Tag Archives: Adversary Paradigm

General discussion

The airing of grievances

We’ve had a few posts up lately about the adversarial paradigm of argument (links: one, two). Today will be another one. The others discussed the problems resulting from treating arguers as opponents, today’s will discuss the problems in not viewing them this way (when appropriate.

Vox.com ran an article on CNN, where it blamed them for treating politics “like a sport.”

In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, CNN president Jeff Zucker described the network’s approach to covering politics, saying, “The idea that politics is sport is undeniable, and we understood that and approached it that way.” That politics-as-sport approach has placed a heavy emphasis on drama, with much of CNN’s programming revolving around sensationalist arguments between hosts, guests, and paid pundits.

That fighting-based approach to covering politics has created a huge demand for Trump supporters willing to appear on the network, which is why CNN hired Trump supporters like Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany to defend Trump full time.

Another dominant metaphor for argument is war: arguers are adversaries, positions are attacked and defended.  It’s similar to sports, but the focus is not on the entertainment of the spectator (I hope), but rather on the viciousness of the contest. Scott wrote a paper on this.

In both cases the focus is not on the quality of the reasons, but rather on some external features–either the joy of the audience in the case of sport or the ability to extract concessions in the case of war.

This is generally bad news for arguments. But not all arguments are about truth telling, as the author supposes:

All of this would be fine and normal for a network like ESPN — but when you treat politics like a sport, you end up with news coverage that cares more about fighting and drama than it does about serious truth telling.

I’d be happy to find out when CNN had ever been about serious truth telling.  But seriously, the context of these CNN discussions is scandal and audience-driven (because of advertising, the need to pay Wolf Blitzer millions of dollars, etc.). This should be a clue as to their focus.

So, in CNN’s defense, they specialize in a subgenre of argumentation called the quarrel. The point of the quarrel is not to settle the truth of some proposition but rather to air grievances. The problem really consists in the viewers (and participants) thinking that this is supposed to be an argument.

General discussion

Not any kind of game

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Here is some advice from  Joshua Parsons, who passed away this week at the too-young age of 44.

In the bad old days philosophers used to invite speakers to seminars just in order to show off to each other by tearing strips off the speaker. It was a wonder anyone ever accepted an invitation to give a talk anywhere! The most prized skill a philosopher could have was to be able to utterly demolish a speaker’s argument; a good speaker would be one who could resist this process, or if that was not possible, then accept defeat with good grace. You’ll still hear old-timers reminiscing about this fondly: “Back in ’58, X gave us a lunch time talk on whether or not jars were a kind of bottle! Y interrupted 15 minutes in with a counterexample, and X said that he was refuted and there was no point in continuing so we all went to the staff club early for cigars and sherry!”

Point-scoring was big then. The idea is that philosophical discussions are a zero-sum game: either someone wins a point and looks clever and someone else loses one and looks foolish, or it is a stalemate, and no one likes a stalemate. This is of course completely false – philosophical discussions are not any kind of game, but a collaborative attempt to uncover and solve serious intellectual problems.

In my view, point-scoring behaviour is one of the biggest blights on the philosophy profession. The way philosophers are trained to conduct conversations in seminars lends itself to point-scoring, which is how the whole sorry idea got started in the first place. Think back to graduate school. At first you were afraid to ask questions in seminars because you had hardly understood a word of the talk, and everyone who was asking questions seemed to have understood it better than the speaker and have a trenchant criticism. Then your supervisor told you that the only way to learn was to muck in, and that she was expecting you to ask a question at the next seminar. At the paper, you listened very carefully to find something that you were sure you understood to ask a question about. You tentatively asked your first question. To your surprise, the speaker took you seriously and famous Prof X asked a follow up on your question. Your supervisor was proud of you. That was good! After that you tried your hardest to think of a question in every seminar. A few years later you had mastered the technique, not only thinking of a question, but anticipating the speaker’s response and ready with a follow-up too.

An interesting thought here is the mercenary nature of these discussions–you don’t actually have any points to make, you need to come up with some because that’s your job (or so you think). You come up with objections that may not be your objections, but they are objections nonetheless.

A further thought might be this: perhaps the author of the paper didn’t care about their point themselves. They had to come up with something to give a talk. That would make it a game for them, I think.