B8005-6 Arguments: Idiosyncratic Truth

ARGUMENTS: IDIOSYNCRATIC TRUTH:

1. ARGUMENTS WITHOUT OBJECTIVE TRUTH: One should not expect the dialectical format to produce anything resembling objective truth. Instead, the “truths” adopted by the agonists are idiosyncratic expressions of “truth” that each party sees fit to adopt as his very own, rather than some truth objectified by authority, as in (“I’m the parent and I said so!”), or by preponderance of evidence, as in (“The security camera caught you on tape.”). Because the objectified truths are not present, the dialectical argument cannot end immediately, and the parties of the argument can hold onto their idiosyncratic notions of what is “true,” as follows:

a. EXAMPLE: OBJECTIFICATION BY AUTHORITY: A twelve year-old girl asked her mother for ten dollars. When the mother refused to give the money to the child, the girl said, “Why not?” The mother said, “Because I said so.” The child was not satisfied with that response and said the mother had to give her a reason. The mother replied that she didn’t have to give a reason: “I’m the adult here and you’re the child and I say you can’t have the ten dollars. Okay? End of discussion.” The twelve year-old insisted that the mother give her a detailed explanation for her refusal to give her ten dollars. The bickering went on and on until the father, who was sitting nearby, told the child that her mother had told her she couldn’t have the ten dollars and ‘that was it.” The child stood there with her hands on her hips and then stuck her tongue out at her father. The father, seething with anger, jumped off the couch and chased the daughter around the dining room table. The child ran out of the house and didn’t return until some time later, after it became dark outside.
Once the argument was objectified by the father pursuing the child and the child leaving the house, the dialect ended. More significantly, the child was so shocked by the incident that she immediately ceased arguing in later cases when she recognized that “the point of no return” had been reached in the argument, when the father signaled a “time-out” gesture with his hands.

b. EXAMPLE: OBJECTIFICATION BY PREPONDERANCE OF EVIDENCE: Frank used to take barrels of sawdust home with him to be used as bedding for his dogs. Frank’s employer had no objection to his taking the sawdust because it otherwise presented a disposal problem for the employer. And normally Frank would get a co-worker to help him lift the barrel onto his truck. But one night the security guard noticed that the men were using a fork truck to load the barrel on the truck. It seemed strange that something as light as sawdust would require a fork truck. So, the guard came over and asked Frank what he had in the barrel. Frank told him that he had a barrel of sawdust. “Then why do you need a fork truck to load the barrel? You never used a fork truck in the past.” Frank told him that it was “real heavy sawdust.” The guard removed the cover on the barrel and found a shallow layer of sawdust on top of a barrel of carbide cutting tools. The carbide had a scrap metal price of about $5.00 per pound at the time and the barrel contained hundreds of pounds of metal. Inadvertently the guard had caught Frank in an incident of Grand Theft - Felony, because the value of the carbide tooling was about $4,000. Frank was fired on the spot.

2. ARGUMENTS WITHOUT CLOSURE: Moreover, often the dialectical argument cannot end on a decisive note, as in, “Shut up! You’re the kid and I’m the parent and I carry the big stick in this household. Got it? Now, get to bed!” Lacking any clear end point or strategy, the dialectical argument can continue as long as the parties are willing to dispute with each other, or until the argument ends by imposition of the superior will.

3. ARGUMENTS WITHOUT SYSTEMATICITY: The dialectic format does not lend itself to systematic study or investigation. Instead, it directs the focus of the disputation to the particular portions of arguments being made at a given instant, rather than to the sequence or panorama of arguments leading up to that point in time. Such arguments become the classical, “you can’t see the forest for the trees,” type of argument because the parties are concentrating on the petty details of particular propositions instead of attempting to precipitate some universal principles from the context of the arguments.

