From: Paul Filseth [pgxf@lsil.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2002 11:24 AM
To: brian@holtz.org
Subject: Re: disingenuous

This is a retransmission of my Jan. 21 email.

> If you have constructive advice for how I can be a better debater, I'd
> be eager for you to tell me precisely what these practices are, give
> examples of them, and explain to me why they are annoying.

    1. You call people's sincerity into question without good cause.

        > I'm not asking this just to be difficult.
        I have a hard time believing that. :-) Still, I'll indulge you
        for at least a little while

      If you can't figure out why that's annoying, I probably can't
      help you.

    2. You argue from authority.

	Your entire line of argument against John, Jeff, Ken and me based
      on your belief that the pros mostly agree with you is annoying.
      If you're wrong, and they don't agree with you, how are we
      supposed to prove it?  Spend months gathering statistics?  If
      you're right that they agree with you, but they're wrong, how
      are we supposed to prove it?  Refute dozens of articles one at
      a time and leave you to claim there are hundreds more unrefuted?
      If we're all wrong, how are we supposed to figure out why?  Read
      hundreds of articles that take for granted that we're wrong and
      never explain it?  People participate on newsgroups because they
      want to get others to take their arguments seriously and give
      them a fair hearing.  If an argument is sound they want others
      to be convinced, and if it's unsound they want to know what's
      wrong with it.  Telling us we're wrong because someone you call
      an expert thinks we're wrong for no reason we can learn leaves
      us helpless, swinging our intellectual fists against empty air.

      The fact that you tell us what's wrong with our arguments in no
      way helps.  We have no reason to think the pros are persuaded
      by your argument, rather than by some completely different and
      possibly much better argument.  Your arguments have been deeply
      unconvincing, and that tells us that if you're right about what
      the pros think, then either there must be a good reason out there
      that we're barred from knowing by the effective conspiracy of
      silence on the subject that you imply exists, or else they have
      no good reason, they're persuaded by bad arguments, but our
      arguments aren't going to be taken seriously because you think
      it's enough that pros who haven't even heard our arguments aren't
      convinced by them.  You're putting us in a Kafka-esque position.
      Of course it's annoying.

      John told you he's not impressed by argument from authority and
      will not debate the thoughts of unnamed "philosophers".  That's
      my position also.  All we're asking for is an opponent we can
      fight, and drub or be drubbed by.  If you don't feel you can do
      it on your own and need professional help, we'd accept that if
      you'd point us to a pro we can fight, and drub or be drubbed by.
      But if you won't even do that much, I for one won't agree to treat
      my failure to land blows on empty air as a defeat.  What it is is
      a reason to stop talking to you.

    3. You make invalid inferences about what people mean by what they
      say and challenge them to defend claims they never made.

	    See below.

> > Is that just an offer to me, or will you offer everyone you
> > disagree with the same courtesy?
>
> As I assumed was clear from my previous sentence (which you deleted),
> it applies primarily to you

     If you aren't willing to refrain from impugning the truthfulness
of _everyone_ you don't have solid evidence against, it means you don't
understand why it's a bad idea to do that, and only offered to in my
case to get me to shut up.  If you don't understand why it's a bad idea,
you don't know how to engage in friendly debate yet.

> because you "had (at least until recently ;-) the best track record
> of reasoning here on a.a.m.".
> That is, people with lesser track records were already getting my
> presumption of faulty reasoning.

     Except Ken, apparently.  Moreover, if you weren't assuming faulty
reasoning in general in my case, then since we'd already been arguing
incessantly for months, that would seem to imply that you thought either
that I must be right (so you were just arguing half-heartedly to get me
to lay it all out for you so you'd understand why I was right), or else
that my statements really were wrong and yet my reasoning wasn't faulty
(so I must really know they were wrong and you were right and must
therefore be being disingenuous).  Yet you claim you never believed I
was disingenuous.  I don't believe for a second that you thought I was
right -- your arguments were too passionate.  So it follows that I must
in fact have been getting your presumption of faulty reasoning all
along, even if you didn't consciously think of it that way.

     And that's the point.  Friendly debate _requires_ the presumption
of faulty reasoning (or ignorance of significant empirical facts) in
the other party.  Because that presumption is a necessity for civil
discussion, to withdraw it from anyone is a hostile act.

> > So you'll probably go right on thinking I'm
> > disingenuous even if you don't say it
>
> Again: I never said or believed you were disingenuous.  I said
> that a particular statement of yours "seemed disingenuous", and
> so I was trying to explore the meaning and implications of it.
> Those efforts were (and remain) stymied by your indignation
> filibuster.

