Towards better arguments

A standard way to promote candidates one supports is to defend them, or criticize their opponents, with well-considered arguments that stand up to criticism. Once made, a good argument stands on its own, advancing the debate and persuading intelligent readers to join your side. There's another strategy that I hadn't thought of before, but which I suppose has its own perverse appeal: shoot out shoddy arguments and frivolous criticisms so fast that by the time that one is defeated, you've posted another. Go fast enough, and you'll always have at least one argument standing.

This is probably the best way to understand Garance Franke-Ruta's coverage of the Democratic primary on TAPPED. Even though I'd most likely disagree, I'd like to see her make substantial and well-thought-out arguments in favor of nominating Hillary Clinton, because those would advance our understanding of the race and lead to an informative debate. Instead we get Garance's ill-thought-out smears of Hillary Clinton's opponents, presented with airs of journalistic objectivity that are quickly dispelled by their obvious sloppiness.

On Tuesday, in a post titled "Unconstitutional Is Unconstitutional", Garance leapt to attack the constitutionality of Edwards' proposal to take away the health benefits of Congress and top federal officials unless universal health care passed by July 2009. But as no less an authority than Constitutional expert and Obama advisor Cass Sunstein soon observed, unconstitutional wasn't unconstitutional after all -- while the President can't take away health benefits by fiat, it's not implausible to read the 27th amendment as allowing him to strip benefits from Congress by passing legislation. (Rarely noted: if the effective date for ending benefits is pushed into the next term, the Constitutional objections evaporate entirely.) On the phone, Joe Trippi clarified to Garance that a legislative takeaway of benefits was exactly what the Edwards campaign was proposing.

What happened next was bizarre. Garance seized on Trippi's phrasing in the phone call to announce that according to the Edwards campaign, Health coverage is a 'perk' and wrote a long post on how regarding health benefits as perks would be a bad way to start the health care debate. The number of wacky assumptions required for her to make this argument in good faith would be truly staggering -- that an advisor's phrasing of one word in a quick phone conversation with a blogger would be representative of a campaign's overall policy views, that those views would then go front and center into the eventual presidential message strategy, and that ordinary voters be affected more by the Constitutional questions than the sheer populist force of the proposal.

And that's why I don't regard hers as a good-faith argument. Arguments like this are as soon written as they collapse (in this case, when Trippi called back to note that he meant "benefits" by "perks") and GFR's next attack takes their place (in this case, her attempt to turn the failure of her sophistical argument into a dig on the effectiveness of the Edwards campaign: "Sounds like it's been a long day over in Edwards land.")

This has been going on for a while. There was GFR's October discovery that a Democratic PAC trying to prevent Hillary Clinton from winning the nomination was started by an environmentalist who had previously endorsed John Edwards. While Garance seemed to think that this was some kind of scandal, Kate Sheppard immediately responded that there was nothing particularly strange about a Clinton opponent supporting Edwards, and that it was fine for progressive groups "to challenge Clinton's progressive credibility and work to counter what seems to be accepted gospel around these parts on her inevitability." Most of TAPPED's commenters echoed Kate's views.

There's a larger point to be made here. Back in July when I examined her article on Edwards and poorer voters, Garance commented: "As for the specific criticism that I am shilling for a candidate, I will note that I have in no way endorsed Clinton." As subsequent commenters noted, that's no way for bloggers to defend themselves. Our endorsements count for nothing; it's by our writings that you know us. Garance doesn't go around making transparently silly anti-Clinton arguments. She does so against Edwards and occasionally Obama. (And sometimes she writes a gem like Thursday's "twinkling of Hillary Clinton's eye" post) That's why readers of TAPPED regard her as a fervent Clinton supporter, and are justified in doing so.

There's nothing wrong with having a candidate. Mine is John Edwards, and people who have read my political stuff know very well why I support him. I've told them many times. He's the most likely to beat Republicans in a general election, he's willing to forcefully defend progressive positions on issues from poverty to health care to foreign policy, he'd make our party more appealing in downticket races where we need to expand our majorities, and his attention to the tremendous issue of global poverty sets him apart from any major presidential candidate I've ever seen.

For all of her smears on Hillary Clinton's opponents, Garance hasn't come out and told me what's so great about Clinton herself. In this she's kind of like the Clinton campaign, which doesn't have much of a message other than that its victory is inevitable. I'm happy to hear an earnest and good-faith progressive argument for Hillary, and it's something that I was pressing Garance for back in July. (Commenters at Ezra Klein’s blog did more to develop the argument than Garance ever did.) I'm not saying I'd agree, and I'm sure I'd find much to criticize in her argument. But our debate would have a positive impact on the state of public understanding, rather than just delaying Joe Trippi's dinner and requiring TAPPED commenters to debunk yet another smear.

