said I: a separate point: I've found that some interpret efforts at rational argumentation as being efforts at "privileging" a world-view. silly.
Ian writes:
>and who, pray tell, gets to define what rational argumentation is? :-) <
The meaning is pretty clear if you pay attention to the context of what I wrote: there's a difference between arguing with someone (using words, references to logic, perceived empirical reality, etc.) and _forcing_ a view on to someone (as with a privileged class using indoctrination in order to legitimate its power). In addition, there's a difference between rational argumentation and irrational argumentation (e.g., those that appeal to authority, engage in _ad hominem_, mysticism, ambiguous language, illogic, etc.)
usually, serious rational argument does not involve deciding that some proposition is valid or true (except deductively, i.e., given its assumptions, which themselves may be invalid, of course). Rather, it decides which propositions are invalid (e.g., astrology's claim that the stars affect our individual destinies in a meaningful and nontautological way). The propositions that survive as "non-invalid" aren't really "true" as much as being working hypotheses and the like. These working hypotheses will likely turn out to be wrong later, and to be replaced by new working hypotheses. (It's crucial to remember that more than one working hypothesis may exist at any one point, while they may contradict each other.)
>I once saw two physicists, one a Nobel Prize winner, nearly destroy an
overhead projector in the course of intense and very abstract/rational
argument debating the minutae of Bell's theorem. The invective was
palpable in the room.<
this was not rational argumentation, except perhaps in name. The only reason this story is relevant is because it shows that those who say that they're rational are often not. We knew that. There's no reason to believe anyone's own self-presentation.
>We need to learn a lot more about our brains/bodies before we can come to
some consensus on just what rational argumentation consists in/of.<
No "consensus" is needed. Such a consensus is impossible, anyway, since there will always be mystics, dogmatists, fools, etc.
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