Why is rational agreement so elusive?
One of the perennial problems in philosophy is why a general consensus or rational agreement is so hard to come by on virtually all the interesting topics. This is also a problem about philosophy, since the lack of agreement certainly has to give philosophers pause, and make them wonder about the value of what theyre doing.
Jurgen Habermas, the 20th century German philosopher though hang on, hes still alive at 94! -- made this one of his central concerns. The American philosopher William Rehg has given an excellent account of the problem, which is worth quoting at length:
Rehg believes that this gap is also a gap in Habermas position on argumentation, one that Habermas does not address adequately. Rehg has some Habermasian suggestions to offer, involving the uses of rhetoric and emotion, but thats not the direction I want to pursue in this OP. Rather, I want to keep the question about the gap open, and sharpen it as much as I can, to see how forum members might respond. I should add that I dont have a correct answer hidden in my chiton, to be deployed with a flourish after everyone else reaches aporia. For me its a genuine unsolved and perhaps intractable problem, of considerable consequence for philosophy.
So let me re-pose the problem in two ways. First, notice that when an important question receives competing reasonable answers in philosophy, theres almost certainly a meta-question involved. That question focuses on what are the correct or convincing ways to argue rationally on that topic. Rehg sees this too, when he says that philosophers have to assess not just two competing sets of arguments but competing interpretations of what argumentation itself should be in a given domain. . . . In effect, one is asked to make a judgment about what constitutes rationality itself in a given area. Might this looming, enormous meta-question partially account for why consensus is often so hard to achieve?
Second, one of most prevalent tendencies in post-modern philosophy has been to question, often hostilely, the role of rationality itself what is it, what is it worth, what knowledge does it lead to, etc. Can this sort of critique of rationality be deployed to examine the Habermas problem? In other words, is it possible that the often frustrating morass of competing reasonable claims might be a revealing wake-up call about rationality itself, and its role in philosophy? How far could such a critique be taken? At what point does the critical post-modernist fall into what Habermas called performative contradiction -- using argument to persuade others that argument should not be persuasive?
I know these are big questions that are often taken separately, but theres also a unity of concern among them, I think. The Habermas gap asks whether the jump from competing reasonable positions to agreement on one can have a rational motivation. Id be interested to hear how other philosophers on the forum have thought about it. BTW, I am not a Habermas expert, and welcome any corrections or improvements to what I (and Rehg) say about him here.
Jurgen Habermas, the 20th century German philosopher though hang on, hes still alive at 94! -- made this one of his central concerns. The American philosopher William Rehg has given an excellent account of the problem, which is worth quoting at length:
According to Habermas, cogent argumentation does not compel assent in the manner of logical deduction but only makes assent to a claim possible or reasonable. This suggests that, at least in some cases and particularly in more controverted matters both assent and dissent may be reasonable options. Both options are so insofar as an open, unconstrained process of discourse has not been able to exclude either option as illogical or clearly inferior in responsiveness. How is it, then, that some participants are rationally motivated to accept a claim p and others to reject p, given that everyone has heard the same arguments pro and con? Although both options are reasonable, it is hardly a matter of indifference which side the participants believe that is, participants in argumentation do not simply feel free to adopt either of the two reasonable options. The gap, then, lies between the possibility of reasonable assent provided by logical and dialectical standards, and actual rational motivation.
Rehg believes that this gap is also a gap in Habermas position on argumentation, one that Habermas does not address adequately. Rehg has some Habermasian suggestions to offer, involving the uses of rhetoric and emotion, but thats not the direction I want to pursue in this OP. Rather, I want to keep the question about the gap open, and sharpen it as much as I can, to see how forum members might respond. I should add that I dont have a correct answer hidden in my chiton, to be deployed with a flourish after everyone else reaches aporia. For me its a genuine unsolved and perhaps intractable problem, of considerable consequence for philosophy.
So let me re-pose the problem in two ways. First, notice that when an important question receives competing reasonable answers in philosophy, theres almost certainly a meta-question involved. That question focuses on what are the correct or convincing ways to argue rationally on that topic. Rehg sees this too, when he says that philosophers have to assess not just two competing sets of arguments but competing interpretations of what argumentation itself should be in a given domain. . . . In effect, one is asked to make a judgment about what constitutes rationality itself in a given area. Might this looming, enormous meta-question partially account for why consensus is often so hard to achieve?
Second, one of most prevalent tendencies in post-modern philosophy has been to question, often hostilely, the role of rationality itself what is it, what is it worth, what knowledge does it lead to, etc. Can this sort of critique of rationality be deployed to examine the Habermas problem? In other words, is it possible that the often frustrating morass of competing reasonable claims might be a revealing wake-up call about rationality itself, and its role in philosophy? How far could such a critique be taken? At what point does the critical post-modernist fall into what Habermas called performative contradiction -- using argument to persuade others that argument should not be persuasive?
I know these are big questions that are often taken separately, but theres also a unity of concern among them, I think. The Habermas gap asks whether the jump from competing reasonable positions to agreement on one can have a rational motivation. Id be interested to hear how other philosophers on the forum have thought about it. BTW, I am not a Habermas expert, and welcome any corrections or improvements to what I (and Rehg) say about him here.
