Over at personal responsibility Diatribe posted a criticism of a school district making policy changes to be more sensitive to all religions. Darwin responds with:

That’s the great thing about small, local governments- they can respond quickly and drastically to small numbers of complaints. I guess that’s why you love local government so much.

Diatribe response:

I will take small local government decisions over big government decisions any day of the week. Does not mean I have to agree with everything the small government says. I thought I have mentioned this to you like a thousand times?

More like 10,000 times.

It’s a weak argument to draw spurious inferences for the purpose of making one side look contradictory. While its true we support localizing power as much as possible it’s a spurious inference to say we must approve of how those local entities use that power.

Because I’m such a nice guy I will give you the argument you are seeking. We favor keeping things local because that allows the people most directly affected to control the problem. This implies a local knowledge of the situation that outsides are not privy to. We criticize local policy, but as outsiders we normally don’t have access to the reasoning behind the policy. Such criticism reflects the same wrongheaded attitude that one finds in national policy makers wishing to influence local law by federal legislation.

Although, for the most part this argumentation is not very strong either. Most importantly is the fact that we are not advocating that the coercive force of the state be brought to bear on local policy we disagree with. In a sense our criticism is toothless.

Secondly, this argumentation is weak because it leads to a dead end. The argument leads to the problem of not being able to criticize anything you are not directly involved with. Effectively it’s multiculturalism and tolerance writ large. These concepts infer relativism which forbids all criticism not directed at the self. This argumentation directs to the outcome that bloggers of Enableate and Personal Responsibility should not be posting on things they are not directly involved with if they wish to avoid charges of hypocrisy. Of course then you, as the reader, are left with no content on this site to argue about. Your argument succeeds, but leads to an unsatisfactory outcome for all.

The way it works is we believe in localizing power as much as possible while at the same time criticize local regions when they make policy decisions we disagree with. You as the reader should not make meta-counter arguments of hypocrisy because of the very nature of the blog leaves us vulnerable to such contradiction. Instead, you as the reader should step away from the meta-argument and back into the posted argument and discuss the policy argumentation found therein.

Of course the problem here is that you don’t see anything intrinsically wrong with Diatribe’s position, but you still wish to be contrarian. This is why we get perverted argumentation that’s outcome is the prohibition of posting on anything any of us are interested in discussing. In a way you are cheating though, because a contrarian’s job is to find errors in argumentation within the argument. By steeping outside the argument you are ignoring the constraints of the argument in a desperate attempt to find any criticism of the position. A more virtuoso contrarian maneuver is to work within the argument.

Argumentation as Brinkmanship

Using meta-arguments is a common strategy employed both by Darwin and Dan in criticizing our posts. Dan has mentioned to me on several occasions that his argumentation is more of a mental exercise than an attempt at persuading other to his position. Darwin has admitted as much to me as well. If true, it’s easy to see how one would end up arguing a position that leads to a silly outcome. If the point or your argumentation is a playful game of brinkmanship then one will play an argument even with a perverted outcome merely to keep the game going. This kind of argumentation is insensitive to being persuasive and to this end ignores the apparent unconvincing perverse outcomes.

Ultimately I prefer this treatment of argumentation over the arguer that holds their position to be absolutely true, and therefore unwilling to entertain discussion. Unfortunately viewing argumentation as merely a game is problematic primarily because it leads to digressions. Often times these digressions are what lead to the perverted outcomes. For someone like me, in which I’m more than willing to entertain all modes of argumentation, but at the same time wishes my argumentation serves a point I find the meta-counter argument silly yet willing to argue against it. However, at the end of the day theses kinds of arguments are no more convincing then the ardent supporter that is only capable of inflexibly making the same argument all the time.

But this really is just a reformulation of a previous argument. One must have the good sense to judge the overly general argument superior to the nuanced digressive one. Sometimes Rush is right.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 11:09 am and is filed under Argumentation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.