Against ‘Reason Supremacism’ in Democratic Politics
Influential theorists of deliberative democracy such as Habermas and Rawls view rational argumentation as the main, and perhaps even as the only, legitimate means of deliberation in democratic societies. This general stance can be (provocatively) described as ‘reason supremacism’. However, this focus on rational argumentation tends to have exclusionary effects and to present barriers for participation especially for those at the margins in societies with great power discrepancies. In particular, when oppressed groups argue (rationally) against their oppression, more often than not their arguments remain ignored in the dominant public spheres, at least until they do something sufficiently ‘shocking’ so as to attract significant (often negative) attention. But interventions in public discourse that do not fit the ‘rational’ mold are then often criticized and sidelined for being of the ‘wrong kind’. In view of these phenomena, political theorist Iris Marion Young has famously defended a more pluralistic conception of political discourse. Drawing on Young and reflecting on the purported differences between rational argumentation and propaganda, I will argue that rational argumentation should be but one type of discourse (albeit an important one) among others in broader political conversations, thus rejecting reason supremacism. To illustrate this thesis, I will draw on a prominent public debate that took place in the Netherlands over the last decades on the folk character known as ‘Black Pete’ (Zwarte Piet). The success of the anti-racism activism against the racialized, colonialist character of Black Pete illustrates the strength of a pluralistic approach to political discourse.
February 7th 1PM ET
Claire Lockard
What’s Love Got to Do With It? Charity’s Etymology and Its Implications for Argumentation
In this talk, I will explore the etymology of the word “charity” and its implications for how we argue. The word “charity” is derived from the Latin word caritas, which translates to “love” (theologically understood as “love of one’s neighbor”). By contrast, “charity” as it is used in philosophy today, refers to the specific practice of giving an author or an interlocutor the benefit of the doubt in a particular kind of way (Stern 2016). Worryingly, the call for charity has also been used to demand the bracketing of problematic (racist, sexist, etc.) content under the pretense of “charitably” engaging with a text or interlocutor.
With a few exceptions (see Bejan 2010), scholars rarely mention charity’s historical or etymological roots when writing about the principle of charity or interpretive charity. However, I will argue that the disconnect between charity’s past meaning and its contemporary use as an argumentative principle has contributed to these problematic demands for charity in reading, writing, and argumentation. Rather than describing an interpretative attitude or orientation, charity has become a decontextualized and vague argumentative tool and a purportedly neural criterion for entry into the world of philosophical legitimacy. As an example, I will explore just one problem with the way that the call for charity can function today: as a demand that one’s interlocutor enter or remain in an unjust world of sense (Pohlhaus 2011).
March 7th 1PM ET
Oliver Traldi
TBA
April 4th 1PM ET
Ian James Kidd
TBA
May 2nd 1PM ET
Dale Hample
The Global Presence of Civility While Arguing
In company with a number of scholars, I have spent more than ten years collecting and reporting data on how people orient to the prospect and experience of interpersonal argument. We have results from about twenty nations, with repeated data collections in several of them. We use (translated) surveys to gather people’s self-reports about their motivations for arguing or not, their understandings of what is going on when they do argue, and their emotional experience with interpersonal arguing. All these categories of interest have multiple instruments that add detail to the general notions of motivation, understanding, and feelings. One of those instruments is called civility, and is formed from items that originally emerged from research done by Pam and Bill Benoit several decades ago. In this talk, I begin by explaining the operational definition of civility used in the research. Next I make an effort to connect the conceptual elements of the measurement scales to various virtues associated with ethical arguing. Then I move on to discuss some of the results of the global project, showing how civility is associated with various of the other measurements. This is intended to show civility’s place in the whole inventory of motivations, understandings, and feelings about arguing face to face with another person, as well as the ethical implications of arguing with or without civility.
June 6th 1 PM ET
Alain Létourneau
Discussing the Scheme “You plead for action X, but your actions are themselves in contradiction with X” as Seen in the Environmental Field
The argumentative scheme (or group of schemes) by which some reprehensible practice of a speaker A is invoked by a third party (call him/her/they speaker B) against the validity of a claim made by speaker A is quite common but hard to completely grasp. I will focus here on environmental claims as the relevant argumentation field (Toulmin, 1958). “Whataboutism”, “Tu quoque”, “Two Wrongs”, and “Ad personam” (Walton, Reed & Macagno, 2008; Goodwin, 2022; Aikin & Casey, 2024) have all been used as names for this kind of argumentative move; this plurality of theoretical readings is already an indication of its complexity. As I showed in a previous talk (Windsor, 2023), the argument about incoherence between discourse and acts certainly is often being used to discredit some speaker, but the net effect is mostly to favor the statu quo ante, called business as usual in environmental circles. First, we need a new look at different uses and understandings of that basic scheme, to get a better grasp of its structure and limits. Second, the links with the virtue approach in ethics can be made visible while discussing the use of the scheme. But the aim of the talk would be to explore a reframing hypothesis, that would be useful from an ethical and rhetorical perspective. To use a familiar figure, this move could be compared to shifting away from considering only the tree by better accounting for the forest.
