Ian said: ...the weasley rhetorical trick of the straw-man. Matt: >From the view point of observing others, commending virtues seems like the thing to do. "Be honest, temperate, courageous, sincere, compassionate, prudent, fair, reasonable," we say to our children. We _want_ virtuous behavior: but is commending it the best way of getting it from _yourself_?
Plato and Aristotle never understood the consequences of taking seriously Socrates, when he said that a person never _knowingly_ does evil. From the first-person point of view, _because_ we want to do good, we never in the moment of action perceive our actions as doing ill, as ignoble or not virtuous. Even if we are self-consciously acting in a manner that we ourselves would normally judge ignoble, that fact merely punches up the fact that we feel our current action falls outside this normality, that this abnormal situation calls for something else, that we are implicitly justified in our ignoble action, which implicitly thereby confers virtuousness to it. If we take Socrates seriously, and believe he's right, then the best way to think about _yourself_ and your actions, in order to be sure you're acting virtuously, is _not_ to make sure you're acting according to canons of virtuous action, but to _fear_ that you are acting according to canons of _ignoble action_. Always fear falling into _vice_ from the first-person point of view, and you'll more likely act virtuously (if not ipso facto). As far as intellectual behavior, one of the most important vices to avoid is _unfair characterization_. If you fear more than anything else the possibility that the view you think wrong is _a straw man_, and not a view anyone holds, you will spend more time making _sure_ that your characterization of what is wrong is given enough attention that an actual person finds it plausible. Only the ignoble, who we should spend no time upon at all (except to call them out as ignoble and not worth our intellectual time: _political_ time is something else), would knowingly deploy a straw man. It _is_ a weaselly rhetorical trick. What is difficult about conversation on the MD is that _only sometimes_ do people knowingly deploy straw men (and those times, I think, are few and far between, and almost all of those occasions are of parody and satirization or signs of having given up on real conversation). Almost everybody, nearly all the time, is sincere in believing that they are _not_ deploying a straw man. It is that sincerity on your interlocutor's part that makes conversation difficult when _you_ happen to think it _is_ a straw man, whatever the other person's sincerity. Straw men have nothing to do with sincerity. The trouble is that accusing others of _deploying one as a trick_ implies that they are knowingly being malicious, are being insincere. (Ian wasn't doing this because he wasn't explicitly accusing anybody of anything; I'm merely taking advantage of the form in which Ian brought up straw men.) But none of us do that. Having an "honest debate" does not mean saying what you sincerely think and feel at every stage of the discussion: it means trying as hard as possible to get inside the other person's point of view; it means trying as hard as _you_ can to avoid a straw man. You can't try for the other person, but you _can_ take care of yourself. Having an honest debate does not even mean coming to an agreement on what's being disagreed about. It only means that you are trying to avoid mischaracterization of your opponent. You have to _trust_ that your discussion partner is also doing that. The feeling of dishonesty that so many feel about others here is a function of mistrust. Trust is not a virtue. You should not do it indiscriminately. Trust is a social attitude, the primary attitude that holds together social relationships. Inquiry is _fundamentally_ held together by social relationships. To not take your relationship with your interlocutors seriously is one way to breed mistrust. This is why I think Arlo is right that the issue between Steve and Dave is between Steve and Dave, and that because we can itemize every relationship every person has from there. Just as in the real world, a person's other relationships can impinge on your relationship with that person, but it is always first between one and another. I also think Arlo is right to think against Ian that love isn't the right thing to talk about. Love is great to plug into our utopic formulas, but I think it misperceives the situation a bit, which can occasionally have great practical consequences, to think that "trust" and "love" can be assimilated or mutually implicating. (We call lovers who see their beloved trusting some other "jealous.") If you want an honest debate, you have to trust the other person. At the same time, however, you have to appear trustworthy. Are you doing enough to be trustworthy? 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/md/archives.html