Comments (52)
While this is surely not the whole story I think, partly, there is value to disagreement. Agreement allows us to proceed, but philosophy doesn't proceed; Or when philosophy agrees it stops being philosophy and becomes something else. This doesn't accord well with philosophical traditions, which seem to have a sort of progress to them that's a mixture of agreement and disagreement, so it's definitely not the whole story. Only I think it worth highlighting that rational disagreement is valuable, and so the elusiveness of rational agreement isn't necessarily a fault against philosophy.
Well, I don't really identify philosophy with rationality, since many of the post-modern critics I have in mind are extremely dubious about such an equation, and I don't hesitate to call them philosophers. For me, the rationality question is a problem within philosophy, but not necessarily solvable by rational means alone. A philosopher is free to recommend other approaches.
So, why do you see disagreement as a problem? Why should philosophers agree about something?
As I understand it, there is a gap between competing rational arguments, neither of which can resolve the issue, and what motivates an individual to chose one over the other. In other words, what is it that persuades someone to chose as they do.
The problem is framed in terms of:
Since both sides present rational arguments, I question the framing of the problem in terms of rational motivation. The participants each come to the argument with their own education, experiences, prejudices, interests, temperament, and so on. These inform and shape their rational thinking.
Quoting J
What assumptions about rationality are we to awaken from? Mathematics is the model of rationality for Modern philosophy, but this is not how rationality is regarded in the Socratic tradition. What do those today within the Socratic tradition have to wake-up from, if anything?
What is lacking is consensus. Yet in some sense, a significant issue for which there was rational consensus would cease to be a philosophical issue. To some degree (perhaps a significant degree), argument is the essence of philosophy. If a consensus is ever agreed to regarding an issue, the argument is over and philosophy will (of necessity?) move on to other issues.
These are good questions, and need to be taken separately. Philosophical disagreement can be a "problem" in two senses. First, it can puzzle and distress individual philosophers, especially those who have held out high hopes for something like a scientific philosophical method, one that obviously converges on truths within given paradigms. Should it distress them? Its hard to know quite what to say here. It seems more a psychological than a philosophical question.
But philosophical disagreement can also be a problem in a more abstract sense a thought problem, a phenomenon that needs explaining. Taken in this sense, disagreement may or may not cause personal distress, but it ought to raise a question about what were doing as philosophers. What can we discover in the history and practice of philosophy that might account for such widespread inability to converge on a consensus? One may or may not think thats unfortunate, but the intellectual problem remains. Its more in that spirit that I wanted to raise the question. (Personally, I find that when Im operating in a rational mode, I do think its unfortunate, and when Im in a more aesthetic/mystical place, I dont!)
Which leads to your second question about why philosophers should agree about something. As a skeptical observation, I think its unanswerable. There is no good reason, provided youre willing to operate outside rational argumentation and/or "argue" for such a move. And indeed, we see this strategy (I dont mean that derogatorily) often employed by Derrida, Feyerabend, Rorty, and others. They are, or appear to be, indifferent to whether other philosophers agree with them, unless its in the name of solidarity, like Rorty.
Yes, and the question Habermas and Rehg want to press is: Is that all we can say? Is that the end of the story? Is rational consensus impossible? Are we left with the dreaded "incommensurability" of viewpoints?
Quoting Fooloso4
I'm not a post-modernist, and perhaps should leave that question to someone with more sympathy for the "wake-up call" position. Presumably, the Socratic tradition would be seen as a chimera, something that promises Truth and doesn't deliver, because capital-T Truth just isn't on offer.
I thought about pointing out that the very problem I was raising was, of course, subject to the problem! But I decided it would be better to let that come out in the discussion. I agree completely. There are reasonable arguments to be made on both sides of the "Is rational agreement possible" question.
No. It is the condition under which the story unfolds.
Quoting J
No, we are left with an acknowledgement of the irreconcilability of viewpoints. The question then is, how best to live together given that there are differences that cannot be reconciled.
Quoting J
I don't want to derail the topic but the Socratic tradition does not promise Truth. It is based on the recognition that we do not know. The description of dialectic in the Republic seems to be making that promise, but, as I have argued elsewhere on the forum, we cannot use hypotheses to free ourselves from hypotheses. If we could Socrates would possess the knowledge he denies having.
We can even interpret the whole world, nature itself, as something fortunately based on contradiction and disagreement. I agree that contradiction and disagreement cause suffering, but this suffering is much less than suffering caused by dictatorship. Think of Hitler: he is the reference point of the attempt of our minds to get agreement from other people. Fortunately nature continuously disagrees with itself. This confuses us, our human nature needs a degree of agreement, comfort, love, support, but what we need is not agreement as a fundamental philosophical category. The fundamental philosophical category should be the opposite: disagreement, progress, research, looking for new and different things. The mentality that looks for agreement prepares racism, so that those who have different cultures, different mentalities, are seen as a problem rather than as a resource to make us and the world rich of variety and difference. Disagreement is the treasure that we should be looking for every day and every moment, more precious than gold and diamonds.
As I said, we are humans, we need degrees of comfort. For this reason we should be careful not to turn disagreement into a new metaphysics, a new system.
Quoting J
If disagreement puzzles and distresses any philosophers, this tells me that they are far from being good philosophers, they are just aspiring dictators that dont like to be contradicted.
Quoting J
Lets leave science to scientists and philosophy to philosophers. Philosophy can dialogue with science, of course, but a philosophy that wants to be science is just disguised dictatorship.