July 4th 1PM ET
Christoph Lumer
A Welfare Ethics of Argumentation
The presentation outlines a systematic ethics of argumentation that is based on principles of welfare ethics. It presupposes an epistemological theory of argumentation that provides criteria for epistemically good arguments, which guide epistemologically qualified cognition, and an epistemological theory of discourse that explains how to cooperatively test, justify, and improve theses. These theories help clarify the individual utility of arguments. All of this can be justified prudentially, i.e. as being in the interest of the respective subject. The actual ethics of argumentation begins (above all) with the resolution of intersubjective conflicts of interest, e.g. my interest in knowledge versus your interest in my persuasion or my interest in doing anything else versus your interest in me enlightening you. To resolve these conflicts of interest, welfare ethics is used here. From welfare ethical evaluation criteria and empirical information, it follows what the morally best solution would be in each case. An instrumentalist normative ethics suggests how we can realistically approach this optimum as closely as possible, taking into account our psychological and social situation. One important instrument for this are morally good social norms supported by sanctions. In discussing various instruments, the presentation considers, among other things, which morally good norms for arguing already hold socially. Moral argumentation virtues are another instrument.
August 1st 1PM ET
Martina Orlandi
“I’d Rather Talk to an AI”: Examining the Moral Risks of Outsourcing Belief Revision to ChatGPT
Convincing people that their beliefs are unwarranted is a notoriously challenging task. Granted that nobody enjoys being lectured, the culprit is that individuals often have non-epistemic interests that motivate them to hold onto certain beliefs. This is the case of conspiracy theorists. The standard view in both psychology and philosophy argues that conspiracy theorists are drawn to conspiracy theories for non-epistemic reasons and that reiterating the evidence not only is insufficient for belief revision, but it can also have a boomerang effect (Douglas et al. 2017; Horne at al. 2015). However, in April 2024 a comprehensive study from a group of psychologists at MIT has challenged this received wisdom and showed a surprising result: that while individuals struggle to persuade conspiracy theorists that they are wrong, ChatGPT can successfully change their minds by engaging in an evidence-based dialogue (Costello et al. 2024). What’s more, this change seems to be durable and to last for months. What should we, philosophers, make of these results? In this talk, I examine the philosophical import of outsourcing belief revision to AI. Insofar as abandoning false beliefs is epistemically rational, ChatGPT seems to bring about positive consequences by leading conspiracy theorists to revise their beliefs in light of factual evidence. However, I argue that outsourcing belief revision to AI also carries ethical risks by undermining moral growth. For example, when it comes to morally loaded conspiracy theories that target particular segments of the population (like those that drive distrust in scientists, or target vulnerable minorities, etc.), reconciling with factual beliefs can also restore trust in those targets, thus bringing about positive collective consequences by strengthening the social fabric. But this can only occur when true beliefs are delivered by other persons. Outsourcing belief revision to ChatGPT necessarily eradicates such positive returns because it undermines this relational benefit.
September 5th 1PM ET
Merve Aktar
The Saving Grace of Uncertainty: Reimagining (Un)Reasonable Responsibility in Argument
Quantum physics has provided the evidence that our very core thingness of things, matter, is “a dynamic entity, an interaction. A process; not a thing!” (Sha & Harshman 2023), so insisting that argument at its core is an isolable matter seems questionable. Adhering to the primary sense of argument, advanced by Aberdein (2023) and Gascon (2024), as an interactive, dialectical discussion, I uphold the virtue argumentation theory perspective that argumentation appraisal, if not the definition of a “good argument” (a topic on which Cohen (2013, 2015, 2022) and Paglieri (2015) especially offer thought-provoking analysis), depends in part on evaluating its participants’ dispositions and motivations; i.e., dispositional virtues. The idea has gained traction in the field, leading to a proposition that has attracted my attention for the purposes of this talk: “what we need is rather a broad and complex conception of what an excellently and admirably conducted argumentative discussion looks like” (Gascon 2024). Far be it from me to claim the ethos to take up such a critical question. Rather, as a literary scholar, I propose to close-read and branch out the question, as I find there to be an underlying issue in it that is implied but not directly articulated or treated in virtue/argumentation scholarship: have we addressed the ideological foundations of our conception— or question — of “autonomous, reasoning agents” (ed. Warburton 2018) necessary to conceive of said admirably conducted argumentative discussion?
Drawing from literary criticism and the philosophies of ethics and of mind, I engage the ideas of self-possession and compatibilism underlying the conventional definition of an autonomous reasoning agent, or, simply, arguer. Both of these ideologies are rooted in the conception of the world, of the material mind, as things of certainty rather than as processes running on uncertainties. My main proposition is that in our transitional context (both quantum and argumentation-based), there is a virtue at stake if we are to move away from the hypothetical normative arguer primed in the dominant adversarial model to one ideally—if not necessarily and urgently— versed in “cognitive compathy” (Cohen and Miller 2015) and “critical creative capacity” (Baumtrog 2017): responsibility. This talk maintains that responsibility underlies both the core idea of the reasoning agent and the practice of its attendant virtues, both dispositional and epistemic. Furthermore, that it occupies the liminal space between free will and moral luck, as it should. Yet, it is consistently placed in the domain of the self-possessed rational agent who can exercise full control over their motivations, emotions, and actions in face of as well as over the Other.
October 3rd 1PM ET
Michael Baumtrog
Creating Ethical Agreements
Argumentation theorists have traditionally created and critiqued their theories centred on the notions of reasonableness and/or rationality. Doing so has resulted in a focus on resolving disagreements in a reasonable or rational manner, with ethical components most often left implicit. In this talk, I imagine what an argumentation theory that prioritizes the ethical and that aims not merely to resolve a disagreement but to create agreement, would look like. To do so, I argue for a set of desiderata for both the process and product of the argumentation and connect the newly focused approach to existing concepts of reasonableness.