Essentially Contested Concepts

This is another cool idea, similar to the "invincible rhetoric" concept I discussed in my previous posting. The idea was initially expressed by W. B. Gallie in 1955, and then revisited by John Kekes in 1970.

Essentially Contested Concepts (ECCs) are "Big Concepts" like the following: art, love, morality, reason, nature, democracy, culture, knowledge, science, truth etc. The concepts are vague, ambiguous, highly general, and also highly valued. There is constant debate over the proper use of these terms, such as whether or not a particular installation of objects is "really art" or not. Very often, people will disagree over how these ECCs should be used. Each side in such a dispute feels that they are making the proper use of the term, but they are also aware that the other side does not agree with them on that very point. Nonetheless, neither side is prepared to concede the term to the other side, and pick a different term that better captures their side of the distinction. Instead, they go to war over who gets custodianship of the ECC.

Gallie described 7 conditions which together define an ECC. I review them here:
1) It defines some kind of valued achievement.
2) That achievement must be internally complex, with many parts adding up to make the whole achievement.
3) HOWEVER, there are several possible ways to interpret HOW the sub-components contribute to the end value, and these interpretations need not be consistent with each other.
4) The achievement itself must be adaptive or modifiable, capable of being expressed differently in different circumstances.
5) The ECC must be simultaneously used both defensively and aggressively - when you take a stand and say "art is x", you are consciously aware that some people say "art is y", and your articulation of your position includes an opposition to theirs.

These first five points describe what an ECC is, but they fail to distinguish ECCs from other concepts around which communication is merely radically confused. Gallie's solution to this problem was to appeal to history - to an ideal exemplar that everyone can agree to as an example of the concept (point 6); and this exemplar must also be internally complex, so that the final performance of the concept depends on the performance of composite activities in ways that are not clearly straightforward (point 7). The exemplar provides the indisputable shared point of reference that distinguishes an ECC from an idea that is merely confused, but yet that example too is complex enough to be essentially contested.

Kekes offers 6 conditions for something to be considered an ECC:
1) ECCs signify some kind of voluntary activity - they involve conscious human conduct and choices. Thus their essential defining characteristic can be thought of as either the activity itself or its goal - the means or the ends, or both.
2) ECCs are evaluative, and the conflict over them is value-charged, with participants putting great weight into which side will prevail because of the evaluations that will be implied.
3) The contest over an ECC will be in the interests of the participants, because the single concept being disputed concerns their best way of satisfying their needs and achieving their goals.
4) Like Gallie, Kekes states that the goal-directed activities that can be classified as instances of an ECC must be internally complex, with many elements each of which plays a role in the performance of that activity. These elements have certain qualities - one element must be something the agent does or has, and could stop doing or having without ceasing to be an agent, and the elements do not each have value of their own (they do not achieve a piece of the goal in isolation). Only the goal state is evaluated, and the constituent activities gain their value from that fact.
5) The component activities must be variously accessible - people will disagree about how significant each element's contribution is to the overall performance.
6) Despite all of this dispute at component levels, participants in the debate have to agree about the general description of the domain they are contesting, and they must share the core problem that prompts the debate in the first place. (This general agreement takes the place of Gallie's appeal to history.)

It seems to me that ECCs and invincible rhetoric are related - both are produced in part by human source-monitoring limitations. These source-monitoring limitations may be caused by general working-memory limitations, or as a side effect/pathology of our capacity to generalize across exemplars. At any rate, if we cannot all agree on how to weigh all the source components of the final goal-achievement, then we are likely to choose explanations that we like based on some extrinsic preferences or some general bias.

This has my Spidey-sense humming... there is some kind of shared pattern here...

W. B. Gallie's paper was in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 [1955-56] pp. 167-198, and in Chapter 8 of Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, London: Chatto and Windus, 1964. John Kekes' paper was in Philosophy and Rhetoric 10(2) [Spring 1977].

