Re: noodling request: Faustian bargains

On Mon, 25 Jun 2007 13:23:15 -0700, David Friedman
<ddfr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You're just talking, ferchrissakes, why is there this overwhelming
need to "win an argument"?

It isn't about winning an argument but about determining what things are
true, what positions are defensible--the whole process of using more
than one brain to understand the world.
<snip>
From my standpoint, if I don't have reasons for my opinion, there is no
reason anyone else should be interested in it, so I might as well save
both of us time and trouble by not expressing it. If I do have reasons,
I ought to be willing to offer them. Conversation isn't, for me, about
stating my conclusions and expecting other people to nod their heads
politely and state their conclusions on some other subject--what would
be the point? It's about discussing ideas, beliefs, facts--which
includes thinking about evidence, implications, internal consistency,
and all that stuff.

....except that when you "state your conclusions", those other people
might nod their heads politely and then state THEIR conclusions... NOT
on some other subject, but on the subject under discussion. You are
not obliged to accept their conclusions, any more than they are
expected to accept yours - but you are also not entitled to cross
examine them on theirs, in the context of the conversation. Some
opinions are based on fact, some on faith, others on strange and
indeterminate mixtures of both. The conversation in question is not
about specific chemical reactions (in which case you can successfully
"defend" your opinion, because it isn't so much opinion as statement
of fact in that there's only one way such a reaction can really
happen). It's about the real world - the mutable, changeable,
ever-different-for-every-observer real world. A "defense" of an
opinion in such circumstances is pointless because the parameters of
the defender and "Attacker" can be so radically different to begin
with. You can squabble, you can argue passionately, you can roar and
scream or icily ignore - but one thing you cannot do, in a
conversation about opnions, is to ask your conversation partner to
"defend" their opinion. Several things can result from such a demand.
Your partner will defend the opinon in terms which you don't
understand or don't wish to understand or to accept, in which case the
two of you start out talking at cross purposes and never actually meet
on any conversational ground at all; the conversation partner can
decline to take the conversation further, in whcih case you declare
"victory" because you, so to speak, had the last word (at least in
your own view), although your partner's reasons might have simply been
a realisation that there is no point in further exchange on the
subject because at least one of the parties is intransigent on a
subject and will respond to any and every statement by the other party
with a sentence that starts with "But..." and ends with a slew of
reasons which often make no sense outside the utterrer's own
worldview; or a heated argument can result in which tempers are lost,
insults fly, and a good deal of societal damage is done for no real
reason whatsoever.

And I think you in particular have direct experience in all of teh
above.

My position is that we can have a conversation, but I refuse to have
an argument. After a certain point, I'll just bow out - not because
you "won" or I "lost" but because it isn't about winning or losing and
I'm out to save my own sanity.

That's all.

A.
.

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