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THE FOG OF DEBATE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 June 2022
Abstract
The fog of war—poor intelligence about the enemy—can frustrate even a well-prepared military force. Something similar can happen in intellectual debate. What I call the fog of debate is a useful metaphor for grappling with failures and dysfunctions of argumentative persuasion that stem from poor information about our opponents. It is distressingly easy to make mistakes about our opponents’ thinking, as well as to fail to comprehend their understanding of and reactions to our arguments. After describing the fog of debate and outlining its sources in cognition and communication, I consider a few policies we might adopt upon learning we are in this fog.
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- © 2022 Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation. Printed in the USA
Footnotes
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School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies, Arizona State University. Competing Interests: The author declares none. For helpful conversations and comments, I am grateful to Ian Axel Anderson, Andrew Bailey, Jared Celniker, David Christensen, Carlo DaVia, Peter Ditto, Xingming Hu, Madeline Jalbert, Samuel Kampa, Charlie Lassiter, William Lycan, Tom Noah, Andrew Rotondo, Peter Seipel, Eric Schwitzgebel, Claudia Vanney, Joseph Vukov, Peter Andrey Smith, Shane Wilkins, Benjamin Wilson, and an anonymous referee. I am especially grateful to E. J. Coffman, Peter Ditto, Brett Mercier, and Norbert Schwarz for insightful conversations and written comments. I want to thank audiences at Universidad Austral in October 2020 and Nanjing University in May 2021 for discussions of earlier versions of this essay. Finally, I acknowledge the John Templeton Foundation for its generous support of my research (grant 61014).
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45 Do I think anyone should follow the Lichtenbergian policy? Maybe occasionally, though only cautiously. Here is one type of situation that may justify the policy. Sometimes our adversaries do not care one whit about the truth; we know this because they tell us so. They fling mud, not arguments. Intellectuals are naturally uncomfortable with the sophists’ dirty tricks. But we who care deeply about reason and evidence can use rhetoric and passion to inoculate other people against the sophists. We could be called upon to safeguard the pursuit of truth in our community using every rhetorical weapon available. (Thanks to Shane Wilkins for discussion.)
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We go to philosophy talks to poke holes in the speaker’s main argument, or to show that something important was overlooked. We are there as much to instruct as we are to learn—and this is so even if we don’t take ourselves to know as much about the subject of the talk than the speaker does. Our hands shoot up when the Q&A starts because we want to get in our own clever objection before someone beats us to it. (7)
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