Debate is Not Truth-Seeking
What we find persuasive has very little to do with objective truth
It seems like we’re always talking about “the battle of ideas” these days. This is nothing new— John Stuart Mill famously coined the term, “the marketplace of ideas” to describe open discourse within free societies. Given the availability for people to get their ideas into the public domain more easily than ever, the battle of ideas seems inevitable and beneficial.
When I say “we”, I’m of course referring to the philosophically-minded. Those of us for whom ethics is not simply inherited from our parents, for whom politics is not merely a team sport, for whom religion is not simply a question of which church you were raised in. Those of us who are still interested in things like open discourse and debate.
Don’t mistake it for arrogance when I cast myself among the philosophically-minded. It’s not a compliment. It’s not exactly an insult either. Suffice it to say that we’re a disagreeable group in many respects, in spite of our many virtues.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was sometimes known to remark, “Don’t try to shit higher than your ass”. A bit crude — but honestly, I think it’s a perfect warning for philosophers. Philosophers are always shitting higher than their ass. We’re always trying to come up with all-encompassing theories. Always trying to use logic to bend the world to our will. Always trying to “solve” moral and religious disputes that have plagued mankind for centuries, as if all we needed to solve the problem was for another philosopher to come along and set us straight.
But that’s just what I’m here to talk about. In a way, this is a bit of an intervention. Philosophers… we need to talk. This is from someone who once held these same prejudices, and got over them. Those of us who consider ourselves philosophically-minded tend to have some serious misunderstandings about debate.
The issue is partly that most people are confused about what human beings are doing when we debate. The psychological evidence would suggest that we didn’t evolve to employ reason in debate for the purposes of gaining true beliefs about reality. This isn’t to say that such a thing is impossible, or that reason necessarily isn’t a means of gaining knowledge about reality — far from it.
But if we’re asking why humans debate, the psychological explanation points towards social reasons. The argumentative theory of reasoning holds that reason evolved essentially as a tool for social competition. When we argue, we’re not trying to find truth — we’re trying to win.
From an evolutionary standpoint perhaps this seems so intuitive as to be almost inescapable. Evolution doesn’t care about “the objective truth”. Evolution selects for that which gives advantage, and selects against that which gives disadvantage. In the social context, those beliefs that are passed down will be passed down by those who most effectively purvey those beliefs.
Hugo Mercier, the co-author of an article on the argumentative theory of reasoning published in April of 2011 in The Journal of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, explains this in an interview with NYT:
“Reasoning doesn’t have this function of helping us to get better beliefs and make better decisions… It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.”
Reason is a way of winning people over. But, perhaps more importantly, Mercier asserts that even flawed reasoning is an effective means of doing this. In fact, flawed reasoning only survives because it can give advantage in argument. Flawed reasoning is an adaptation. To quote Mr. Mercier once again, “People have been trying to reform something that works perfectly well.”¹
Some have, of course, taken issue with this characterization of reason. It seems like an overly-bleak assessment of the situation. It makes everything about combat, about selfishness. This pushback isn’t at all surprising. We don’t want to entertain any viewpoint, like the argumentative theory, that might threaten our cherished concepts: such as truth, justice, love, and the like.
But really, none of that is at issue here. We’re not talking about the value of truth itself, but the functionality of debate as a means of doing so. The moral prejudices that we have about “the marketplace of ideas” and the value of debate presuppose to some extent that logic is a potent force. If debate is a truth-seeking behavior, that implies that the truth can be revealed through debate. What would this mean, in practice? That logic, in its sovereignty, can make other minds bend the knee? That if someone is made to understand the illogic of their position, naturally they will want to change that position? But we all know that this is nonsense.
Furthermore, we don’t have to conclude that everything boils down to combat. The problem is far more subtle than that. After all, if a belief were false in a dangerous way, such that it were disadvantageous for the whole community, evolution would select against that too. There has to be some underlying merit to a belief for it to survive at all.
The point of my criticism is not to reduce our outlook on debate to utter cynicism. But we must acknowledge that arguing is a social activity, and it has social motivations. Our powers of reason developed in proportion to the social utility of persuading. Employing logic in the course of a debate is something we do to out-maneuver, to make ourselves look better, to dominate, to take control of the narrative.
As such, all those familiar logical fallacies will always be with us — because they work. When we argue with others, the concern is what we find persuasive. What humans find persuasive has very little relationship with the objective truth.
We philosophically-minded will eternally object to these considerations. This is probably because we really like debate, and we really like truth-seeking, and we tend to think that we can do both simultaneously.
We might even permit that such social forces on human psychology do exist. We might admit that we’re wired to engage in debate as combative and/or competitive activity. But still — we want to hold on to the notion that there is something real there. That logic has real power separate from mere persuasion, and debate is worthwhile as a truth-seeking activity. That open discourse and the marketplace of ideas can actually do what we imagine that they do.
This argument is very, very old. Plato records a version of it in the Socratic dialogue, Gorgias. Gorgias, for whom the dialogue is named, is a rhetoritician against whom Socrates argues. Socrates, naturally, holds the position that reason as he employs it is both a means of getting to the truth, and separate from the art of persuasion. Socrates argues that truth should be the ultimate standard, and that rhetoric is therefore an inferior art to philosophy. Gorgias argues, on the other hand, that if a rhetoritician uses his powers for evil — such as to persuade a democratic body to vote for something harmful — that is not a failing of the art or the instructor, but simply an example of a person using a tool for immoral purposes.