Quoting J
This inability to converge on a consensus is exactly what has made philosophy productive, a way for growth, discovery, progress, in any epoch.
Now you might answer: Well, I disagree totally with you and, as a consequence, you should be very happy about this. :grin: This would be just a trick, because disagreement from love for disagreement means wanting, at the end, and environment where disagreement is discouraged. So, in that case you would disagree with me, not because you want to encourage disagreement, but for the opposite. In other words, the disagreement of Hitler with Hebrews is much different from the disagreement of Hebrews with Hitler, they are the opposite of each other in their final result.
You can notice that my disagreement from you is an encouragement to discuss, explore different perspectives, enlarge our horizons; your disagreement from me would mean, instead, discouragement of plurality, invitation to close our minds and our horizons inside some kind of cage.
I agree. There is a reason The Allegory of the Cave comes early in the study of philosophy.
Disagreement is, I agree, predictable and ultimately desirable. However, there should be agreement on the step up of the problem, that is what is known, what is unknown, what is opinion. Disagreement on what we theorize is the unknown is natural.
Some interpret it to mean that we can transcend the cave, but others that we remain in it. Some despise Plato because no matter how deep they go they find only questions and not answers, others love him for the same reason.
So much could be said on this excellent topic, but I'll mention a possible sampling bias approach. The problems with solutions we agree on are for just that reason boring. We don't need to talk about them. If genuine inquiry is the settlement of belief in the context of genuine doubt, then we should expect conflict on interesting topics. It's maybe a bit like the jury being out for a long time suggesting the intricacy of the case.
Quoting Arne
And so do I. I was doing my impersonation of a disappointed post-modernist, trying to give voice to a common critique of Western phil. My own view is that Plato was the subtlest of philosophers, constantly engaging with the meta-philosophical questions I find so compelling. However . . . there is a way of understanding "the Socratic tradition" to mean "everyone in the West who came after Plato," and if you adopt this somewhat crude and Hellenistic conception, then yes, there's a strong streak of "Let's find the ultimate truth about everything" in that tradition.
Exactly. Disagreement is inherent to some issues. There would be no philosophy without it.
One of the responses to this problem that I like best is the line that stretches from Dewey through Rawls and describes a broadly liberal-democratic, pluralistic vision of justice and the state. For let's not kid ourselves, when viewpoints become irreconcilable, philosophy must become praxis. The way we disagree has ethical and political dimensions.
But then, in the spirit of "two reasonable views of (most) everything," Rawls, T. Nagel et al. have been the subject of some withering, well-observed dissents from Critical/neo-Frankfurt School philosophers and also from more friendly voices such as Martha Nussbaum.
Agreed. And therein is the Chimera (ultimate truth). In a sense, Plato's idealism is premised upon the notion that we are incapable of any certainty regarding "the ultimate truth."
As someone earlier pointed out there is agreement amongst realists or materialists and idealists, for example, but not between the different camps, obviously, because the different camps accept different things as being fundamental.
I don't know. I know what seems plausible to me, and I know that differs from what seems plausible to some others. I don't see myself as being concerned with persuading but just with trying to articulate what seems most plausible to me concerning metaphysical speculation about the nature of the real. I can easily understand that others with different foundational assumptions do not share my sense of plausibility.
I don't believe I have an agenda or preference for say physicalism vs idealism; perhaps if anything I'd rather live in an idealist world because it opens up the possibility of some kind of immortality. I get it that others don't like the idea of immortality at all, but I, for one, would choose to live forever if it were possible. That said I find physicalism more plausible, so I am not being motivated by wishful thinking. I often interact with others who I believe are motivated by wishful thinking, but I acknowledge I could be mistaken and even if I were correct, I don't imagine that i could ever convince them of that.
Obviously a very deep and difficult issue.
One point, it is the nature of dialect to explore a question from the perspective of competing arguments. That is why dialectic, in particular, has such a role in philosophy. For example Kant's critiques responded to the dialectic between empiricist (Hume, Berkeley) and rationalist (Spinoza, Liebniz) philosophers. In so doing he produced a kind of 'third way' which was not available to the protagonists of either side. In some ways, dialectic offers a kind of range of possibility, rather than a settled dogma.
Another point is that attaining philosophical insight might not itself be easy or even possible to communicate. It is often said that philosophy is hung up on problems it has been canvassing for 2,000 years 'without making any progress'. But how do you measure 'progress' in this matter? Perhaps some of the sages of yore reached a pinnacle of philosophic insight which is preserved in their writings - the later platonists come to mind - but those who now read them don't really understand them, and neither did many of their contemporaries. In which case the accusation of futility is not really applicable. It's that realising the insights that they try to convey is very difficult - unlike the fruits of scientific research, which are cumulative across generations, and yield practical results.
It could be argued that reason in contemporary culture lacks the kind of lodestar that was formerly provided by religion. After all, it was suppose to provide the summum bonum, the reason for all reasons. But then religion seems itself to have demolished that ideal, when viewed through the history of religious conflict in Western culture.
There's an old opinion piece in the NY Times that I often cite, concerning Habermas' dialogue with religion (as is well-known, he engaged in a number of dialogues with Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI). This was eventually published as the book An Awareness of What is Missing. Habermas is not endorsing any kind of wholesale return to religious faith, rather he says that while 'religion must accept the authority of secular reason as the fallible results of the sciences and the universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality, conversely, secular reason must not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith.'