"Possible Girls" gets published!

Today when I went to my mailbox in the department, I found a solicitation for money from Al Franken, letters from various departments acknowledging their receipt of my job applications, and a well-stuffed envelope from USC. That surprised me -- I hadn't applied to anything at USC. When I opened it, and saw that "Possible Girls" had been accepted for publication by Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, which comes out of USC, I spent the next hour acting like a complete fool. (Made loud excited noises in the hallway, started dancing uncontrollably at various moments, and abruptly hugged Josh Dever, who had helped me most with the paper.) I have to make a couple changes, but they aren't especially substantial, so I should have them done quickly.

I have a couple other publications -- most notably the book that Brian and I have come out with -- but getting my first peer-reviewed journal publication is really exciting. And it's pretty cool to be an ethicist with a metaphysics paper in a good journal. Especially a paper that made the reviewer laugh out loud several times.

Defending atheism from... Lee Siegel?

When talking philosophy with my students or with nonphilosophers, it's really useful to see their facial expressions, so I can get a sense for when they've gotten what I'm trying to say, and when I need to keep explaining things. One of the things that makes philosophy blogging in nonphilosophical places so challenging is that I can't see the faces of my audience as I write, and I don't have as good a sense for how much explaining to do.

I may have overexplained a little bit in my latest post at Ezra Klein's blog, which responds to some really bad arguments against atheism that came up in an LA Times op-ed. Other than that, I'm quite happy with the post.

(Backstory: Lee Siegel, the author of the op-ed, is a really weird guy -- he had to leave The New Republic when it was discovered that he was dishonestly using aliases to defend himself in comments. In his time at TNR, he took some mean swipes at Ezra, so I'm not especially well-disposed towards him.)

She'll slice them with Occam's razor

Lindsay Beyerstein describes her cooking style as empiricist . If the dish photographed above the post is any indication, Lindsay's cooking is remarkable for its parsimony. In keeping with the Quinean emphasis on ontological simplicity, very few objects are involved.

The wheel weaves as the wheel wills

I was a fan of the Wheel of Time series back in my high school days, though I stopped reading after about book 8, in part because of my concern that Robert Jordan would die before completing the series and leave his readers stranded. Today I heard news of his untimely passing, just as he was working on the 12th book. Many of the books run 500+ pages, so what you basically have here is an immensely long fantasy epic, full of foreshadowing and stagesetting for a climactic final battle... and no ending. Yikes.

I don't even have an intuitive sense of what to say about truth and falsity about incomplete fictional works. Will Rand al'Thor die in the final battle? Before, we thought that question had a correct answer, though we didn't know for sure what it was. Were we right to think it did have a correct answer, or does Jordan's death make it the case that we were wrong? If it did have a correct answer, does it still?

Blogrollery

I eventually got fed up with the fact that half the blogs on my 'roll hadn't been updated in 2007, so I switched a lot of stuff out. (Fafblog? dadahead? where have you gone?) And in keeping with an interest in making this the philosophy / funny dancing space, while the politics stays at my weekend Ezra Klein gig, I've promoted the philosophers to the top of the blogroll. I expect that more philosophy links will appear...

Small Steps To Happier Pigs And Chickens

After eating a nice veggie burger with extra pickles (for the low price of $2.26; thank you Burger King) I feel moved to address the posts by Matt, Tia, Scott [dead link], and Matt again about how we should respond to the cruelty of factory farming. Says Tia, addressing the response to Michael Vick's crimes:

I, too, find silly the spectacle of someone who is not in any discernible way opposed to factory farming practices fulminating about dogfighting, and there's just as much a cultural diversity argument against a prohibition of dogfighting as there is against a prohibition of any kind of law against animal cruelty. It's much easier to justify encroachments on someone else's cultural practices if they're based on some kind of gesture towards a coherent ethical scheme; "factory farmed meat for me, but no dogfighting for thee" strikes me as the most baseless sort of imperialism.

