There is an op-ed in the Keene Sentinel about the
constitutionality of gay marriage. Next
week there will be an opposing POV by Chuck Douglas, a pal of mine - a former
US congressman and NH Supreme Court justice.
Remind me to catch that.
This week’s op-ed discusses gay marriage in terms of Loving
v. Virginia, which ruled that the Commonwealth could not forbid interracial
marriage. The writer asks if the Constitution likewise forbids banning marriage
on grounds of sexual orientation. Her paragraph-ending
comment before discussion is “It absolutely does.”
Such phrasing puts me off.
I understand that this is something of a debate tactic, convincing
others by one’s own certainty, as in my prior post about confidence versus
correctness being the better evolutionary strategy. Maybe it’s a lawyer thing, and works often
enough to be the recommended mode of arguing.
Showing the least doubt might be fatal in front of a judge or jury. But it has the opposite effect on me. Jes’ sayin’.
It suggests that you are unable to understand an opposing POV, and thus
have no justification for your assuredness.
Even harebrained ideas often have something going for them after all,
even if they are not sufficient to carry the day.
I ran across a post on another site in which the author made
good arguments, yet was so determined to strike down opposing views that he
declared them to have zero truth values.
Zero is a very small number. You
might convince me that Samuel is very dangerous and Daniel is not very dangerous
at all, but if you assert that Samuel will definitely become a murderer and
Daniel will definitely not, then I know you are a fool. In the instance of this particular essay, the
zero truth value was not mere hyperbole or artistic license, it was the entire
point of the post. His assertion, quite
cleverly put, was that there was no possibility whatsoever that there was any
truth in his opponents claim. The claim had a Borges-like “Garden of Forking
Paths” reality at best, but certainly no connection to this one.
It relates to my anosognosia and May We Believe Our Thoughts series
from two years ago. If one cannot allow
even a 1% chance that one is 1% wrong, that is pathological. I am not that certain
about even personal information, such as my name and date of birth, if it comes
to that. (Yes, we can probably construct a situation under which I would allow
100% certainty for some bit of information.
But these don’t occur in nature.)
I have been toying with the idea that this is a personality
trait in some cluster of very intelligent people, in which the
authoritativeness is tied into some autistic, not-self-observant
characteristic. It is very easy (for me,
anyway) to fall into confirmation bias on such imaginings, so I’m not pursuing
it too hard. One can construct both
environmental (consistent experience of being the smartest person present,
encouraged by parents who were similarly constructed) and brain-based (deficits
in alternative-narrative abeyance located in the anterior cingulate gyrus or
something) theories for it, but hell, that doesn’t make it more true, just more
plausible.
Curious, though.
2 comments:
The assignation of zero-value to the arguments of opponents has become the standard operating procedure in politics and is invading and eroding much of what used to be called "civil discourse."
Now it has devolved into rhetorical artillery battles.
*sigh*
Weellll, it does allow us to assign a zero value to their arguments.
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