In the NY Times column, some of these points are discussed:
So I suppose none of that points to a resolution - which, considering the topic, is kind of appropriate.
Not sure I agree with the premise of the OP to begin with, that "rational agreement is elusive", or what exactly that entails. I also don't see why this would be a problem for philosophy since it doesn't need to reach or even aim for a complete consensus. I consider rationality a deeply flawed concept, but in this context, it's the completely unrealistic conditions it sets up that lead to this predictable failure to produce a unanimous consensus across (humanity?) or (across a civilisation?).
This captures part of these unrealistic conditions. However, I'd point out that logic and rationality rely on language, which is part of why there's a lack of consistency that would lead to unanimous consensus. All could easily agree that "People should aim to be reasonable", and proceed from this point, using it as a foundation for further argumentation. A premise that will help lead all of us to the same conclusion. The issue is that the truth conditions for when one or something is "reasonable" are highly complicated and context-dependent.
The logic of when something is or isn't reasonable includes too much nuance and subjectivity for it to be reliable. The same applies to many words that are commonly used in philosophy. It's part of the nature of those words, and I don't see it as a problem to be resolved.
The other problem is that logical arguments aren't very powerful, and you can see this when doing anything competitive. A novice can make as logical an argument as can be about how to achieve good results in X, but with their limited experience, I'd still expect their results to be subpar. All logic must accomplish is to be convincing or compelling, and that's no guarantee of results. There's always going to be a process of trial and error, of endlessly seeking ways to improve. It's a neverending process. The lack of consensus is part of that process, and it exists even within a single person when pursuing improvement. Top athletes or professionals never stop searching for ways to improve or exploring and testing new ideas.
The final problem is that rationality is holistic, and logic can never be holistic. I can go into detail on that if you disagree, but that mightn't be necessary.
I generally find that the problem with rationality as a concept overall is that the term pretends to be non-evaluative, and is yet evaluative. The word is deceptive. The truth conditions of the term have very little to do with what the term is supposed to represent. I'm almost at a point where I refuse to debate the term anymore. Treating the word as synonymous with "logical" or "sensible" seems fairest to me, and that's how I interpret the term when it's used, usually regardless of whatever the person using it wanted to express.
Interesting that you mentioned Habermas, because I just bought a book by him called "Truth and Justification".
But for the OP questions, could it be the case that some interlocutors' judgements are overridden by their self-pride and emotions ignoring the rationality during the debates?
Even if their rationality tells their claims have logical flaws or not making sense, but due to their overriding emotions such as self-pride overshadowing the rationality, either the rationality is invisible to them, or they still maintain their claims even if it lacks rationality or truths in order to protect their self-pride, taking an ad hominem response. Therefore could it be the case, emotions are more forceful than rationality in the minds in some cases?
Having recently read Aristotle's Rhetoric I have been persuaded of the importance of rhetoric in service of the truth.
You said you did not want to pursue the use of rhetoric and emotion but unless you want to draw the limits of reason and its inability to lead us to agreement some attention should be given to rhetoric.
By all means, please share your thoughts on how rhetoric might enter the story here. In the OP I tried to sharpen the question about rationality in order to make it manageable and specific, but Rehg and Habermas both write about the importance of rhetoric and a hermeneutical investigation of rationality. In the same paper I quoted from ("Reason and Rhetoric in Habermas's Theory of Argumentation," in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time, Jost & Hyde, eds., 1997), Rehg devotes a number of pages to laying out his ideas of how "rhetorical devices might constitute an essential aspect of rational motivation."
:up:
I too would be interested in hearing more along those lines.
And why does this take the form of a question, when none of those concerned are interested in looking for a truth that they are not already in possession of?
This seems to be falling into the trap of considering reason to be purely objective. 'Competing reason' is an oxymoron. In my experience, competing claims are 80% a concern of psychology and 20% rationality at best... and that goes for philosophical argumentation too.
How do you mean it has been demolished, by what/whom?
Ive met many such people, interested only in confirming what theyre already sure of. Socrates met a lot of them too! I hope it doesnt characterize more than a fraction of good philosophers, though.
Quoting kudos
I probably didnt do justice to the distinction Habermas and Rehg want to make between rational argument and reasonable claim. Rational argument based on logical form (validity, if you like), with the premises put on hold as to their veracity, is indeed as objective as objective gets that is, its transparent and publicly checkable. But H & Rs idea is that, when you also claim veracity for the premises, youve moved from rational argument to reasonable claim, to making a plausible case that could be countered by an equally plausible alternative. And the gap question concerns whether theres a rational procedure for deciding between such competing reasonable claims.
The role of psychology is yet a different matter. In an earlier post, we have:
Quoting Fooloso4
This seems to be a similar idea to yours. But the gap question remains: You can grant that most of what we think is idiosyncratic to our psychology, and still ask whether there is a rational procedure that can mitigate this -- and also, as many have responded here, whether you would want to.
Your final quote about religion as a lodestar is @Wayfarer, not me, so I'll leave it to them to respond.