4. ARGUMENTS FILLED WITH OPINIONS INSTEAD OF FACTS: The dialectical argument often ends in a he-said-she-said deadlock because vapid opinions are being bantered about instead of unassailable facts. The parties retreat to their own houses and harbor the opinions they have just exposed in the dialect, smug in the assurance that they are completely right. From behind the facade of newspapers and magazines, they hurl opinions back and forth as if those words could do genuine damage to the opponent. Only later do they discover that fact-finders out in the world make mince-meat out their “arguments,” which the agonists have pretended to be factual, when, in fact, such arguments can be shown to be only opinionated thoughts arising from unthinking minds. One recalls, for instance, the Presidential Election of 1984, when Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale traded barbs with each other. A disinterested observer might have heard only trivial opinions being proffered by each candidate. But when Mondale told the whole world that he would “raise your taxes,” the dialect - and the election - was really over at that point in time. The mere opinions that many people heard (or held about the candidates) had changed into hard facts that affected their wallets, and Mondale went back to Minnesota crushed in utter defeat. The dialect had ended when mere, silly opinions had mutated into a hard, crystallized, unassailable fact of the threat of rising taxes.

Flowers for Your Rose Garden

C3001-104 Thanksgiving: Lister Bag Tea

    The isoprenes hung heavily in the air around the pine tree boughs like mean gossip in a small, Southern town.  I could see the haze extending to the far horizon, in staggered slices of landscape, each one just a bit lighter than the one in front of it, cascading into pale indistinction.  The cicadas filled the valley with their strident, insistent sirens.  Who, I wondered, could think of reproduction in such oppressive heat and humidity; who could find allure in the sticky embrace of such a sweltering sycophant?
    We marched in route step through the forest along a well-worn path that had seen generations of footsteps in the khaki-colored soil: the pale color of cowardice, stubbled with stubborn chert here and there to twist ankles.  I learned in time to kick those stones off the path without breaking my stride.
    At first, the man in front of me had a slender, dark line of perspiration on the back of his shirt.  But as we marched those endless miles through the heat, his shirt eventually turned into a uniform flowing with sweat.  The man dripped with each step like a metronome.  Those droplets were eagerly swallowed by the dusty-dry soil.
    After what seemed like hours of marching, we came to an expansive, open area that looked much like  a picnic area in a state forest.  Then I noticed them.  There were two of them and they were hanging from a tree like bloated carcases in a slaughter house.  In some respects, they looked just like duffel bags except they were much fatter.  I had never seen anything like them before.
    I asked what they were and I was told that they were Lister Bags (cf. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Lister+bag ) filled with iced tea.  Somehow the thought of cold tea revolted me.  Who could drink such a thing?  But I was told that it was actually “pretty good.”
    Later, after I stood in line with the others, I got a canteen cup of that unsweetened tea.  I sipped tentatively and tasted the strangeness of the polymers from the rubber lining of the Lister Bag.  But the drink was cool and refreshing.  It was a welcomed guest on that hot and humid day.
    And now, years and years later, I found a bottled unsweetened tea for sale in my local grocery store.  I brought one bottle home and sat on the couch sipping the tea.  It was Lister Bag tea all over again.  My wife could not understand the Christmas-morning joy I found in that glass of tea.
    I am thankful for that hot and humid day, filled with isoprenes and cicadas, and khaki-colored soil.  But I am especially grateful for that canvass bag of iced tea with its generous gift of refreshment.

