New Version: In keeping with the theme of this essay, this is a revised version based on edits from before and
after a Human Values Network meeting discussion.
This is the result of a collaboration, without giving credit to
individuals who made the contributions. (People are welcome
to add comments at the end of this article.)
Summary: Are debates between adversaries the best way to
establish what is true? Is it better to use more cooperative
methods?
Is there a problem with the way the arguments and discussions are made
when they are done in an adversarial, confrontational way? Prof. Martin Lenz
argues in the following excerpts from his article that there are problems
with the way philosophical arguments are done. Interested readers should
follow the link and read the entire article. (Prof. Lenz will have a book
coming out soon.)
Maybe I should explain what I mean by an adversarial argument,
for people who are not involved in science or academia.
A classic example of an adversarial situation is a legal
trial in which there is a prosecution and a defense lawyer
and they are opposing each other, in an effort to give both
sides to a judge or jury, to come to a decision that is reasonable.
Academic adversarial situations don't have both sides in the same
room, and they can go over decades. One scholar may write a paper
or give a talk at a conference that makes a hypothesis to explain
a observation. Perhaps at the same conference, or over time in
print, others criticize or point out limitations. These can lead
to arguments or disagreements that can last for years.
Being known for a discovery may help the academic get grants or funding,
so there may be a monetary reward. But that reward is usually a secondary
consideration. The main motivation is to be known for a discovery, for
getting a reputation for expertise, and for recognition among peers.
Exerpts from article at
https://aeon.co/ideas/the-adversarial-culture-in-philosophy-does-not-serve-the-truth
Professor of history of philosophy explains why adversarial
criticism is antithetical to truth
By Martin Lenz
This article was originally published at Aeon and has been
republished under Creative Commons.
Written January 12, 2020
"Philosophical discussions, whether in a professional
setting or at the bar, frequently consist of calling out mistakes in
whatever has been proposed.... This adversarial style is often celebrated
as truth-conducive. Eliminating false assumptions seems to leave us with
truth in the marketplace of ideas...
"I doubt that it is a particularly good approach to philosophical
discussions.... [It implies that] Claims are either true or false;
arguments are either valid or invalid....
"...A more fluid attitude towards authorship [is] if you discuss an
idea among friends, tossing out illustrations, laughing away criticism
and speculating about remote applications.
"The appropriate metaphorical resources for naming this philosophical
practice should not be derived from warfare but from playgrounds, where
reinvention and serendipity guide our interactions."
"[But then] whose idea is it at the end of the night?..."
This last point gets into the issue of why people do this sort of thing
in the first place, namely to get credit for the idea or "own" it. They
are remembered for the idea. They want to be remembered by getting their
name on a Law or Principle or Hypothesis. This is a source of meaning for
people's entire careers as scientists or scholars in some subject area.
Lenz makes good points but for somewhat wrong reasons, in my opinion.
For a lot of problems in society, the solution has to come from getting
people to cooperate to act together. If one smart philosopher comes up
with an answer but can't convince other people to do it, then it won't
solve the problem. If he/she can address criticism but not in a way
that is inspiring and charismatic, people won't follow the lead even if
they can't see a logical flaw. They must be convinced to buy into the goal
and the path forward. This is a reason that, in business, a committee is
needed to work on a project, because if many people don't agree to work on it,
the project won't get done.
That doesn't mean that there aren't questions with true/false answers
that can be decided by adversaries. That's the way the court and legal
justice system is set up to determine if someone is guilty or not guilty.
This also leads into another point that Lenz makes. When a group solution
is accepted and then modified by a group discussion, the idea doesn't belong
to one person any more. One person may have originated the initial idea. But
the person can't continue to claim ownership if there are contributions from
many people.
In the world of science, this issue is addressed by having multiple authors
on publications. Usually, there is no notation about which author worked
on which part of the paper. In movie projects, there are credits at the end
that go on for many minutes with details about who had which jobs. But if
you buy a product like an iPhone, it has a company logo on it, but who
knows what person actually worked on which parts? There may be a wonderfully
innovative part of the phone that no one knows who came up with the idea.
It is also a problem of coming up with new ideas and finding new ways to
encourage new ideas and new ways to do things that can solve social problems.
As Lenz wrote, new ideas come from a sense of play, which takes an extra
kind of trust and collaboration.
Are the ideas for free, and people only get paid for the work of developing
them? Some say that Ideas are a dime a dozen, so they are cheap. Is work
the only thing that is paid for?
Patents can be filed for new inventions, but the inventor doesn't get paid
unless there is actually a product or service that is developed and sold
based on the patent idea.
Getting solutions to work, like getting videos to "go viral," is an entirely
different effort from coming up with an idea. It comes from marketing to
promote an idea. It is getting others to be excited about it.
If people are only paid for promoting ideas, but not for coming up with
new ideas, will we have a society that advertises but doesn't create?
As an example, I just heard a lecture on Da Vinci. He had a lot of
engineering drawings of inventions with exploded diagrams showing the
parts to machines. Even now, it is not known whether he actually
invented the machines, or whether he just drew machines that were
in common use that someone else built. Is he getting some credit
just because he was the guy who wrote it down and made the drawings?
During the group discussion, people pointed out a number of ways
that ideas and development work are done without giving credit to
anyone. Open source software is written with input from many people.
Glenn Curtiss developed many inventions for airplanes in the 1910-1920's
that were shared, partly with competitors like the Wright Brothers'
company, to help build new planes, partly for the World War I effort.
Curtiss was very successful. Jonas Salk didn't parent polio virus
in order that everyone had access to it.
Thomas Edison took a lot of credit for inventions that were
collaborations of his research lab. See recent movie "The Current
War" between Edison and Tesla.
There are collaborations, brain-storming sessions, and networking
at conferences, in addition to presentations by individual or
groups of authors.
There is an expression that good managers try to give
credit to others rather than take credit for themselves to be successful.
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