So in your view reasonable claim inherently involves a claim that can be countered. Is this really characteristic of it being reasonable, or only of it being a claim? If it were characteristic of reasonableness, then why does it necessitate multiple valid viewpoints? If that were the case, reason would be reference to pure subjectivity and thus not reason at all, no?
Different from what?
Again, I may be at fault here for not explaining precisely what the problem situation is. No one not me, not Habermas, not Rehg believes that any and all claims are automatically reasonable, that just because its possible to counter a claim in some fashion, this creates a plausible or reasonable position. Rather, the issue raised is meant to address a very familiar problem situation in philosophy, where excellent philosophers find themselves differing about very basic questions in metaphysics, morals, etc. H and R, if Im reading them correctly, are asking into how this comes about how it could come about, if all concerned are intelligent and rational and have been exposed to the same pro-and-con arguments on the question.
The idea is that, if the form of the argument is agreed to be valid (and of course there may be disagreement about that as well), then the problem must lie in disagreement about the premises which have not been argued for. Clearly, some premises have no initial plausibility (We know theres a hell because God needs to punish us deservedly) and most philosophers wouldnt waste time on them. So perhaps we should say that a reasonable claim might be one with a long, intricate history of back-and-forth among great philosophers, always being countered by other, equally reasonable claims. As I said, I think that is a very common thing to find in the history of Western phil.
But this emphasis on arguing for the premises seems merely to push the question back, or up, one level. For any argument in favor of the premises must itself start from premises, and so on. . . theres the problem. H and R want to know if there is a way out of the potentially infinite regress, and if so, whether it is rational in the sense that it can argued and justified to others who dispute the original claim. And as weve seen in this discussion, it may well be that an approach emphasizing rhetoric, persuasion on ethical grounds, or some form of hermeneutic analysis is required in other words, a new understanding of rationality would have to be brought into play.
Quoting kudos
I meant different from the question of whether theres a rational move that can be made in this situation. We can give as much weight to psychology as we care to we can imagine all our interlocutors are burdened by heavy baggage of personal biases -- but the question doesnt go away: Could they do something about it, in terms of argumentation, other than assert their idiosyncratic (Kant would say heteronomous) points of view? And would whatever they did be rationally convincing?
What I meant was that while religion used to provide the summum bonum, a universally-agreed highest good, this history of sectarian religious conflict has undermined that consensus. (Well, among other factors.)
The image that comes to mind while reading your post is that of the Blind Men and the Elephant. A plethora of perspectives will not yield unity of knowledge. So the ideal of Objectivity gradually emerged, to provide the god-like perspective that we now expect of Modern Science.
One postulated solution to that "perennial" conflict of opinions has been to politically agree on a single authority, whose opinion will overrule any lesser authority. So, primitive people bowed to the strongest man among them to decide controversial issues. But when strong-men resorted to violence, instead of reason, to reach consensus, the moderates looked for some higher authority. When Kings were found to work only on a tribal level, they postulated a singular Super-Human to rule them all. Yet unanimity of opinion continued to elude them.
20 centuries ago, the early Roman Church was internally divided due to various opinions on which "scriptures" were to be accepted as the "word of God". The result of their international Council of Nicea was the anthology we know today as "The Bible" : produced, after much wrangling and anathematizing. Since some concepts in that Authorized Version --- Trinity ; Body/Bread --- were contrary to common sense, Theologians began to approach The Discord Problem philosophically. But even applying Reason to matters of Faith did not result in unity of opinion. So, they agreed to accept the pagan Aristotle as a neutral authority on the nature of Nature. And the rest is history . . . . of excommunication & execution due to differences of opinion.
The moral of these stories may be to accept that human knowledge is incomplete, and subject to personal bias. But somehow we manage to move-on from these intersections of opinion. For example, in constitutional convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin made a last desperate attempt to pull unity out of the fires of passion. He cautioned his fellow delegates that it is human nature to consider themselves to be "in possession of all truth." Then he pleaded " that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument".
Perhaps, the few remaining schools of Philosophy, should include Philosophical Humility in their curriculum. With that fire extinguisher at hand, maybe we can keep chipping away at the walls of intellectual pride & prejudice that divide us. :nerd:
The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
The rest of the story :
In some versions, the blind men then discover their disagreements, suspect the others to be not telling the truth and come to blows. The stories also differ primarily in how the elephant's body parts are described, how violent the conflict becomes and how (or if) the conflict among the men and their perspectives is resolved. In some versions, they stop talking, start listening and collaborate to "see" the full elephant. In another, a sighted man enters the parable and describes the entire elephant from various perspectives, the blind men then learn that they were all partially correct and partially wrong. While one's subjective experience is true, it may not be the totality of truth.
Philosophical Humility :
Aristotle understood humility as a moral virtue, sandwiched between the vices of arrogance and moral weakness. Like Socrates, he believed that humility must include accurate self-knowledge and a generous acknowledgment of the qualities of others that avoids distortion and extremes.
https://positivepsychology.com/humility/
1. People are not innately rational beings. We're innately rationalizing beings.
What does this mean? It means that most of us have a conclusion that we want, and look for reasoning that leads to that conclusion. It takes less effort and makes us feel happy and smart. No one likes to be wrong. Everyone likes to be right. Therefore the path of least resistance for our own emotional well being is to justify what we already want.
2. Being rational is not innate to most people and can be emotionally unsatisfying. It takes training, discipline, and ethics.