As a statement about the badness of the practices involved, that seems right. And as Tia says, the mere fact that we have entrenched social practices of treating different animals differently doesn't make any moral difference -- entrenched social practices of treating different races or genders differently, for example, don't justify themselves. There's some difference in the way we should regard the agents, though. One has to be quite cruel to make a leisure activity out of watching animals suffer terribly. By contrast, the distance between a diner and the sow that spent her entire life squeezed into a gestation crate is large enough that one can understand how kind-hearted people ignore the suffering and order the pork chops.
Matt and Scott concede the wrongness of factory farming, despite continuing to enjoy its fleshy fruits. And so do many people, including, I'm sure, many readers of this blog. I often think that animals would be better off if people were comfortable with taking smaller steps to reduce their meat consumption. Avoiding factory-farmed meat need not be all-or-nothing -- it's something that's fully half as good if done halfway.
And there are a bunch of ways to do it halfway. You can avoid factory-farmed meat for the meals where you least enjoy the meat portion of your diet. If you're concerned about messing up other people's plans when you go to eat their cooking, you can have a policy of never choosing factory-farmed meat, but eating it when it's placed in front of you without your requesting it. Or if you're the sort of person who likes action more than abstention, you can make a project of exploring the various interesting foods that the veggie world has to offer. When you find something you like, eat it more often, and let it displace some of your meat intake. There's plenty of different ways to go about this, and if there's some meat or egg dish (the situation of egg-laying hens is pretty terrible) that you're absolutely unwilling to give up, don't let that stop you from giving up a lot of things that you like less.
If you only go halfway, there may still be something deeply inconsistent about your practices. You understand the badness of factory farming, but aren't willing to move as fully against it as you know you ought to. But it's far better to be inconsistently kind than consistently unkind, and being a vegetarian with exceptions is far better than causing great animal suffering. All of us fall short of doing everything we could to make the world a better place, but we're worse for doing less, and better for doing more.
My own practices regarding meat are often seen as amusing, and you can read about them here. I enjoy meat as much as most people do, and in a city like Austin I've been pretty successful in finding ways to satisfy myself while not contributing to factory farming. (The Chipotle across the street with its excellent free-range pork plays a big role.) And I've found plenty of yummy things to eat that I might not have tried if my refusal to eat Normal Meat hadn't steered me to them. May you be so fortunate.

Brightness and the Beasts

I just got back to Austin yesterday.

I was amused to see the new book that Brian and I put out referred to on the Nietzsche society blog as "a major new publication involving some of the big beasts and bright young things of the anglophone Nietzsche world." Brian's definitely on the 'big beast' side of that, which leaves me as one of the 'bright young things', I suppose...

Dance floor linguistics research, and other adventures

Mike and I went out dancing tonight. He tells me that I owned the dance floor for about two and a half hours, and he's probably right. I've got the one-inch diameter patches of ripped skin on my knees to show for it. If you haven't seen the knee-walk, ask me for it whenever I show up in your town. (Not tomorrow, Rochester residents, because I need some time to recover.)

We left the bar when some girl slapped Mike for no easily discernable reason, and went to another place where a pretty sad bachelorette party was going on. As is my way, I brought people out onto the dance floor by doing all the crazy stuff I do, and Mike ended up dancing beautifully with the bride-to-be. If there's a place that the benevolent spirit of the evening wanted us to visit, it was there. We made that party a lot more fun than it otherwise might have been, for all involved. If I spend the rest of the dancing nights of my life livening up dead bachelorette parties -- even with none of the lucky consequences that single men might hope for -- I will have lived well.

When we were at the Pita Pit after all our dancing, a girl came up and told me that when she initially saw me doing the knee-walk, she thought I was horribly injured and didn't have legs.

I also managed to verify the results suggested by the good Aaron Dinkin in the comments to the previous post. Four out of five women who grew up in Rochester and go out on Thursday night pronounce "documentary" with the stress on the next-to-last syllable. The woman from Syracuse does too. I'm eager to be sent out into the field on more linguistics research assignments, so when you hear where I am, let me know what you want me to ask people about.

If you'll pardon me, I'm off to disinfect my torn knees with a spot of Jack Daniels. Have a great night, wherever you are.

leave me a rambler, til the day that I die

Next stop: Rochester NY, from August 8-13.

Congratulations, Matt and April!

I'm heading off to their wedding in the North Carolina mountains this weekend. Back late Sunday.

Defending Intentionalism

Ever since a wonderful graduate seminar with Al Martinich five years ago, I've been an intentionalist about interpretation. According to intentionalism, the meaning of an utterance or a text is whatever the author intended to communicate by it. This means that the correct way to interpret texts is to figure out what the author was trying to communicate. Martinich and I hold that this view is correct of utterances and texts of all kinds -- from what you say when ordering at a restaurant, to instruction manuals, to works of literature.