Invincible Rhetoric

Okay, so this is a seriously cool idea about a seriously annoying phenomenon - the phenomenon of invincible rhetoric. People who use invincible rhetoric are always right. They will stress a point one way to be right in another situation, but then when you bring up an objection they have another stock answer for that one too. A quick example of the difference would be the two sayings "haste makes waste" and "the early bird gets the worm".

A person who enjoys dispensing post-hoc advice will always be infallibly wise, if their knowledge base supports both of these claims. These two invincibly paired proverbs are not necessarily mutually exclusive or contradictory. In some contexts one proverb applies, and in other contexts the other does. However, sometimes when you want to challenge the advice someone gives you, you want to hold them to one claim-context pairing or another. This can be difficult. Since their assumption base contains both beliefs, they can stipulate either of the opposing points as what they "really" meant, and in so doing, they can re-contextualize or re-frame the debate. If they keep shifting within their assumption base just so as not to be wrong, this should be criticized as a type of invalid argumentation. This is a subtle and infuriating case of the if-by-whisky fallacy of infallibility.

Any kind of unassailable belief system enables invincible rhetoric. Religious people - truly religious people - don't make a fetish about being "right" all of the time, instead they use their faith to commit to meaningful lived actions amidst the uncertainties of life. However, religious literalists and armchair apologists often do crow with pride about how their belief system can answer every question and withstand every argumentative challenge. They can mount this kind of invincible facade because they have an assumptions base that generates invincible rhetoric. For example:

- SUPREMACY CLAIM: Their religion is the one true religion (of many thousands throughout human history), and their omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god wants everyone to know this and to follow this one religion (sect).
- AGENCY COUNTER: If that is what this omnipotent being wants, why doesn't it just make it so, or make it obvious to each one of us.
- SHIFT TO 'ORDEAL' FRAMEWORK: This one god wants people to believe in it for the 'right' reasons, so it sent a message through a very narrow channel (one person/tradition) instead of a broad one, and deliberately made it difficult to believe in it, so that people can 'prove' their belief and loyalty in the face of opposition, disbelief and persecution.
- BURDEN OF PROOF COUNTER: Why would an omnipotent, omnipresent being need or value oaths of recognition and fealty from much more limited beings, such that it would set up these kinds of ordeals and tests?
- SHIFT TO 'GIFT OF LOVE' FRAMEWORK: It loved us so much it gave us free will, which we abused to turn away from it. But it loves us so much it sent us messages and signs to lead us back.
- INCONSISTENCY COUNTER: So it gave us the means to do what it did not want us to do, in order that we would do what it does want us to do?
- SHIFT TO 'ORDEAL' FRAMEWORK: For the right reasons - that we may prove ourselves worthy.
- RATIONALITY COUNTER: Based on what we know about agency, intentions, and the scope and scale of subjective goals and concerns, it does not make much sense for an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipresent being to develop these kinds of intricate tests of loyalty. However, it makes perfect sense that human groupings develop these kinds of in-group tests of belonging and commitment.
- SHIFT TO THE 'MYSTERY' FRAMEWORK: How can you claim to understand the reasons or motives of such a supreme being? All of our concepts are so limited in trying to understand god. He has revealed himself to us in the only way we can understand, but he is far greater than our understanding. All we can do is accept what he has shown us in his benevolence.

This kind of thing has a great sense of felt-closure to it. There is an answer to every objection, and it seems irrefutable, despite the fact that the different frameworks or assumption bases in the rhetoric are not all perfectly consistent with each other. It is odd that supreme beings demand all kinds of commitment signals from humans. It is also odd that supreme beings with no limitations would leak their message out through narrow and protected channels. Why not just tell everybody? But there is a framework in apologetics - call it the SHIFT TO THE HERMENEUTIC FRAMEWORK - that this being *has* told everybody, but people are just too busy, confused, misled, numb or fallen to notice the message that is everywhere. But this is inconsistent with the need to be loyal to one specific channel for this message.

These objection-countering themes can wax and wane throughout a discussion with a religious literalist, creating a position that they feel is unassailable because it has an answer for every challenge. However, the coherence between the answers is loose, and reliant on dubious premises which would support conclusions the religious person might not endorse. The only thing notable about their invincible rhetoric is that it is invincible, with no necessary indication that it is also correct. This makes it incredibly annoying to argue with them.

