Hi Dave,
Matt said:
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.
DMB said:
To say that accusations cause mistrust is a little like saying that
arrests cause crime. I mean, if the accusation is not unfounded, then
it is the straw-man maker that has destroyed trust. It's not
accusations of evasion that causes mistrust, it's the evasive
weasel-wordy behavior that destroys trust. These tactics are not part
of an honest or sincere conversation and I sincerely believe that it is
wrong NOT to complain about them.
Matt:
If you are replying the above as in opposition to what I said (just
there or more broadly to my earlier description of how trust
functions), then I think you grabbed what I was saying by the wrong
handle. I was not attempting to reduce the creation of mistrust to
accusers, nor--more broadly--polemically enter into current debates
about who's done what to whom. In this passage, my writing was
intended to convey that I had ratcheted down my purview from
describing how trust functions to the more narrow maintenance of
trust in practical conversations, specifically one's I've had experience
in. I have nothing but my own experience in conversations to
suggest that attributions of straw-man fallacies usually precipitate
the end of good, honest discussions. And that partly because, as
you correctly perceive, if one has already decided that it is
appropriate, the evasive, weasel-wordy behavior has already
destroyed the trust between you and your main interlocutor, and
you are trying to register to your audience ("for the record," as it
were) why the discussion has ceased, from your point of view, to be
honest and worthy of your attention.
That being said, my "I still can't but think" reticence about straw-men
fallacies comes from that fact that if they are premature, they raise
the emotional stakes, as people don't like being accused of
dishonesty. It's hard for a conversation to recover from that. The
implied context I was thinking of was the MD, and as an on-going
discussion, I'm thinking of the behavioral-social rules of thumb that
would best lead to its maintenance.
I agree that it would be wrong not to complain about dishonesty and
insincerity. The maintenance of truth has a hard time recovering if
that is not done. But I'm also worried about prematureness in
complaint, as there are bells you can't unring. Because we are
fallible creatures, and because I have the maintenance good social
relationships at the forefront of my attention, I commend delicacy
more often than I do brutal sincerity. As I said in the opening post,
"Having an 'honest debate' does not mean saying what you sincerely
think and feel at every stage of the discussion." The "at every stage"
caveat is important, and I said the whole bit because "Inquiry is
_fundamentally_ held together by social relationships. To not take
your relationship with your interlocutors seriously is one way to
breed mistrust." _One way_. I consider _premature_ accusations
one of these ways. If you are too consistently premature, if you too
often jump to what in the end prove to be unwarranted conclusions,
then people won't trust in general your conclusions, and take your
accusations to be like "crying wolf." Another way to destroy trust,
of course however, is to be a wolf.
I don't want to be misunderstood here: social rules are different
from management of truth. There are wolves, and they should be
called out as truly such. But because statements of truth happen
within social relationships, there must be some sensitivity to the
social (if and only if one is concerned with maintaining it, of
course). The social situation you sketched out in your reply is too
simple (primarily from the clause "it's not accusations of evasion
that causes mistrust"): it seems to imply that each person is their
own judge and executioner. You see a crime, you execute
punishment. But that is not the social situation I see as actually
working, and I want to sketch something closer to our actual legal
situation, which between cop-judger/accuser and execution of
sentence, there intervenes lawyers, judges, juries, and
courtrooms. The analogy is far from perfect, and that because
real life maintenance of the social sphere represented by the
courtroom in the analogy is _far_ more complex.
In this discussion of trust, I officially have no view of any of the
particular battles and social relationships going on right now (I
think you may have implied that I've intimated a view, or
perhaps that I should (in your "apoplectic" comment)). I am
attempting to speak philosophically, which means the force of
what I'm saying goes for everyone and is not polemically wielded
at any particular one. My philosophical views are of course
informed by my actual experiences, but they are abstracted away
from currently in order to talk about conceptual dynamics alone
(e.g., "inquiry is fundamentally social") before moving back down
to particular pieces of commendation (e.g., "I would suggest not
even using the straw-man fallacy in the MD"). In this discussion of
trust, I trust that everyone wants to be both honest and maintain
themselves as trustworthy, and thereby makes their decisions
about when to risk prematureness in honor of truth based on their
own assessments of particular situations. It is because we _have_
to trust each other to do those things that I commended "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."
Matt
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