Even though the two debaters diverge starkly in their perspective, it’s hard to see how anyone could deny the immense power of rhetoric. Gorgias:
“I say that if a rhetorician and a physician were to go to any city, and had there to argue in the Ecclesia or any other assembly as to which of them should be elected state-physician, the physician would have no chance; but he who could speak would be chosen if he wished; and in a contest with a man of any other profession the rhetorician more than any one would have the power of getting himself chosen, for he can speak more persuasively to the multitude than any of them, and on any subject. Such is the nature and power of the art of rhetoric.”²
Socrates has a big problem with this, naturally… but is Gorgias speaking falsely here? Can anyone deny that he is correct?
Gorgias praises Socrates’ own skill for persuasion early in the dialogue, which should not go unnoticed. So much of the appeal of Socrates is just this: his talent for persuasion, and his ability to use reason to demolish and dominate his opponents. Socrates is actually a great rhetoritician. Much of what we moderns admire about Socrates is his style rather than the substance. Typically, modern people don’t hold Socrates’ conclusions to be true — such as ideas about censoring music and art or having a caste-based society — but we still read Socrates… why? To watch the master work. To see him weave his arguments, entrap his opponents, and excel at the sport of debate.
The debate recorded in Gorgias is a debate about debate itself: whether debate is about winning or whether debate is about seeking truth. This debate about debate has been going on for millennia — whether in the Athenian forum, or between psychologists writing in scientific journals. And I’m not about to settle the matter in this article. Let’s not shit higher than our ass here.
So, instead, I’ll appeal to personal experience. Speaking as someone who would consider himself very open-minded, I have to admit that when I get involved in a debate, very rarely am I actually in the mindset to be persuaded of something. The longer the debate goes on, the more in-depth the debate goes, the more I find myself locating flaws of logic and coordinating attacks in order to demolish the person’s argument. That’s quite a different thing from considering whether there’s some underlying sense to how this person sees the world. I also have to admit that I’ve rarely changed anyone’s mind as the outcome of a debate.
Well, that’s not exactly true. The person you’re arguing with is rarely the intended audience. On social media these days, you can argue before an audience of all your friends and family. On a website like reddit, you can demolish someone in front of millions. The reason why we try to persuade is for the audience’s benefit, rather than the person you’re arguing with. Just like on any popular talent show these days, its the audience that judges.
Sometimes, when it comes to divisive issues, like politics, even the audience isn’t really there to be convinced of anything. They’re there for the competitive aspect more than anything else: like the fans of two opposing teams at a football game. If there is any change in the audience’s perception, it’s usually in the form of heels digging in, perceptions of the other side solidifying, not to mention all the emotional excitement that we derive from social competition.
To the extent that persuasion is happening, the relevant questions are: Who comes out looking better? Who took control of the narrative? Who framed their arguments in a more appealing manner?
Very rarely are we winning the heart or the mind of the person we’re actually talking to. Usually it has little to do with “the truth”. Again, that isn’t the function that debate evolved to fulfill.
Does that mean that changing hearts or minds is impossible?
No. I’ve seen friends and family utterly transform on a whole host of very personal and important issues, from politics to religion and everything in between. But how does that happen? Spoiler alert: it isn’t because they got “destroyed with facts and logic”.
As Alan Watts brilliantly pointed out in one of his best lectures, entitled Mind Over Mind, all transformation is gradual. It’s work. It’s a process. Watts:
“Neurology knows relatively little about the brain, which is to say that the brain is a lot smarter than neurology… There is this [organ] which can perform all these extraordinary intellectual and cultural miracles, but we don’t know how we did it. We didn’t have some campaign to have an improved brain, over the monkeys or whatever may be our ancestors. It happened. And all growth, you see, is fundamentally something that happens.”³
While Watts’ words may almost seem like a truism — ‘growth is just something that happens’ — the meaning here is that you can’t force growth. You can’t make someone to grow by browbeating them anymore than you can can get perfectly sculpted abs simply by willpower. We understand perfectly well when it comes to our physiology that change is gradual. Change happens due to little choices we make every single day. You have the body that your lifestyle created. If you want a different body, you have to change your lifestyle.
So, what is the equivalent when it comes to the psychology? Someone who thinks all liberals are communistic devil-worshipers isn’t going to change that view after hearing a “devastating” liberal argument. Someone who has never met a rural conservative and thinks they’re all toothless hillbillies who hate women and minorities isn’t going to take a more nuanced view after hearing the arguments of a pundit on FOX News. In all likelihood, either person would probably become more entrenched in their beliefs.
What might change either one of those people — broad caricatures, I know, but still — would be to actually meet and maybe even befriend the other person. To develop relationships with people who believe differently from them. Not to ostracize the family members with beliefs they think are stupid or abhorrent, but to maintain those family ties in spite of that. Minds are changed after years of personal growth. Minds change because of what we see, feel and experience. They change because of a million little interactions and relationships.
So, my message is not not simply that debate is meaningless, and therefore we should abandon reason. It’s not that the truth never prevails, or that you can’t override your human biases given the right conditions.
All I’m asking — in this intervention — is that we be realistic about what we’re doing when we’re scoring a slam dunk of an argument on an opponent on Twitter. It’s nothing more than a social game. It’s really no different from two apes wrestling, while the others look on and cheer. If we can be honest and self-reflective about that, and still think it’s worthwhile activity — then, by all means. Go on wrestling, my fellow apes.
You might win the argument. But if you think you’re forging the truth in the raging fire of the battle of ideas… remember Wittgenstein’s rule, and adjust your aim.
