Margins

Consider me convinced. But for all we know, you could still be wrong.

Could I though?

You could…in the sense that nowadays winning an argument means little more than continuously supplying reasons until the opponent is satisfied. It does not follow from a claim being well justified that it is necessarily immune from falsehood.

Look outside the window.

It’s just a sheep man.

What if I told you that’s not a sheep but a cardboard cutout of a sheep placed there deliberately to confuse?

What of it?

Well then your “justified belief” that there is a sheep outside this canteen is false. In fact, it seems nothing in any reasonably held belief guarantees its truth.

What if we avoid the subjective standard of justification like the plague? Instead, by elevating the standard of proof to that of absolute certainty, our ground for holding a particular conclusion will be infinitely stronger than if it only manages to convince some biased adjudicator in debates?

How do you mean?

Ideally, a proposition would be symbolised (A), then tested against its negation (~ A). Whip speeches are written around clashes – points of contention that can be resolved in favour of one side or the other. Whilst debating whether global warming is fact or fiction, depending on the points previously raised by all the benches, a potential clash would be whether state-funded papers on global warming is factually reliable given the existence of vested interest. In a sense organising debate rounds into clashes mirrors the logical representation of propositions into opposites, both being an attempt to map out the terrain of the opposition of ideas.

But notice while A and ~ A cannot both be true, i.e. (A & ~ A) is false, in casual debates cases often are not mutually exclusive. And so whether a team wins or loses turns on an adjudicator’s subjective assessment of their arguments’ soundness.

Also, binarising debates is not always a clear-cut process. While logical sentences are themselves unambiguous, in deciding which interpretation to accept as canonical – before binarising even begins – we are inevitably making a normative judgment. For instance, “I cleaned the room” cannot gratuitously be taken to mean “I did not clean the room” is false because the meaning of “I did not clean the room” is ambiguous. The speaker could mean any of the following:

(1) Someone cleaned the room, but not the speaker

(2) The speaker did something to the room but not cleaning

(3) The speaker cleaned something but not the room

(4) The speaker cleaned the room but the room did not become clean

There are circumventions, though none of which satisfactory. We can pick any of the above and roll with it, but the outcome of such an election would be arbitrary. We can ignore the ambiguity but that is just ostrichism at its most pathetic. We can consult the speaker, but not if they are dead of indisposed. All these have to do with the natural confusion of language that persists even after we have successfully translated sentences into symbolic logic.

Hume famously argues that truth cannot be established by logic and the meaning of words alone unless the negation of an empirical proposition results in a contradiction, either of an analytic or a synthetic nature. In order to claim that the negation of an empirical proposition contradicts some other logical truths, there has to first be non-trivial logical truths, preferably those that are empirically acquired. Otherwise we have no reason to believe that the empirical proposition the logical truth of which we are attempting to establish can ever become a logical truth. In other words, in order for there to be absolute truths, we have to first be certain that there exist truths that could be absolute. But if we have such knowledge, then justification becomes a triviality!

So…the void?

Yeah, very frightening indeed.