     To raise the issue of the other person's sincerity is to imply
that he does not deserve the benefit of the customary presumption of
honest error.  The moment you decided to explore the subject of my
truthfulness instead of the validity of my argument, we were no longer
in a friendly debate.  I have zero reason to assist a non-friend in
his efforts to explore whatever he feels like exploring.  You took
what had been a discussion and changed it into a prosecution.  You
made us enemies.  Enemies stymie each other.  I elected to stymie
your prosecution of me by refusing to play out my role in your script.
My option.  My goal here is to make sure you never sandbag me again,
and I don't see how getting you to understand why "Life" is a good
example for refuting anthropic arguments would help achieve that -- it
doesn't have anything to do with why questioning your debating partner's
sincerity is unfriendly.

> Are you refusing to believe my self-report here?

    No.  What you self-reported was "I will from now on first question
your reasoning skills before questioning your motives. :-)"  That's a
statement of what you intend to _say_.  You didn't self-report what you
were going to _think_.

> How would such refusal be any different than an accusation of
> disingenuousness?

     Had your self-report been about what you would think, if someone
had refused to believe that, it would have been very different from
an accusation of disingenuousness.  First, because your statement was
about the future.  You do not necessarily know what you will think
in the future.  So such refusal would be an accusation of lack of
self-knowledge, not disingenuousness.  And, second, because he could
not raise the issue of your sincerity.  You'd already done that to
yourself, by putting a smiley on your self-report.

> Is habitual (but uninentional?) carelessness and illogic toward
> others' words perhaps one of the practices that allegedly makes me
> annoying? Please provide details and examples if you have the
> time and interest in improving my debating skills.  If not,
> then please refrain from such snide generalizations.

     If you didn't want to be disparaged, you shouldn't have opened
hostilities.  But here are a few:

    > The debate over whether "supernatural" is well-definable.  I can
    > settle that quite easily by saying, "Yes, it's well-definable when I
    > define it to mean 'imaginary.'"
    That of course is not what I meant, and you know it.

    > However, that kind of definition seemed to be not the kind that you
    > wanted to debate or to talk about.
    Duh. :-) I'm interested in a definition that makes sense of the
    philosophical debate over naturalism. I'm not interested in
    a definition designed for use in a vain sophomoric attempt to
    define the supernatural out of existence.

    > the very people who seem to get the most mileage out of
    > understanding (or pretending to understand, or mistakenly claiming
    > that they understand) the term.
    Is Michael Levine, author of the above Stanford Encyclopedia
    article, someone who "pretends" or "mistakenly claims" to
    understand the term?

    > These are acceptable as dictionary definitions to help people understand
    > the ordinary usage of words. As tight definitions suitable for
    > philosophic debate they are useless.
    If you have evidence that philosophers use the term to mean anything
    other than its ordinary dictionary definition, then please present it.

    > in a world without rocket scientists, we could write "rockets can't
    > be built" in our textbooks. When rocket scientists appear, we could
    > then add a footnote saying "except by rocket scientists".
    Please tell us the ISBN of the physics textbook that says building rockets
    is a violation of what is otherwise a physical law and can only be
    accomplished by the will of rocket scientists.    

> when I asked you about it (in a more careful way that apparantly still
> didn't live up to your standards of civility),

     It apparently did live up to yours.  And that's the problem.  There
is no civil way to raise the subject of the other person's deservingness
of the presumption of good faith.  All more careful phrasing does is make
it that much more obvious that you're fully aware of what you're saying.

> If you want your statements never to be misunderstood, you
> might consider answering questions about them.

     You don't need to understand it to avoid putting words in my
mouth.  All you need to do is leave out the words "perfect" and
"considered" when you call something "the Filseth Standard", on the
grounds that they're your words and not mine.  If you offend someone
to the point that he doesn't want to talk to you, that doesn't license
you to assume any answer you like to any question he hasn't answered.
You don't have a right to have your questions answered.

> And before complaining about my civility in the future, please
> ruminate on a sampling of your own uncivil remarks that I've let
> slide:

     You don't need to draw my attention to the fact that I've been
uncivil to you.  I did it deliberately, because you forfeited your
right to expect civility from me.  We are in an unfriendly debate by
your choice, and that's how such debates go.

     My statements about your lack of civility are simply responses to
your questions to me and your continued erroneous implications about
me, which I choose not to leave hanging, and explanations for why I'm
not resuming the debate on the philosophical questions you want to talk
about.  They aren't complaints -- I complain when I expect the person
I complain to to try to correct the situation.  All I expect from you
is endless insistence that your initial attack was justified, each time
thereby implying again that I did something to deserve it.  I will not
do anything to help you leave that impression.  Resuming the original
debate while that implication against me is still hanging would imply
that I accept you as a civil debate partner.  That would imply that I
think you were being reasonable in attacking me, which would imply in
turn that I agree I did something to deserve the attack.  I didn't.

