Dear Diary Moment 3/12/2020:
I recently listened to the audiobook for Paul Krugman’s Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight For a Better Future –as usual with his books: he was offering a collection of his blogs and editorials for the New York Times. And confession: this is clearly a matter of confirmation bias in that he brought up something I have thought for some time. The point he made was that when it comes to arguments for FreeMarketFundamentalism, we have to take a good look at the motivations of those making those arguments. This, of course (from the perspective of informal Logic), is considered a “Circumstantial Ad Hominem”. And within the framework of Logic studies, it makes sense in that while we generally get arguments for FreeMarketFundamentalism from those most likely to benefit from it: the rich. But we still have to take the argument on its own merit as if it could be argued by someone that didn’t share that benefit from it. We see a similar dynamic at work with the Tu Quoque argument that argues, in an ad hominem manner, that one be consistent with their selves. For instance, if were arguing a pro-choice position with a pro-lifer and found out that they had gotten an abortion their selves, it would be pointless for you to point that out since any argument they might make might be offered by someone that didn’t have an abortion.
However, while informal logic is a useful tool that can help one whittle an argument down to its strongest form, the whole discipline of logic tends to work in its own little world where everything falls into a predefined place while being mostly detached from the real world. There’s a kind of Marcusian operationalism at work in it based on an appeal to authority. Zeno’s logic makes perfect sense as concerns the arrow. But we’re hardly inspired to go prancing around between an archer and his target.
The political and social world is a different world altogether. In it we have to work from the pragmatic truth test as compared to the correspondence and coherence truth test. In this sense, the pragmatic truth test is a synthesis of the previous two and then some in that it is about what argument works: what seems sufficiently justified. But it’s not just a matter of whether an argument works; it is equally a matter of who that argument is working for and why.