Being rational often does not feel good. Being rational will expose you more often to how wrong you are than how right you are. It does not let you feel superior to others. It does not make you feel smart. All of that is status and ego, and a rational person understands those are irrelevant to an argument. It can cut out a lot of entertaining thoughts as you need to look at data or take rigorous steps. Its so EASY not to be rational. Instead of admitting to being wrong in an argument, you can use techniques to skirt around someone's rationality and defend your rationale. A lot of people rationalize that they are rational, but are doing so because it gives them a sense of feeling good about themselves. Thus, when an actual rational argument is presented that breaks their rationale on something, they become hostile. Its because they don't care about rationality, they care about their ego and sense of self as a "smart" person being threatened.
3. It is easy to rationalize and be convincing to others as good rationalizing persuades emotionally, which is more powerful than unemotional rationality.
Basically because we're all rationalizing creatures by default, its easy to get away with not being rational. You'll always find some people who agree with your points if you're entertaining or connect emotionally with another person in your argument. You can get a feeling of intellectual superiority, though it is undeserved. Its so much easier to fake being rational and convince people than actually be rational and convince people.
So to sum, we're not special rational beings, we're rationalizing animals that with work and effort, have the capacity to be rational. This capacity is incredibly difficult, as it must overcome ego, desire for status, and plenty of other emotions that we want for our own self-benefit. Being rational will not win you friends or applause. It will often times be met with silence, anger, or dismissal. Its so much easier and fun to be great at rationalizing while basking in the illusions of our own superiority.
Now, lets couple this with philosophy. Philosophy is loaded with words, phrases, and theories that are havens for rationalizers. We sort broad definitions that allow subjective interpretation between different groups of people. We even allow much philosophy to be "untestable" which basically means its a logic game of imagination. Unlike science which requires data and repeatability, many aspects of philosophy are subjective, and therefore fall into the, "I'm right because I believe this" trope.
Because philosophy can also be confusing and unclear in its definitions, it can make people feel intelligent by stringing a group of words together that sound smart. After you take the careful effort to dissect the word play, you can find nothing was said at all. As most people are untrained to be rational in philosophy, the default is for people to rationalize in philosophy, especially on these boards.
This causes people to create identities such as, "I'm a Hegelian Idealist," or other general nonsense that gives them a feeling of being smart and "rational". One can start to get a sense of having special knowledge over regular people. "After all, those materialists are the general masses who have never thought of this at all!" But its all a trap of ego.
Its not that rationality can't win after a long and protracted battle. Of course, if a rational argument does win in philosophy, its no longer philosophy. Its now something provable and testable, and often becomes a science. Philosophies goal is to destroy itself ironically, and there are a lot of people who don't want to see that. So much of philosophy that is floating around is the unprovable mistakes of the past that have made no progress to solving real problems of today, but can be fun to think about. That's my take on it anyway.
I think I understand this, but hope you'll say more. Tell me if this is close: One possible premise for a philosophical argument is "Philosophical arguments need to have premises that can be rationally argued for." So, in trying to evaluate that premise, we're immediately thrust into a self-reflexive loop that is also highly abstract. (I would have said "form without content," though you characterize it the opposite way.) I'm not sure whether, or why, this detracts from the argumentative weight of any one particular premise, or whether the "system" aspect is important here. I do see that it highlights a foundational problem about argumentation, and if that's mainly what you mean, it's a good point. But I may be missing something . . . please go on!
Quoting J
I think we would want to gain precision regarding this sort of claim. For example, presumably the constituents of this consensus are philosophers, no? And then what sort of bounds are we placing on our sample, specifically historically and culturally? My guess is that there is much more consensus than folks believe, and that the really significant exceptions come from historical or cultural deviations.
For example, one might look at the English tradition of moral philosophy and, seeing so many different views, conclude that there is a significant lack of consensus. But from the perspective of Elizabeth Anscombes Modern Moral Philosophy, there is a conspicuous consensus around the issue of consequentialism, and considered in this way, everyone in this historical-cultural epoch is narrowly aligned in a way that past generations would have seen as bizarre.
Quoting J
I dont find the lack of consensus odd.* I would want to highlight a few points: 1) The feebleness of the intellect in knowing difficult matters; 2) The falsity of individualism and the significant role that culture plays in reason; 3) The complexity and subtlety of the human mind, which is underappreciated; 4) That humans are not especially interested in truth; 5) The Fall.
I think the first point is self-explanatory, but I will try to give some minor elucidation of the others.
(2) In dialogue with Habermas, Joseph Ratzinger pointed to the cultural fracturing and the increasing disintegration of consensus, and gestured to the thing that he believed provided for Western consensus in the first place: Christian culture, with its twin roots of Judaism and Hellenism. If he was right then it is religio-cultural realities that generate consensus, not rationality per se. The idea that the individual achieves truth or rationality on their own, and that individuals are the proper constituent of consensus, is thus thrown into question.
(3) The power of the human mind and its ability to consider and reconsider things ad infinitum seems to be underappreciated. Also related are questions about the very nature of argument. The idea that "everyone has heard the same arguments pro and con" seems questionable to me, not only because exposure to arguments differs, but also because comprehension of arguments differs. I think Plato's Theaetetus is good in highlighting the way that an argument does not necessarily transfer understanding from one mind to another, and that such transfer is rather complex.
