A serious diver would not approach today’s topic without a trusty scuba tank. However, I’ve come to accept that I’m a lazy old sea otter, holding my breath and dipping in and out of kelp forests, not daring to brave the trenches of epistemology in earnest.
The starting needle of my latest plunge is “a theory that explains everything, explains nothing”. Though this needle points towards something along the lines of falsifiable theories being the only ones that count, I won’t be boarding Karl Popper’s submarine here, or indeed any vessel that came before or after his. My intention is to link this idea with the idea of the “strongest-weakest arguments”—arguments that I consider to be simultaneously the strongest and the weakest one could make, which in turn hampers the discussions they were brought into.
Let me give a few examples outright. In a discussion about war (or any armed conflict), one could bring up that no matter what, killing children is wrong and should be stopped. Well, obviously. The argument is the strongest in the sense virtually no one would oppose it. It combines two extremes: the highest degree of innocence met with the highest degree of despicable violence.
At the same time, it is also the weakest argument. First, because it implicitly anchors all other arguments to be relative to the death of children, which to some may feel like outsmarting everyone, but in fact leads to nowhere—you didn’t win, everyone else just stopped playing with you. Second, because it is so universally applicable and universally accepted, it becomes a mere platitude—why, indeed, did one feel the need to explicitly state it? (This can be a rhetorical question or an earnest one, and answering it in earnest can be quite important, though it will inevitably derail the conversation.) And third, arguing from efficiency, since the killing has happened and is happening nonetheless, apparently forces exist that easily disregard the preciousness of a child’s life. It becomes obsolete to bring up that which has been discarded by others already, even when it is atrocious to have discarded it in the first place. With all its strength, this argument couldn’t prevent the fact—what shouldn’t have happened did already happen, so let’s update our priors, so to speak.
Another example is globalisation. It seems almost any current problem can be blamed on globalisation at least to some extent. For people my age and younger, it is the only state of the world we’ve ever known. So it is the strongest argument, in the sense that it permeates every crevice of our lives in ways glaring and subtle. But also, it is the weakest argument, as its omnipresence renders it meaningless: “because of globalisation” starts sounding like “because of gravity”, or “because of magic”.
Well then, are strongest-weakest arguments just trivial arguments? Something which is true, but doesn’t “help” us? The distinction for me is that trivial arguments are boring and easily ignored, while strongest-weakest arguments are not so easily dismissed. As seen in the examples above, this persistence can be on the basis of emotion or immersion—a moral, or a systemic absolute, which is either palpable for all, or compelling enough for most to concede. In other words, it is much harder to shrug off a strongest-weakest argument, in no small part because the vast majority of people are bothered by it themselves.
To summarise: something true, but knowing it doesn’t help us, yet we still want it addressed, is a likely candidate to be used as a strongest-weakest argument.
Some other examples off the top of my head include: our persistent forgetfulness of history; our near-sighted way of making decisions for the future; our lack of imagination to tackle problems and do reforms. Incidentally, all three of these point to our human limitations, and sure enough, to refer to human limits is itself a strongest-weakest argument. That’s the subset containing all these examples.
Is it then, that my so-called strongest-weakest arguments are simply ways of bemoaning the state of affairs, or the human condition? Indeed, such is often their origin. Continuing on this path, we can say they are not arguments at all, but disguised complaints. I can see how one position would be to just dispense with them altogether—if not through the “true, but trivial” route, then through the “true, but irrelevant” route. This happens if eventually the two parties agree on the irrelevance of the statement. Which, by definition of “not easily dismissed”, is the more unlikely case. Also, conceding to this approach is made even more unlikely if doing so is perceived as a personal failure, or if it blocks one from following their train of thought to a place where both parties can be engaged again.
So if both parties don’t agree to dismiss it, then the statement becomes an argument. To make matters worse, the willingness of one to dismiss it is sometimes interpreted as disagreement with the statement itself, which then becomes a new point of contention. One is framed as opposing something so strong or so evident that their opposition seems untenable, while at the same time the other is framed as affirming something so weak and obscure, its mere mentioning warrants its worth of serious consideration. This is the dichotomy, leading to a stalemate state, that I am trying to capture with the term “strongest-weakest argument”.
…Alright, if dismissal is one helpful approach, but “not easily dismissed” prevents that, what other options are there? No lazy ones, I fear. Precise language, precise goddamned language. And patience, goddamned patience. At which we’ll keep failing—true, but trivial. And also true, but irrelevant—for we’ll keep trying. I, for one, have found that I much prefer to force myself to dive as deep as my limited breath will take me, than to wait ashore, succumbing to a promise for a perfect submarine.