Sorry to hear that Matt ... I have no taste for dog-fights ever, but I thought your "efforts" were still making progress ... I must concentrate more closely.
In which case - if I may divert the thread further - without naming names, I too have had a number (tens) of threads (here, on my blog, even in the day job, and often continued in private e-mail) over the past years, and a couple quite recently that end in abuse and accusations of insincerity / disingenuousness against me too. As someone passionate about what real knowledge is - and passionately honest with it - that kind of accusation naturally cuts to the quick and agitates my thinking, to the exclusion of much else. I need to get a life ;-) It was interesting for me to see DMB vs Matt progressing - as an example case - because I think it is a very important aspect of how "quality" does or doesn't make progress - which is of course why you started the thread. If we can de-personalise the debate for a while ... the pattern I see is this ... Firstly dialogue / conversation / narrative / anecdote / rhetoric / irony (but not sarcsam) are all essential to debate and argumentation - it's not all logical dialectic. Part of that is building a foundation, a stock, of general inter-personal understanding, confidence and trust, against which "critical rationale" can be judged (ie valued). If all anyone ever does is disagree with you, then their criticism is water of a duck's back - without value or quality - unless of course that criticism is a personal accusation of any kind of dishonesty, in which case all bets are off. When two or more intelligent and committed people argue, violent-disagreement and violent-agreement are very close cousins - often a large measure of agreement but "lack of" agreement over some subtle (but naturally very important) distinction. Finding and understanding those subtleties to narrow them and find further agreement, or real disagreement and/or changes of position / language is of course the nature of philosophical debate. In my experience two things happen. There is a lot of "talking past one another" around the subtleties, which paradoxically requires more conversation, so that the language can evolve on both sides. Unfortunately also what happens, is that often any further dialogue becomes meta-dialogue, dialogue about the basis of the debate, the objectives and motives of the participants, rather than the (very, very important) subtlety at issue - my weakness that one - witness this post for example. At that point, as soon as one accuses the other of splitting hairs, counting angels on the head of the pin, taking the piss, stalling, obfuscation, or descent into unintelligibility, the trust breaks down, and any subtle argument is totally doomed until that is restored. (a trivial personal example - Krim accused my AI point of being "too subtle" and therefore unintelligible just this last week) Again paradoxically, the only fix is more conversation ... but away from the contentious issue ... to recycle the whole process and re-stock the good will. Of course that whole loop may itself smack of "timewasting" and re-inforce the inter-personal deadlock. The solution is a strange loop, a cycle on another level, rather than another loop of the same. Like a round of drinks say, or a Hawkwind concert to use the local meme. Sincerely ;-) Ian (PS of course people like Platt who deliberately create conflict must be moderated - but I see none of that in the likes of Matt and DMB - just sincerely frustrated striving - to subtly misunderstood ends.) On Sun, Jun 8, 2008 at 1:12 PM, Matt Kundert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hi Ian, > > I'm sorry to disappoint, but DMB made it quite clear that he thinks I'm being > disingenuous when I converse with him and that I'm being a little > hypocritical with my whole "quality conversation" thing. Because our > conversations almost always devolve into cat-and-mouse, attack and defend > polemics that use far more ethos and pathos then logos, rather than continue > a pattern that neither one of us enjoys, I'm ceding the ground to him that > I'm a hypocrite and backing out of the low quality conversation. > > I don't have a taste for dog-fights anymore. I may have once, but not > anymore. Now I just want to talk about philosophy. Talk, not fight. > Arguments aren't fights, but somehow I always feel like I'm fighting when I > talk to DMB. I haven't wanted to fight with him in a long time. > > Matt > Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