(4) There are lots of things that humans tend to find more interesting than truth and philosophy, such as food, drink, sex, power, glory, etc. I don't think philosophers are immune.
(5) This is the Christian claim that something is amiss about the human intellect and will. They don't work as they ought, and this is not limited to philosophy.
I wonder if the consensus about the idea that there ought to be a consensus is perhaps our own historical peculiarity, and is driven by the Wests secularism and its belief in The End of History.
* Aristotle looks at this phenomenon of divergence in Metaphysics IV-5
:cheer:
Glad you like the thread. Ambitious is being kind!
Your perspective here is a timely corrective. We dont talk past each other and disagree about absolutely everything, thats true. (And yes, I meant to raise this as a problem among philosophers, not the general public.) Perhaps theres more consensus than I realize. Perhaps, as you point out, the sense of grotesque wild pluralism (as Richard J. Bernstein put it) is local to our era.
But here is why Im skeptical. First, irreconcilable or incommensurable positions seem to have been around since 5th century BCE Athens, if Plato is to be trusted. Im one of those who reads (most of) the Platonic dialogues as illustrations of the conflict between a certain kind of rationality, philosophia, and those who distrust it, as played out in an actual polis where political consequences are very real. And even after bad actors like Thrasymachus leave the Republic, we still never really reach a definition of justice that could persuade those who are hostile to philosophia. And your point about the Theaetetus is also telling. So . . . disagreement over argumentation and its value are nothing new, I would say.
Second, what Im calling the Habermas gap really is like playing Whack-A-Mole. Consider Anscombe on consequentialism. You rightly use terms like from this perspective and considered in this way. But doesnt this merely reinforce the point that there are many equally talented philosophers out there who dont share her perspective and dont consider the matter in this way? Are we narrowly aligned around a consensus re consequentialism? Maybe. Darn it, theres not even a consensus around whether theres a consensus! . . . or so it seems to me.
Quoting Leontiskos
One last point, very speculative. I think the question about rational justification as a consensus-building technique may be internal to philosophy and not a historical phenomenon at all. I suggest that its part of the essential self-reflective character of philosophical thought which may also account for its apparent intractability. I find this speculation of yours about the West enticing, but I dont think that historicizing the problem can really answer it. For (and I know this is repetitive by now) the position that Theres a consensus around the idea that there ought to be consensus, aka We now know that consensus is a good thing, can be and has been disputed, by thoughtful philosophers.
Yes, exactly. In evaluating the premise based on the idea that it is part of one functional philosophical system among many equally valid and having this constitute its grounding lends it to an abstract domain of objectivity.
A philosophical system of any real value can't be self-objectifying in this way without falling into a lull of blind subjectivity of no serious use. I consider it a mistake to take the work of Kant, Hume, etc. as complete philosophical systems that are equally true and valid, while we play the neutral subject observing their writing as an interplay of conflicting logic.
Unlike the reductive-physical-measurable MATTER of Science, Philosophy is dealing with holistic-metaphysical-unbounded IDEAS. Using a physical/material metaphor, Plato advised philosophers to "carve nature at its joints". Unfortunately, the problems this thread refers to are Cultural, not Natural.
Scientific "facts" are Real & Objective, but Philosophical "truths" are Ideal & Subjective, hence Truth is irrevocably Moot. And, the "plateaus" may only be Logical or Categorical Boundaries, instead of Physical "joints". Hence, the perennial plaint remains unanswered : "what is truth". When two people can agree on what counts as true in a particular case, they may be in possession of enough truth to move on to the next question. :smile:
Ha! Well I think you also managed to keep it accessible and interesting.
Quoting J
Oh, I agree with that. I don't think it is local to our era, or new to us. I actually tend to think our own age possesses more consensus than past ages, perhaps because we value and emphasize mathematics and the hard sciences, where consensus is easier to come by. There have also been intentional moves towards consensus, such as the attempt to replace religion with rationality during the Enlightenment. And then there is the converging global culture, where multiculturalism yields to cultural pluralism, which in time will seem to yield to a large degree of cultural homogeneity (and this occurs not only with respect to culture, but also with respect to religion and morality).
In my last post I was rather trying to say that strong consensuses tend to hold within a single historical, cultural, and religious tapestry. The most striking lack-of-consensus seems to occur when we move outside of such an ideological framework.
Quoting J
I think at the time she wrote it was widely recognized that she was correct. But then her thesis led to a diversification in the field, where virtue ethics and deontology became more common in the English-speaking philosophical world. But yes, the question of how to specify consensus looms large. Anscombe was pointing to a meta-ethical consensus relative to prior history.
Quoting J
So would you say that the self-reflective character of philosophical thought intrinsically resists consensus? Or intrinsically resists rational agreement?
Quoting J
It seems to me that the OP is predicated on the idea that there ought to be a consensus, and that we are thus left to reckon with a conspicuous absence. When it comes down to brass tacks, this has a lot to recommend it. If truth exists and truth is knowable, then it should generate consensus. If there is no consensus, then it would seem that either truth does not exist or else it is not (generally) knowable. On Aristotle's account no one disagrees on first principles, such as the principle of non-contradiction, and this is how he tends to answer the strong anti-consensus view.