The more conventional opponents of intentionalism are formalists, who believe that the meaning of a text can be determined by the words of the text itself, without recourse to things like the author's intention. (The New Critics were the paradigmatic formalists.) There are also exotic views like reader-response theory, according to which the reader or the interpretive community determines what the text means; and deconstructionism, which seems to hold that texts don't have unified meanings. What I'll try to do here is explain why intentionalism is the best theory of interpretation. I'm going to direct my attacks mostly at formalism here, because it strikes me as the strongest opponent.

First, a simple example. Suppose someone tells you, "I went to the bank today." This could mean either that they went to the side of a river, or that they went to a financial institution. In some circumstances, there won't be enough context to rule in favor of one interpretation or the other. (The fact that the person actually went to a financial institution and not the side of a river doesn't make it true that they meant that they went to a financial institution, although it's good evidence for that -- they still might have meant that they went to the riverside, and been lying. But the reason it is good evidence is that it makes it more probable that they intended to communicate that they went to a financial institution.) Even if there's not much context, we still want to say that they meant one thing or the other. It's hard to see what could make it the case that they meant one thing or the other in cases where there isn't a lot of context, unless it's their intention that did it.

I also don't know how a formalist makes sense of our judgments about which literary works are satirical. If we found something like A Modest Proposal coming from a society that practiced cannibalism, we might be tempted to read it as an earnest suggestion, as the intention to promote cannibalism is one that a cannibal might have. But our understanding of the sorts of things that literate Irishmen of Jonathan Swift's times were likely to regard as acceptable makes it wildly implausible to ascribe pro-cannibalistic intentions to him. So we regard his work as satirical. The best way to explain our different responses to Swift's work and to the identical words, written by a cannibal, is to go to our judgments about what the two authors are likely to intend.

I've aimed both of these examples at the formalists, but they work against reader-response theorists and deconstructionists too. Even if a reader, or an entire interpretive community, believed that Swift was earnestly proposing cannibalism, they'd be wrong. And it's hard for me to see any support for the idea that texts don't have unified meanings in these cases -- in Swift's case, we insist on a particular unified meaning -- the satirical one.

Now I'll deal with a case that's supposed to cause intentionalists trouble. Amanda posted a while ago about how Ray Bradbury has told us that Fahrenheit 451 isn't about censorship. According to him, it's "a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature." I haven't gone back and read the book to see if this actually makes sense, but in any case it's not unheard of for authors to make statements about the true meaning of their works that seem ridiculous. Does this mean that we were, in fact, all wrong about what their works meant?

Not necessarily. The causes of our actions often differ from the way we rationalize them, and in complex cases of communication like the writing of novels, people might not have a good handle on the psychological processes motivating them to write exactly as they do. So even as the forces within them cause them to focus their writing in a specific fashion and to play up aspects of stories that emotionally resonate with them, they may not be able to give correct descriptions of what's going on inside them. Perhaps what really drove Bradbury to write the story as he did -- and what he would've felt strangely unsatisfied if he hadn't been able to properly express -- was an appreciation of how bad government censorship of literature was, even though he didn't explicitly realize that this was motivating his portrayals of events and characters. I'm willing to give a fair amount of credence to first-person reports of one's intention, but even honest people aren't perfect at reporting their intentions in complex cases, so their reports can be overridden if we have enough contrary data.

Another case, brought to me by English grad students in Dr. Martinich's seminar five years ago, concerned the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud. They explained to me that some of Rimbaud's poetry seems to leave some aspects of its meaning open for the reader to fill in. This made reader-response theory seem more plausible to them. It did concern them, though, that not all interpretations of the poems they described would be correct, even if every reader had them. For example, Vowels is not a casserole recipe, no matter what a casserole-obsessed interpretive community might say. There's no good way to fill in the ambiguities in the poem and get there.

I don't know if they eventually accepted it, but they were intrigued by my way of reconciling their interpretive practice with intentionalism. Suppose Rimbaud intended aspects of the meaning of his poems to be filled in by his readers, so that it would mean different things depending on who was reading it. And suppose the readers took seriously the project of operating within the space generated by Rimbaud's intentions and did not try to turn the poems into casserole recipes. Then the meaning of his poems would be generated by something akin to an act of joint authorship. When two people's intentions are in harmony, they can jointly generate the meaning of a text, and to my English department friends, this seemed to be at least a plausible story about how one reads Rimbaud.