In a research paper called "The Invincible Character of Management Consultants' Rhetoric: How one blends incommensurates while keeping them apart" (Organization, Vol 7(4), 2000, p. 633-655), Johan Berglund and Andreas Werr describe how rhetoric of this sort draws its objection-countering power from the fact that we embrace a wide variety of master-narratives or root-metaphors as valuable for different explanatory contexts. By freely mixing arguments from more than one mythical system within the same discourse, we can construct a sequence of arguments that has an answer for any objection. The argumentation may also be easy to endorse, because we recognize the value of each argument within it. Receptive audiences for this kind of message react positively to the prima facie validity of each of the commonplaces of wisdom as they are trotted out, without reflecting on the fact that each commonplace is drawn from a very different discursive context, and as such they cannot really be jointly applied against the same objection.

In the religious example I used above, there is the "Omnipotent Creator" mythic system, which emphasizes an unbroken narrative of cause and effect (except for the cause of God itself, which is never given, and so the creator myth still fails to explain how it all started. It just shifts the creation-from-nothing from an object-protagonist - the universe - to an equally inexplicably pre-existing subject-protagonist; the creator. This probably seems plausible to each individual human who believes it because they were once tiny kids with huge parents who *were* their world, so it makes sense that subjects precede the world). Then there is the "Ordeals of Faith" myth, whereby God tests the loyalty of those who believe in it, and the way to be down with God is to prove your unshakable faith no matter how sparse the evidence, or how hard the test. This sits uneasily with the "Omniscient judge" myth, according to which God would already know how loyal you were anyway, thereby requiring no test to find out...

If you freely counter objections raised relative to one mythic system by drawing on another mythic system without noticing that the story lines are kind of distinct, then you can always have an answer for every objection without noticing their incompatibility, because each answer draws on mythic systems which are fuzzily-distinct enough to prevent the conflicts from being noticed. This is unbelievably infuriating for us rationalist types, to the seeming great delight (at times) of those who manage to silence our objections without having to submit any of their incommesurable beliefs to Occam's razor.

This phenomenon is similar to one of the cognitive defects that Pascal Boyer identifies as one cause of religious belief in "Religion Explained"; specifically "Source Monitoring Defects". We do not recall or activate our awareness of the distinct sources of distinct knowledge types. Other defects Boyer analyzes include the well-known "Confirmation Bias", "Cognitive Dissonance Reduction", "Consensus Effects" and "Memory Illusions", all of which can conspire to efface the disparate sources of wisdom to create invincible rhetoric, where incommensurable ideas cohabit in powerful ways.

However, this same infuriating aspect of religious literalist apologetics tells us something important about religion as a human cultural activity that should lead us to receive religious wisdom in a respectful manner (even if we don't believe that God exists in any kind of way besides in human culture). Religious wisdom has enormous power as a repository of important generalizations drawn from many domains of human life, compressed into non-argumentative mythic structures.

So religious belief will be full of inconsistency, and unacceptable as a rational description of how the universe works, but at the same time it will be a powerful mashup of observations and generalizations about all features of human life. This storied richness is a resource that people can draw on to act meaningfully in positive ways, and some religious people who are committed to this kind of lived religion are empowered to do more good than they would otherwise have attempted. Thus people who take the love of wisdom seriously will attend to the wisdom of the irrational, even while rejecting it as a description of the world, and remaining vigilent against its capacity to empower people to do more evil than they might otherwise do, as well. What goes for religion can also go for all kinds of human discourses that are non-scientific, such as the pop psychology and pop business writing were a great many important observations may come together in ways similar to how root metaphors come together in religious traditions.

There are thus thoughtful ways for rationalists to engage religious ideas, pop-psychological ideas, folk wisdom, managerial/self-help guru-dom, and other such cultural repositories of meaning. Nevertheless, invincible rhetoric remains totally infuriating, and when it is being used as a dodge, people should really be called on it.