Yes, but. I tried to walk a fine line in the OP. I was trying to put the idea There ought to be consensus based on rational argumentation in brackets, so to speak, acknowledging its attractiveness but also holding it up for consideration and critique. What is the status of our concern for rational consensus, for something to which we can appeal which will or ought to command universal assent (Bernstein)? How should we view it? Is it the same thing as a desire for some unattainable, foundational objective truth? Or should we carefully examine other understandings of rationality? I guess I would summarize this as: Objective rational consensus may be the great unrealized dream of philosophy, or its nightmare, from which we struggle to awaken. I take the Habermas gap question to be a way of asking, What would it take in order to be able to realize the consensus dream?"
Quoting Leontiskos
Im not sure quite what Im saying here. Im trying to find a way to make the consensus question ahistorical, I think not simply something that waxes and wanes depending on time and place but this may not be the way to do it.
Theres no doubt that what you describe is accurate, and different eras do develop consensus relative to prior history, and then, perhaps, lose it. Could there be any progress to this dialectic? As to this possibility, Rorty puts the question well: Even when we have justified true belief about everything we want to know, we may have no more than conformity to the norms of the day.
I find myself wanting to say that its philosophy itself, understood as a particular way of thinking critically or self-reflectively, that ought to reveal why this kind of consensus is chimerical (if it is), not some historical analysis. The only reason I tried to call out self-reflection, previously, was because were all familiar with the queasy infinite-regress character of reflection, which seems analogous to the consensus-about-consensus question, or the how-to-reason-about-rationality question. Or, as another forum member pointed out, this may be the nature of dialectic, if dialectic indeed characterizes philosophy no synthesis can resist becoming the next thesis, to be countered by its antithesis. But I dont have a theory of this, or even a good insight.
It goes deeper than that. Imagine the college-educated, yet mainly sports-watching, hard-drinking, workaday man whose very existence is subsumed by the debates and beliefs of the intellectual debates/pursuits/insights over the last 2,500 years or so, but does not care about any of it. That is to say, these insights are ignored by reflex or default. Something has failed. Philosophy is backing up to the most fundamental questions of "why do anything"? Pursuits of metaphysics may be pursuits of meaning. Humans are able to question the very framework of their existence. This puts us in an existential situation not faced by other biological beings.
Most people don't want to go there. Einstein grappled with interesting questions not because his patent office told him to, but because he was fascinated and curious.
I don't disagree entirely but why do you say failed? Is your assumption that the average person like this should be interested in these matters? Do you draw a direct line from being able to think about 2500 years of intellectual debate and being a 'better citizen' or some analogue of that?
That's fair. My original idea wasn't to promote a form of historicism, but rather to shift the constituents of consensus from individuals to cultures. I want to say that a culture's belief is in some way more stable and more reliable than an individual's belief. So for me personally the question about consensus-between-cultures is more interesting than the question about consensus-between-individuals, but maybe it is clearer to simply speak about individuals, as the OP does.
Quoting J
I keep thinking of the two sentences I wrote that followed the one you quoted:
Quoting Leontiskos
Thus a very fundamental case for consensus is: <Individuals are able to know truth; truth is one; therefore individuals should agree in what they hold to be true>.
But there may also be reasons why we see consensus as attractive or concerning.
Quoting J
This is an interesting practical question, which comes at it from a different angle.
It may be worth pointing out explicitly that this is all about a meta-question, a kind of bird's-eye view of rationality. It seems to me that, with a few exceptions, everyone does accept that there should be consensus, and in their day to day lives they try to convince others of the things they hold to be true. Every time the average person enters into an argument they are working for the "consensus dream."
But the "Habermas gap" question has something like a God's-eye view in mind, and I think this is where the contradiction arises. It is a search for a programme that will ensure consensus, but no programme that ensures consensus is ultimately able to respect the autonomy of reason. That which is reached by a programme can only ever be a pseudo-consensus. The assumption that we could answer the question "What would it take?," seems to be an overreach in itself. We simply work towards consensus, and if it ever happens it will be the result of billions of individual arguments doing the hard work on the ground. I don't know that there is any special key. I don't know that there is any answer to the question posed at that level of abstraction. But perhaps I am misconstruing the question.
Else, my answer to the practical question would include things like, "Make philosophy part of the core curriculum in high schools and colleges," but I realize this is not at all what Habermas has in mind.
Its a matter of questioning whats given. Bad faith and all that. Humans are the only animals with self-consciousness (replete with concepts and self-talk, a level with symbolic language and syntax let's say). The move away from questioning first principles on meaning, life, ethics, and metaphysics would represent a sort of bad faith for simply following a certain circumstance one is born into.
In a way, I guess I can link this to why I am averse to Wittgenstein-style philosophy. It is a move away from questioning first principles to drowning in technocracy (language games in later Wittgenstein, and language positivism in early Wittgenstein). This is why I mentioned the patent office and Einstein. Einstein's curiosity is of interest here, not the demands put on him by his patent office, which, if anything, was a distraction from pursuing his curiosity, though necessary to survive at that moment.
So it's the move to questioning everything, and being curious, and having no bounds that moves us away from the bad faith of simply following the given, to be simply a technocrat when one can be a free (in the truest sense) thinker, questioning first principles. The questions, and ones attempt to solve them are important, even if agreement can't be had, ultimately. In that aspect, philosophy (not the technocratic kind but in its free form) represents the most human of capacities.