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Online meta-discussion is full of ideas and terms from debate — accusations of “moving the goalposts”, citations of logical fallacies. When people withdraw from discussion, they get accused of not really believing in their own ideas — arguing in bad faith, or fearing that their claims won’t stand up in “the marketplace of ideas”. How did unstructured communication with strangers become tinged with the expectation that it would follow the rules of our most elaborately artificial rhetorical spectator sports? And why do we, when communicating with strangers, default to considering such communication an argument?
The west likes debates. In particular, anglophone enlightenment thinkers like those who initially engineered american cultural norms inherited ideas about the use of rhetoric in the search for cosmic or metaphysical ground truth from Plato and Descartes, adversarial collaboration in countering errors in science from Bacon and Occam, adversarial argument in law from English judicial arrangements, and competition as a factor in driving down prices from Adam Smith — so Americans of an intellectual bent (especially educated libertarians, many of whom have approximately the same set of ideas about how the world ought to be as Thomas Jefferson minus the support of slavery, and some of whom also share Jefferson’s ideas about slavery) are especially prone to going all-in on this intellectual form of trial-by-combat.
Of course, we know from experience that regular trial-by-combat is not a great way to arrive at justice. Generally speaking, the stronger party will win, regardless of who’s right. If the parties are evenly matched, luck plays at least as big a role as whatever one might gain in confidence or motivation from seeing themselves as right. And, we wouldn’t even be getting to the stage of formalized combat without both parties thinking they were right (or, more rarely, thinking they could get away with being wrong)! Informal debate has similar problems, which is why none of the traditions of adversarial search for truth mentioned above are very much like it.
Plato (and his sock-puppet Socrates), when they present their own ideas, are not convincing to modern readers; nevertheless, when they tear down other people’s arguments, they are fairly compelling — why? Because the socratic method does not actually involve attack or competition. Instead, it involves identifying key gaps in understanding and asking them to be filled. A perfectly consistent model (regardless of whether or not…
