock recommended it as a strong book in the kind of argumentation theory that I would enjoy. I had often spoken with my colleagues about how displeased I was with the confrontational form of argument that tends to dominate academic philosophical discourse: the notion that critique consists in attack. 

To me, a philosophical idea first exists as a hazy notion, and the purpose of criticism is to let the idea go to work, see what it can do in thought and what its implications are for action. Subjecting a tentative hypothesis or notion to aggressive critical attack, searching for its flaws as if it were a fully-fleshed out concept from the start, only nips creativity before it even has the chance to establish itself. I was interested in finding models of argument that approached the subject with a little more nuance. Dr Hitchcock assured me that Gilbert’s book was the most fruitful for my meta-philosophical discourse about discourse. 

I only started it recently, but I do enjoy one key idea. Gilbert describes the example of two academics. Smith writes a complicated 500 page book. Jones writes a review of the book, summarizing and attacking its ideas in about 2000 words. Smith explains that Jones has completely misunderstood her. Summarizing a large book in a couple of thousand words and expecting your attacks on this summary to stick isn’t solid philosophical analysis or even charitable engagement. 

We don’t need to be precise in what we say (because we so rarely are) to be understood (as we so often are), even though the bulk of argumentation theory tends to believe that precision of necessary for comprehension. I’m only at the beginning of the book, so I’m not sure where Gilbert ultimately takes this. But I consider it a promising start.