Once upon a time, I had a conversation with a buddy of mine that went something like this:
Buddy: I'd like to schematize the Bible in logical form to point out the contradictions to Christians.
Me: I'd like to schematize the US Constitution in logical form so we could explicitly logically check any given law for Constitutionality.
Buddy: That's a great idea. Let's do it. Now.
Long story short, my buddy and I spent the next few months of a Florida summer working on that project. We finished it. Every single line. Every single amendment. He even wrote a paper that got published in a scholarly journal.
I don't usually think small. Nor, for that matter, do I tend to attempt to resolve intellectual conflicts by quibbling over accidental or extrinsic issues. I studied philosophy because it is a temperamental affliction with me: I need to get to the bottom of things. If I want to know the Constitutionality of a law, then, well, I'm looking for strict logical consistency with the COTUS. And if that means I have to schematize the damned thing myself (or with help from a really smart, really hardworking, and really disciplined friend who keeps kicking my ass to stay on the project) then, well, that's what's going to be done.
I'm getting really tired of discussing politics with people who disagree with me.
Now. There's a truism in philosophy that, when two sides in an argument keep running into an impasse - usually defined as an explicit logical contradiction, but there are variations - it usually means that both sides are relying upon the same assumption or set of assumptions that are, themselves, self-contradictory. Two examples with which I am personally very familiar, and which constitute my strongest areas of interest in philosophy, were the Idealism/Empiricism debate in the philosophy of mind, and the Libertarian (Free Will)/Determinism debate.
While I'm grossly oversimplifying literally centuries of intellectual labor here, it took Kant to mediate the former debate with his Transcendental Idealism by arguing that the mind imposes a structure on empirical reality rather than deduces certain categories from it (presaging, by two hundred years, the cognitive revolution in science); and the Compatibilists to mediate the latter, arguing that determined agents can nonetheless be judged according to categories of responsibility normally reserved for free agents. It's all very complicated, but, well, there ya go.
If this sounds a little bit like the Hegelian dialectic of Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis, I suppose it might. I'm not a Hegel expert so I'm not going to judge. But, what does this have to do with politics? Well, for years, to me, disagreements between Liberals and Conservatives have had the same flavor as the old debates between Idealists and Empiricists or Libertarians and Determinists. And I kept ending discussions with very smart, very articulate people with either an "agreement to disagree" or, more often than not, them going away exhausted. I tend to plumb the depths of the REASONS WHY we disagreed quite a few levels deeper than they were prepared to go. It's that "being a philosopher" thing again: I need reasons. I need to KNOW, more deeply, where we're not in agreement; I need to get to its fundamental basis. I need to get to the GROUND of what you and I think, and why we don't think the same.
So, I'm getting really tired of discussing politics with people who disagree with me. We either spin our wheels around the same topics or one of us goes away frustrated. And I wanted to DO something about it, try to figure out the deep reasons why these disagreements keep arising. Now, to the extent I have thought about the differences between Liberal and Conservative thought, I do not think that all the disagreements in policy or cultural inclination can be reduced to any single category. However, there is at least one entire class of disagreements where I think the approach of looking for commonly shared yet inconsistent beliefs might not only be possible, it might be quite fruitful:
Economic Policy.
I am a bit puzzled by the analogy with transcendental idealism and compatibilism. In large part b/c both of these views strike me as false -- or at least not at all likely given other positions you might hold. You have to buy into Kant's views of space and time, and I doubt your physics self would agree to that. And the compatibilist, well, I'll get to that in a second.
ReplyDeleteYou write: "it (the impasse) usually means that both sides are relying upon the same assumption or set of assumptions that are, themselves, self-contradictory."
This claim, call it (J), just strikes me as wrongheaded in the first place. You have created a false dilemma for yourself. If we agree on the assumptions, then we have either made a logical error in coming to different conclusions OR we have additional assumptions getting us to those conclusions.
I think both possibilities are explanatorily relevant in many cases. I think often people make logical errors in understanding what certain principles logically entail. For example: One might believe in the principles of libertarianism. Some people, Nozick, thinks the general principles lead to paradox. Here's a good article from _Mind_ discussing it: http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/content/LXXXVIII/1/419.extract
So, in these cases, the person just doesn't understand their political views. I like to think about conservatives who believes that anyone and thus everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I think it is true that any one person could do it, but it seems metaphysically impossible for everyone to become a multimillionaire. So, the move from any one person could do it to everyone could do it isn't good, and it makes for bad policy.
Finally, and I think this is where most of the disagreements happen, is that people at an impasse really have different principles and beliefs about facts. Imagine that you believe the world will end with a rapture before your life ends. You would think your obligations to the earth and future generations would be different than a person who thinks there will never be a rapture.
So, I think you really need to keep in mind that the sources of disagreement or impasse really comes in at least two guises: logical confusion of one's own beliefs and different beliefs.
I kind of see why compatibilism and TI seem like a relevant analogy to make, but I think it is the wrong way to go. Moreover, I think you want to do more than explain away a disagreement. You want to make a normative claim about what the *best* policy is. And that is going to get you into as much disagreement as just about anything else. Because people disagree about the purpose of economic policy and what is best for the members of society. But I'll stop now...
I was gonna mention what Chris said. No need to be redundant. ;)
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