Hey Ian, Ian said: As I said in the other thread, by agreeing with Arlo aparently against me, you were actually dis-agreeing with his straw man, not me, that somehow I was suggesting we need to be some unconditional love-in - nothing could be further from the truth. Trust and respect have to be earned, and that starts by giving a little, getting inside the other person (not just saying you're doing it).
Matt: I think you inflated a little bit my meaning in saying, "I also think Arlo is right to think against Ian that love isn't the right thing to talk about." I can grant your intention to have meant "love" in the poetic sense I called nice for utopic formulas, and that Arlo may have misperceived that intention (I have no sense one way or the other)--I can grant both of those things, yet I still think that the word "love" is the wrong word to use to name the object I'm concerned with in this context. It seems your concerned with that same object, which makes us jointly concerned with the same set of consequences. I know you never meant a "love-in," but I think "love" is the wrong way to formulate the issue, under which you also stick "trust and respect." I wanted to say against that, that it does make a practical difference at times to distinguish trust and love, as you don't in this particular formula. I haven't articulated what practical differences and where they might occur, but it's a supposition I would maintain. Perhaps you have no particular truck with dubbing the object of this discussion "love" or "trust," and think this is a nit upon which nothing hangs. Even that being the case, rhetoric does matter, even if it isn't the rhetoric of covering insults with insincerities. Rhetoric matters sometimes to be able to see the right conceptual distinctions to make. Rhetoric matters for intellectual, as well as social, reasons. And it's the intellectual matter I'm concerned with in dubbing it "trust" against "love," though this is to bring into better view our social responsibilities. Might I also remind you of this passage from my post: "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." You have not done this. However, I find the attribution of a straw man a little disarming in this context. I would think a straw man is something built, and usually over time. Can we not get somebody wrong without thereby building a straw man? Perhaps Arlo has been attributing this wrong intention to you for some time (I again plead ignorance), in which case it makes sense for you to call it a straw man (if, of course, you've also spent time trying to correct him on this count, corrections gone unheeded) and to say that I accidentally followed into its conceptually scope makes sense. Granting all of that: I still can't help but think that attributions of the straw-man fallacy create more emotional hay than they do in helping clear the landscape of misapprehensions (excuse my mixed metaphors). Too many fires are lit from the remains, which just adds to our heat problem and obscures our vision. 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