B4022-4 Moron Economics: Galbraithian Nonsense

    A colleague of mine used to patronize the people who assembled machine tools in a large machine tool manufacturing facility.  The colleague was an electronic technician who was responsible for debugging and testing the machine tool electrical controls.  Frequently, the assemblers asked him how the control “knew” where to move, say, the table or the slide of the machine tool.  An adequate explanation would have taken more time than it was worth.  So, the technician simply told them that “it was all magic.”  They never accepted that explanation and they always wanted him to explain things further.  “Well,” he say, “it’s like putting your tooth under the pillow at night and finding a quarter there instead in the morning.  It’s a Tooth Fairy sort of thing.  And it’s all magic.”
    Much of what passes for economics today is that Tooth Fairy sort of thing.  Your car won’t start?  Try pushing it off a fifty-foot cliff unto the jagged rocks below.  It didn’t start?  Okay, try pushing it off the 100-foot cliff nearby.  What?  It still didn’t start?  We need a 200-foot cliff, folks.  The “stimulus package” wasn’t big enough.
    I’m sure that there is a Miss Romer somewhere dug into her stuffy Keynesian burrow who is wondering why the United States’ stimulus plan didn’t work.  Somewhere, a Mister Summers is scratching his head over the same issue.  “If only we had spent more!”
    Now, a fool comes out of Texas with an absurd reprise of France’s 35-hour workweek (1998-2008).  Remember that?  Let’s reduce the workweek hours and spread the jobs around.  Today this Texan fool says let all of those older folks retire who want to retire, and let the younger unemployed take their jobs.  It’s a win-win for everybody.  Well, except if you work the mathematics:  The person now working pays a portion of his salary into Social Security and Medicare “trust funds.”  That person retires and begins to draw down those “trust funds.”  The younger person begins his new job and starts paying the same fees to the “trust funds” as the older person did.  No matter who works the same fund amount is contributed.  But in this case, an additional person is drawing funds out of the “trust funds.”  Can’t bankrupt the Social Security and Medicare “trust funds” fast enough?  Try getting more people to draw out of the system.
    Tooth Fairy economics.  Put your tooth under the pillow and tomorrow there will be a coin there.  It’s all magic.

B8005-5 Arguments: Clarification of Opinions

THE CLARIFICATION OF OPINIONS: We could say that some arguments serve to establish particular opinions in others where no such opinions existed previously. To “win” an argument, thus, is to form or affect a new opinion in another person.

TRIVIALITY: But let us understand, first, that all arguments that seek to change opinions are, by their very nature, trivial. While it is true that the arguments themselves may seem very important to the persons arguing the particular cases, in any reasonable scheme of things it makes very little difference whether I believe, say, that the moon is either made of Green Cheese or if it is made of Compressed Twinkies. In either case my opinion - along with one American dollar - will get me a coffee at McDonalds, and very little else; i.e., my opinions, like the arguments themselves, are ipso facto trivial.

THE NATURE OF OPINIONS: Since opinions are philosophically identical with contradictions, there can be no “correct” opinions. Instead, there is nothing out there but a bewildering array of competing opinions, each of which is valid for his owner, but not necessarily for others. Listening to others bray about their opinions is very similar to flipping through a catalogue of highway signs: each sign wags its scolding finger in your face without any practical effect. At the end of the day, the catalogue - and your interlocutors’ opinions - can be tossed into the trash can.

THE FUTILITY OF ARGUING AGAINST OPINIONS: In any really objective sense of the word, it’s a hopeless task to badger another person with relentless ferocity in order to change his opinion. Far better, one should allow the other to steep in his delusions until he, himself, comes to the conclusion that his opinion is unwarranted by existing conditions or facts. Don’t change the opinions of others; let the conditions change the opinions:

EDUCATION: We often hear an array of arguments about spending additional sums on education. Almost always such arguments take the form of what will happen to "our children" if we fail to spend less than x-dollars per pupil. It is a fruitless task to counter such arguments with economic specificity. Rather, it is always a more effective approach to give the education leeches precisely what they ask for in the hope that eventually they will build such a large edifice that the salaries, operating and maintenance costs will simply overwhelm the system. Currently, many state governments are operating with budgets severely in deficit because of past excesses in granting every silly educational demand that was placed upon the state legislature. For years conservatives have argued for some kind of restraint, and they have made those arguments to no avail - until now. Once the critical mass has been reached with extravagant spending (as it is today), further arguments are no longer necessary because everyone from the smallest child to the oldest man can see that the budgets are not sustainable under any taxing scheme. The educational establishment is ready to become undone by its past "successes."

KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS: At the present time we are participating in an economic experiment. Some, like the Captain Ja-Boom Tisch's (i.e., Obama's) administration, have argued for stimulus spending to give a Keynesian boost to the economy. Huge sums of money had been spent in the attempt to prove that Keynesianism actually does something. To date, however, the results are exceedingly unsatisfactory. The amount of money that's been spent is slowly crushing the private sector, and less charitably, is destroying the United States of America. Yet the persons responsible for continuing to support these silly Keynesian ideas are not dissuaded by the results that we are now seeing. Instead they firmly believe that we need to spend more to make this work. Or as one wag put it so well, "If you failed to fly after you jumped off a 10-foot step ladder, perhaps you could try jumping off of the roof of your house." There will come a point, obviously, when it is no longer feasible to pretend that additional deficit spending will stimulate the economy. The problem, however, is that the United States may no longer exist when these economic morons finally come to their senses.

