Taking Sides: Arguments With...

I reckon I could predict with 100% accuracy, your views on any given political or social issue (as you probably could mine, I concede) But isn`t that a shame?

Well, is it? And also, could he? What I think happens with arguments- between-opposites is that you tend to judge your opponents very broadly. So Troll looks at us and sees brainwashed PC lefties and we look and Troll and see a gibbering Littlejohn clone - subtleties in everyone's position are erased.

Whereas in arguments-between-similar nuances get more room to come out and the debate tends to rely less on just reciting long-held positions. ILE has lots of these sort of arguments and to an outsider they look like a 'cosy consensus'.

The problem though is that to get - by ballot-box at least - the kind of world 'we' want we have to change the minds of enough Trolls to vote it in, and vice versa. (Troll's position of course is that the former has already happened and the country has gone 'to the dogs'). So I suppose what I'm asking is - how can political debate (on a tiny level or a big one) become less knee-jerk?

BUT, 'I like a scrap' trolls have a point when one postulates a broad consensus that is wrong. But maybe all the lone voice can do in these circumstances is hope that history proves him/her right. Whatever that means.

One of the troll's interesting points was that he or she knew it was only a matter of time before someone called him a 'fascist'. The crude reduction in using such an emotive term is often intended to end debate rather than prolong it. Of course the troll was equally reducing other opinion's to some spurious left-liberal consensus. The lesson: I try (when I can) to remember that analytic insight comes not from confusing positions but distinguishing them; and so try not to, for example, assume that someone expressing strong opinions about the idea of 'Englishness', is also racist, sexist etc. (Aside: Is this is the kind of parallel drawing -- Oasis-fan = xenophobe -- that led Robin to over-react in his mailing-list eviction?)

I mean, isn't Troll just cosying up to the "new liberal consensus" by taking "fascist" to be an insult?

So love your enemies, because, like Caesar, you may well end up saying to your close friends, 'Et tu, Brute?'

The U.S. population is split about 50-50 pro- and anti-Darwin (or that's what I read once), but I think that the arguments among the less than 1% who actually engage in evolutionary biology will matter more than the "big" debates between the Darwinists and the anti- Darwinists (despite if the latter win Board of Ed elections every now and then).

What about positions that seem not to unite the same old allies?

Actually, it takes more than rhetoric to get your opinion out. Personally, I thrive on arguments with people that believe differently from me: how else can you keep a conversation going for more than 2 seconds? Understanding of an opponent's point of view is possible, even if you don't agree. It is the ability to foster understanding that separates us from the monkeys.

Well, that, and less body hair;>

Troll says it's "more stimulating" to "test your views" against an opposite - but I think generally it isn't, because what happens at best is a kind of intellectual chess game, with familiar gambits being used to block and counter-attack, and nothing new being said. And more usually what happens is name-calling. Whereas arguing with someone quite close to you means you have to explore the details and subtleties of what you're saying a lot more.

Frank K is right in that we're talking here about arguments in the abstract - do scientific arguments (his examples) work differently? My hunch as a 'layman' is yes.

I disagree somewhat with your account of Kuhn. It's not just that most "useful" disputes occur between those who broadly agree; the revolutionary changes in a science also emerge initially as disputes among people who broadly agree. And what they agree on is what constitutes the problems in the field, what models you use in going about solving a problem, and when a problem has been solved. That's what it means to share paradigms. What sets paradigm shift going is when (1) some problems are intransigently resistant to solution, (2) someone proposes a solution that sort of works for the problems, but (3) it turns out (though this isn't always obvious at first) that adopting the "solution" would cause huge problems in the rest of the science, and to solve these other problems would seem to involve overthrowing fundamental premises and changing models and redefining your basic terms, without new premises/models/definitions being immediately available. And the argument is now between those who think that what you gain with your new idea outweighs what you lose. The argument gets settled in favor of a new idea not simply when "evidence" appears to support it, but when new usable premises/models/definitions appear that are capable of replacing the old. The Copernican Revolution lasted over 100 years and involved not just the gathering of evidence but drastically changing one's idea of what a planet was and what motion was, among other things. But these changes all came from modifying earlier ideas that once had had common acceptance among cosmologists.

Here's a Greenspun non-ILx thread on Kuhn that I once wandered into, though I couldn't really get anyone there to talk about my ideas.

we decided it was one of philip g's manyu pictured dogs pissing on the server (which is kept in pg's garage)

also there wz something beets

Um, you know what I mean. I should have written something like, "The argument is now over whether you gain more than you lose with your new idea." But obviously with something as drastic as the Copernican revolution, the arguments were over a lot more than just that.