#43: Persuasion and Justification

The psychology of titling is such, I think, that when one constructs a conjunctive title, one tends to put the “more important” conjunct first. Thus you might expect that I would have entitled this piece rather “Justification and persuasion.” But that would be because you begin with an automatic bias in favor of justification inherited from an ancient invidious comparison between the two.

The rot began among the Socratic Greeks, and probably within the writings of Plato himself, who distinguished between philosophers, the good guys, and the sophists, the bad guys. The sophists were itinerant teachers and lecturers who taught the skills of rhetoric for pay. “Real” philosophers contemptuously dismissed them for teaching not “the Truth,” but the skill of “making the worse argument appear the better.” Nonetheless, some of the sophists were very sophisticated indeed and commanded even Plato’s attention and respect. The distinction between “mere cleverness” and “truth” has persisted, however, through the millennia, as has the distinction between persuasion and justification.

Since justification plays such an important role in science, both in the form of induction and deduction, and since science was extended to social, political, and moral issues in the exuberant “scientistic” enthusiasm of the 18^th century, we have come to expect justification in arenas where it simply does not apply.

Conservatives have foolishly accepted the justification challenge in the form laid down by progressives, a challenge they were doomed to lose from the outset. Progressives, on the other hand, derived an equally foolish consequence from the conservative inability to justify. Progressives believed (and still believe) that the inability to justify entails an absence of a “right” to defend!

They reason in this way: You have a right to defend your values or way of life only if you can justify your “belief” that it is better than your opponents. Of course, there is shrewd calculation in this foolishness, since it is the intention of the progressives to paralyze the conservative.

The tacit assumption of both sides is the same as that of the 18^th century “enlightenment” scientism, namely that all of human issues are susceptible of “rational” determination.

As I have written earlier, this is simply false. Values are no more than personal preferences, no different in kind from culinary preferences. They are not susceptible to rational determination because they are not strictly speaking beliefs at all. They are rather emotive and behavioral dispositions. In ordinary language, we call these dispositions “preferences,” and that is how I will refer to them. Any attempt to derive either a general principle or a particular prediction is always subject to rejection.

The progressive would like to be able to generalize from individual human judgments, beliefs, and actions, and then to force regularity on people by means of those generalizations. The problem is that the respondent is clearly entitled to say no. Perhaps the case in question is slightly different or perhaps he has just changed his inclination. He doesn't have to defend his response! De gustibus non est disputandum. I’ll adapt this to read: “there’s no disputing preferences.”

This is truly a Solomonic resolution of the impasse between conservatives and progressives: they both gain something and both lose something. The conservative loses the claim that his preferences have absolute justification (say “divine”), which is welcomed by the progressive; the progressive, on the other hand, loses any basis for demanding it of him, which is welcomed by the conservative.

There are three basic reasons why the demand for justification continues to be so readily tolerated where it does not belong.

The first reason is the one already mentioned, namely that our enlightenment tradition has promoted “reason” (in some counterfeit of “science”) as the self-evident panacea for all human ailments. We still suffer the side effects of this panacea, which belongs rather in the pharmacopeia of the naturopath, than in the resources of a genuine social physician.

The second reason is justification does have a legitimate role within the context of purely legal decision making, this being so because the context supplies the necessary and sufficient conditions under which one outcome is “right” and another “wrong.” In this respect, justification, like law and like logic, have game-like qualities. Progression towards a destination in each of these is governed by rules accepted by the participants.

The third reason brings the discussion to full circle. The third reason is that both induction and deduction are frequently used within the context of persuasion.

If I wish to move you over to my side of an issue, there seem to be at least two ways in which I can approach the process. I call the first one the utopian one, and in its finest form (say the Spinozistic one), it attempts to take you from utterly unassailable axioms through deductive steps to an unavoidable conclusion. This is axiomatic wisdom and ethics. It doesn’t work as persuasion, if only because it is always possible for the respondent to have recourse to Moore’s device if he doesn’t like the theorem reached by this method.

The other, and most common method, is that of seeking assumptions, beliefs, and preferences in the respondent’s warehouse of attitudes, not even necessarily ones that one shares, which have the salutary effect of either indicating inductively or entailing deductively the proposition one is marketing. This the pragmatic approach to persuasion which is not inherently rational, but which might use rational as well as non-rational devices for a strictly causal objective: giving a person a disposition to go our way. In the utopian method, an error of inference disqualifies the result; in the pragmatic method, errors of inference are easily dismissed.

But more to the point, persuasion is the real-world method of managing human relations, not Socratic dialectic. In the real world, when faced with counter-intuitive argumentation, non-brainwashed respondents dismiss the results whether or not they can see clearly where the fallacy lies. Intuition trumps argumentation. As Hume put it so beautifully in his footnote on Berkeley, “all his arguments, … admit of no answer and produce no conviction. Their only effect is to cause … momentary amazement and irresolution and confusion…”.

The so-called progressive hopes to change the population in such a way that this survival adaptive mechanism in the human animal is neutralized and he becomes easy prey for the specious argument and counter-intuitive conclusions. The progressive wants to create a world in which “justification” determines belief, not persuasion.

Let’s reverse the nasty trend that originated in that much over-rated and mis-named century, the “Enlightenment,” and encourage those around us to return to their natural and spontaneous preferences, letting them know that these need no defense.