KILLING ME SOFTLY WITH HIS WORDS: Second, all arguments that seek to change opinions are never attempts to discover objective truth itself, but instead, are always attempts to squeeze some gritty exudate through the grille surrounding the opponent’s head. The end of such argumentation is to smother the opponent in a virtual helmet of irrefutable logic, from which he cannot see or breathe or even speak. All in all, the argument seeks to conclude with one party silent and unable to speak.

B8005-4 Arguments: Assumptions

“Arguments follow from assumptions, and assumptions follow from beliefs, and very rarely - perhaps never - do beliefs reflect an agenda determined entirely by facts” (David Berlinski. The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions. New York: Crown Forum, 2008, pp. 103-104).

ARGUMENTS FOLLOW FROM ASSUMPTIONS: Of course, this is an incorrect statement. Arguments follow from disagreements, where one of the parties refuses to accept certain assumptions made by the other party of the disagreement. What the two parties argue about, basically, are the assumptions themselves. Did Wittgenstein not say that arguments cease once adequate definitions are made? It would seem, then, that the first requirement of any disagreement would be to clarify the meaning of the assumptions being used.

ASSUMPTIONS FOLLOW FROM BELIEFS: Again, this is an incorrect statement. Assumptions may follow from beliefs. But more often, assumptions are applications of current opinion to contemporary arguments. That is to say, sometimes assumptions are nothing more than clichés stated by one of the parties without regard to reasoned thought or to an opinion formed from examined beliefs. For example, people often say "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." Such a statement more often reflects the extent to which propaganda has been effective in the lives of the public than it does from a conclusion drawn from proper examination.

BELIEFS ARE NOT FACTUALLY SUPPORTED: While I tend to agree with this statement at some overall level of understanding, I also assert that facts themselves are trivial. A true fact does not support a belief. Rather, it makes a tautological statement about the world. But in a very general way, the things that people assert tend never to be based on examined facts. It might be more correct to say that people express their beliefs on the basis of selected facts, or on particular facts culled from a vast assortment of available facts. In other words, beliefs are often based on peculiar and nuanced selections of facts.

CONTRIVED REASONING: In spite of the difficulties that Berlinski has laid out here, I think he is particularly correct about modern science in its pretense that its positions and conclusions are based on "facts" alone; and, in contradistinction to religious belief, that scientific assertions are always based on evidence rather than on beliefs. Almost always, science has no genuine evidentiary basis. Instead, it possesses something that I will call a contrived reason that supports a particular notion.

B5006-1 Reasoning: Scientific Facts

Scientific Facts: It may be pure speculation on my part to suppose that progress in science, generally, is hampered by the psychology of remembered “facts.” In particular, a rigidly held belief in some particular aspect of science, e.g., Darwinian evolution, may prevent a scientist from looking at his scientific inquiries with the necessary objectivity to determine the actual truth. His elaborately constructed world view may not be capable of the requisite deconstruction needed to accommodate a newer, more descriptive, conceptualization of science. Even when confronted with the overwhelming statistical logic of a William Dembski, for example, or the compelling biochemical evidence compiled by a Michael Behe, the dyed-in-the-wool Darwinian, such as Richard Dawkins, cannot admit that his concept of evolution is fatally - and ineluctably - flawed: “Dawkins...asserts that ‘biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.’ He refers to living beings as ‘designoid’ objects. ‘Designoid objects look designed,’ Dawkins contends, ‘so much so that some people - probably, alas, most people - think they are designed. These people are wrong.’ ” (Dan Peterson. “The Little Engine That Could Undo Darwinism,” The American Spectator, June 2005, p. 37.) It is difficult for me personally to imagine a more arrogant statement than Dawkins’s statement that “these people are wrong.” On what objective basis can he make such a statement? That he believes in materialism with such blind and obstinate conviction that absolutely no non-materialistic explanation has even the possibility of being true? Good Heavens! Where does this person get off?