I should say a last word about the practice of reappropriating texts. In taking ahold of a text -- perhaps a play or a novel -- and giving it a meaning that you know the author didn't intend, either in your own mind or in some work you create based on it, you cease to be an interpreter and start being a kind of author. This can be good or bad, depending on how good an author you are, but the important point is that the responsibility for the things you intended but the original author didn't goes to you. If you take it upon yourself to turn Vowels into a casserole recipe, don't blame Rimbaud if it the casserole doesn't taste good. But if it does, most of the credit belongs to you, and not to Rimbaud.

Hair

This is a pretty good debate roundup.

For my part, I really hated the Edwards hair video the first time I saw it, because the detail wasn't good enough for me to make out what the images were. But now that I've got a better view of it, I'm really digging it:

Bad people making bad arguments

Who voted against anti-dogfighting legislation this spring, and why? NPR reports:

Most of the bill's opponents say they aren't fans of dogfighting but are conservative, pro-life Republicans. Iowa Rep. Steve King from Iowa says it's wrong for the federal government to criminalize pit bull trafficking while allowing legal abortion.
"My vote says that human life needs to be elevated and stay above animal life. And I think it devalues all human life, when you set the life of an animal up above that of a human," King says.

It's one thing to say that human lives are more valuable than animal lives. It's another thing to think an early-term fetus is morally like an adult human. And it's a totally different and completely insane thing to think that you can alleviate the badness of injuries to humans by permitting wanton cruelty to animals.
For our second bad argument, we turn to Tom DeLay:

"I contend [abortion] affects you in immigration," DeLay told the Washington-area gathering. "If we had those 40 million children that were killed over the last 30 years, we wouldn't need the illegal immigrants to fill the jobs that they are doing today. Think about it."

DeLay criticizes abortion because it decreases the labor supply, creating economic opportunity for foreigners. To those of us who have any acquaintance with poverty in developing countries, and who aren't deeply racist, this seems like a wonderful thing. But if you're Tom DeLay or his College Republican audience, that's a bug, not a feature. You'd like to ban abortion so that you can create an America where labor oversupply forces native-born workers into bad jobs for terrible pay, and where Mexicans are starving to death across the border.

Battle of the former Perspective staffers

This Saturday's Ezra-blog output:

The Senate calendar tells us why Hillary's strategy of putting off universal health care until a hypothetical second term is a very bad idea.

I show that the facts from Garance Franke-Ruta's latest article don't support her Edwards-bashing conclusions. Garance kind of responds in comments, but doesn't address many of the actual issues.

I'll put up the post from Sunday here, since it has mild philosophical content.

Tired of myself, tired of this town

I'm leaving the DC area tomorrow evening, and I'll arrive in North Carolina Friday afternoon. Chapel Hill, here I come!

A hill of beans, and a beautiful friendship

One of the many things I like about Casablanca is that even though the love story has an unhappy ending, the movie has a happy one. Rick finds new purpose in his life, leaves Ilsa with Victor, and goes off with Louis to fight the Nazis. He doesn't get the girl, but he ends up doing the best thing he could with his life, and he knows it.

It's the kind of ending that a utilitarian can love. Despite the fact that people are built to obsess over minor matters in their personal lives, these aren't the things that matter from an agent-neutral perspective. And if you can attend more directly to the agent-neutral considerations, you'll pay less attention to problems afflicting only yourself, and become more effective in making the world a better place.

I think of this now because it's becoming apparent that I have less control over my romantic life than I have over the fates of other people I don't know, several thousand miles away. Even my meager assets can save lives in developing countries, while I can't brighten the days of a lonely girl two blocks away. It's time for me to internalize that, and live accordingly.

The Line of Worst Fit

In trying to argue that very high tax rates lead to lower total government revenues, the Wall Street Journal used the following graph. They think the Laffer Curve is the line of best fit, or something close.

As the mildest attention to the graph reveals, however, it's just a random line that goes through an outlier and doesn't bear any interesting relation to the collection of points on the graph.

We've all encountered many cases of people wantonly imposing bad theories on recalcitrant data. But I've never seen such a graphic example before.

McCain's cash problems are bad... but not that bad

Josh Marshall clearly had a lot of fun writing this [dead link removed].

In the end, the state representative was merely attempting to pay for gay prostitution rather than actually being a prostitute. The confusion results from media's attempt to be delicate about the situation, in which he was paying to be the kneeling partner rather than the unzipping one. (As I'm discovering, it's hard to be both accurate and non-vivid about these matters.)

Voting From The Unicycle

Haven't been posting much recently because I'm visiting a lot of friends in DC. But here's the latest from Ezra's blog, on evaluating voting records of Senators from different states.