We were, however, still in a friendly debate when I wrote:

    [..] how "exist" works in your idiolect [..]

I take it you don't know what "idiolect" means.  It isn't unfriendly.
It's the same as you calling John's definition of supernatural
"idiosyncratic".

> > > I've never seen
> > > such a journal article, never seen a citation of such, and
> > > instead have seen many journal articles that would presumably be
> > > required by editors and peer reviewers to deal with such a
> > > demonstration if it existed.
> >
> > [this] doesn't actually have any bearing on the merit of
> > your definitions
>
> It bears on the merit of *any* definition, since your position
> appears to be that the notion of God or supernaturality is
> oxymoronical or meaningless. Articles that treat these notions
> as non-oxymoronical and meaningful stand in prima facie opposition
> to your position.

     No they don't.  What you call my position exists only in your
imagination.  My position is that _your_ definition (specifically, the
one you were pushing when that discussion fell apart) and those I've
seen in dictionaries are meaningless and/or false to common usage.  I
have myself stipulated a meaning for supernatural: "goes in the same
category with Santa and Harry Potter".  Attempts I've seen to flesh out
that kind of a description with an objective criterion have failed.
This doesn't mean the concept is meaningless; it may only mean that
people stink at figuring out what they mean.  If philosophers talk the
same way as ordinary folks and don't talk about what they mean by it,
that is not evidence that any particular definition is any good; nor
is it evidence in favor of the existence of an objective criterion.
Such a criterion may or may not exist but a tacit assumption that it
exists is not evidence for it.

> > > it wouldn't motivate me to rehearse for you how the issue came
> > > to be a matter of settled scholarship.
> >
> > It sounds like you didn't bother to tell him Bible scholars'
> > _reasons_ for believing there was a Q source. Typical.
>
> It sounds that way because that's precisely what I said. :-)

     That's not precisely what you said.

> If somebody disputes the moon landings or the Q source theory
> or any other matter of settled scholarship, it will indeed
> be "typical" of me to not invest my time educating that person.
> The fact that I thusly value my time in no way increases the
> credibility or validity of the case opposed to the settled
> scholarly consensus.

     You can of course use your time as you see fit; but if you take
that attitude he will have no reason to consider himself refuted.  It
would be perfectly sensible under such conditions for him to find
someone else to talk to, who's interested in discussion rather than in
preaching to a choir of one.  It would not be reasonable for him to
back off and say to himself, "I must be wrong and I shouldn't mind that
no one will tell me why, because I ought to have faith in whoever I'm
told is an expert."

> > All that matters is whether you can expose flaws in our arguments
> > against your definition.
>
> That is indeed what mostly matters, and I have indeed
> rebutted all such arguments.

     True, but "rebutted" does not equal "exposed flaws".

> But I for one would be worried if the consensus of mainstream
> scholarship appeared to assume that my position is obviously wrong.

     Suit yourself.  As for me, I won't worry, if all attempts to
find out if they have a good reason to think I'm wrong are met with
stonewalling.

> > What you're arguing, in effect, is that looking isn't the appropriate
> > way to test that theory
>
> Your analogy obviously does not capture our situation.
> Suppose people (viz., professional philosophers) act
> in a way that appears to assume that supernaturality is well-defined
> enough in its ordinary dictionary definition to argue whether it
> exists. What I'm arguing is that other people who disagree with
> that assumption should find discomfort NOT ONLY in my demonstrations
> that it is well-defined BUT ALSO in the apparent existence of the
> assumption among so many people trained and incentivized to
> detect and expose such allegedly false assumptions.

     But the worthlessness of the ordinary dictionary definitions is
blatant and self-evident, just like what an acrostic in the Bible says.
All one has to do is look and apply logic and experience with real
humans really using the words.

> > The problem is that you do not appear
> > to understand the difference between friendly debate and
> > unfriendly debate.
>
> Can you name anyone else who thinks I've been unfriendly or
> uncivil to you or to anyone else on a.a.m.?

     I haven't polled them.  Feel free, if onlookers' opinions matter
to you.  I'm not much into appeals to the gallery.

> > You crossed from one to the other without good reason
>
> I've given my reasons, and you've admitted that you
> haven't rebutted them.

     That is false.  I did rebut them, and when you falsely claimed I
hadn't, I rebutted that.  You seem to have trouble grasping the fact
that "X." and "I called your sincerity into question because of X."
are not logically equivalent statements.

- Paul