If God is not an idiot...

I recently had the extreme misfortune of taking part in a debate over evolution. I don't know why I even bother.

Religious deniers of evolution... (sigh)... have certain commonplace objections to it, and they tend to be really kind of exotic. They sometimes attack the accuracy of carbon dating (as if the theory relied on carbon dating!), or they attack the very idea of biogenesis - of life emerging from non-life, as if that is some huge insurmountable gap to be crossed that even an infinite amount of compositional variation and selection could never give rise to... (a bit of a red herring, since all current scientific theories of biogenesis are provisional anyhow - this subject area is still in its early days)...

Other favored tactics involve asking what came "before" the big-bang (which displays a total ignorance of how spacetime dimensionality is best understood), or showing that random variation could never lead to complex organs like eyes (which in fact are not so complex and which have emerged many times along different species lineages, in several different designs - if this seems hard to digest, start with the fact that pigments react to light, whether they are in an organism or just lying around, but the ones in organisms thus come to carry info about the outside world as a simple result of responding to light...)

Most religious argumentation against evolution betrays a failure of the imagination as well, specifically a failure to imagine scale - the scale of cosmological/evolutionary time, and the incredible power of combinatorial processes...

But look... Evolution-deniers really don't have to get so fancy to disprove evolutionary theory. It would be extraordinarily easy to disprove evolutionary theory. All you have to do is find one single population of organisms. That's it. The population has to have certain characteristics, of course, but once you find it, evolutionary theory as we know it will be forced to its knees.

You can challenge or disprove evolution if you can find a population of organisms where:

1) There are different (inheritable) traits across organisms;

2) The different traits lead to some organisms having more reproductive success than others, and these traits are inherited by their children who thus also have more reproductive success (i.e. more grandchildren per parent down the successful lineage;

3) Yet somehow, mysteriously, when you look at the genetic composition of each subsequent generation, most of the organisms are genetically related to the *less* reproductively successful ancestors, i.e. the grandparents that had the *fewest* (as few as zero) grandchildren.

Finding this population of organisms would refute evolutionary theory, or at least give it pause. Explaining this pattern of inheritance would force us to posit a new mechanism of inheritance not yet framed by science. For as long as no new mechanism (e.g genetic quantum tunneling?) were found, evolutionary theory would have to be provisionally considered incomplete. During that time period, people might speculate that perhaps certain lineages in these "inheritance without descent" species were "favoured by God", so that even though a "favoured" organism might have have the fewest descendants by way of reproduction, they have the most descendants via this favour - God puts the DNA of His favored organisms into subsequent generations, in violation of evolutionary principles... or something.

A very strong case of such a finding would be a population where *all* organisms do not demonstrate reproductive fitness, but rather eagerly get themselves eaten by predators as soon as possible, before reproducing. (They would be "manna", essentially...) Nevertheless, the species persists and thrives, growing with each generation. Finding a single such population would displace evolutionary theory as an acceptable general framework for biology (for the period of time within which no reproductive mechanism was understood).

Of course, find such species sounds like an impossible task, but only if we accept the scientific worldview of cause and effect. On a religious worldview, there is no reason why God could not intervene in the causal order of nature, and reshape future generations of a population as He saw fit, to give that population the characteristics noted above. Most emphatically, if He had any interest at all in disproving evolutionary theory, He could do it very easily by creating and maintaining such a population. The whole scientific/materialist worldview would be shaken by such a discovery.

If He thinks he can challenge the scientific worldview by making an image of the Virgin Mary appear in a grilled-cheese sandwich, or writing "Allah" on the side of a fish, (no offense and of course I say this for effect...) He's pretty dumb. The scientific worldview is *based* on ideas like the power of combinatorics and coincidence to produce patterns that may fortuitously be able to play a role in the context of some other system...

If God is not an idiot, and he wants to demonstrate his existence in the face of scientific skepticism or evolutionary reasoning, all he has to do is support *one* of the kinds of populations I have described above.

If religious people are serious about rebutting evolution, all they have to do is find it.