I somewhat agree but I do think there is an important issue of presentation here as well. In particular, I'd argue that it is a very important feature of intellectual hygiene not to accept arguments phrases in terms of concepts whose coherence you don't necessarily accept.
And you can often rephrase those arguments without using those concepts to put pressure on those who don't accept them but it is pretty important you do that. Indeed, I'd argue that there are quite a few places in modern philosophy where our judgements are biased because a concept is subtly incoherent and we effectively end up demanding the person who rejects the argument provide what amounts to a proof of impossibility rather than demand the challenger phrase the argument without assuming the concept in question. My personal pet peeve in this regard is the surprise quiz -- if you want to suggest it is puzzling you are on the hook for convincing me you have a definition of surprise that raises problems (imo it's just ambiguity between different ways of using that word).
I mean with respect to how you phrased the preferability argument on substack -- if I'm not misremembering -- it was phrased directly in terms of this notion of preferability that the deontologist would be inclined to reject. I didn't find that very convincing. However, when I read the corresponding paper it seemed much more clearly framed in terms of a dilemma for the deontologist and I found that quite convincing.
It's possible that was just an ancillary issue I was hung up on but I remember being really impressed with how you framed it in the paper to specifically address concerns about the conceptual incoherence and I really want to encourage that.
So I think it is totally appropriate to ask the person challenging a theory to state the challenge in terms about the bullets the theory has to bite on its own terms (which can include: you would have to deny that there is a notion ...). Though I agree that as a matter of personal intellectual hygiene one should try to do that oneself if it isn't done for you.
I question the notion that transparency is essential to question begging. Suppose I present the following argument:
People sometimes feel pain.
If illusionism is true, no one feels pain.
Therefore, illusionism is false
This argument does not seem to me to meet the transparency condition. However, once we disambiguate the terms used in this argument, it becomes apparent that the only way this argument could possibly work requires understanding the terms in a way that simply restates the conclusion. This is because “feels pain” is ambiguous. Illusionism is roughly the view that people mistakenly believe they have phenomenal states. That people mistakenly believe this is irrelevant to the objection, so the only thing that’s relevant is that it denies that there are phenomenal states. And we can distinguish between the only relevant senses of “feels pain”: one that involves pain phenomenal states and one that doesn’t. Illusionism denies all phenomenal states, not just pain phenomenal states, so pain itself is irrelevant. All that matters is that it denies there are phenomenal states. And the denial of the view that there are no phenomenal states, is, in this case, functionally equivalent to asserting that there are phenomenal states. Once we fully unpack this argument, then, we get something like:
There are phenomenal states.
If there are no phenomenal states, then there are no phenomenal states.
Therefore, there are phenomenal states. (Or, alternatively, it is false that there are no phenomenal states)
If this is used as an argument against the view that there are no phenomenal states, the first premise is clearly question begging. The issue with the transparency condition is that it conceals the vacuity of objections like the pain argument above behind a superficial veil of substance. When disambiguated, the relevant terms either trivially entail the conclusion in a superficial and trivial way that presupposes the conclusion or something that entails the conclusion, or at least one premise is going to be false and the conclusion doesn’t go through.
It is also question begging in the sense you specify in the article: You say that charging an argument as question-begging is “to deny that it raises any interesting problem.” I think this is true in the above case. The objection to illusionism on offer here does not raise any interesting objections to illusionism. It simply consists of asserting the contrary and vacuously repeating the implications of illusionism.
My point here is that even when an argument isn’t transparently question begging, it can be just as useless, vacuous, and presumptuous, and this is merely concealed behind terminological camouflage. There are no hidden implications or untapped considerations here. The argument’s entire force comes from rhetorically hoodwinking readers into thinking something substantive has been presented. I think this is true of many arguments: they are presumptuous and presume their conclusion in questionable ways, but conceal this. There’s no serious intellectual work to do in engaging with these objections. Given this, I question whether the transparency condition should really be maintained.
I agree that, if every disambiguation of one's claim/argument is transparently question-begging (or transparently unsound/irrelevant), then that also qualifies!
Btw: Sorry for being so disagreeable. I agreed with and appreciated most of the article. I need to make a point of saying that more, instead of always going for critiques.
I don't think it is only a matter of disambiguation: more generally, in subtle cases of question-begging, there's a tacit premise (which may or may not have been made and slips by unnoticed on account of some ambiguity) needing to be teased out to reveal the problem (though I suppose that if one wanted to, one could distinguish question-begging from circular reasoning on the basis of transparency.)
The resolution, I feel, can be stated quite simply (though not so easily applied): claims of question-begging are not exempt from the need for justification in order to be persuasive.
I agree with this, but I would go a little further. Consider two types of premises: assertions about what is true (e.g., that illusionism is false) and statements of implication (e.g., if illusionism is true, then there are no phenomenal states). Statements of what a philosophical theory implies are logically vacuous in the sense that they are determined by what a philosophical theory says. That leaves the assertions—but the proponents of the theory in question already accept the theory.
This suggests that, once we disambiguate arguments and clarify their implications, there is no philosophical work for deductive arguments to do. Either they make logically vacuous statements, or they make assertions that the proponents of the theory already reject.
Brilliant post and I really like how you offer excellent criticism of your own position before explaining why you think your position is better. As somebody who has absolutely been guilty of dismissing objections as question begging when I thought almost everyone on my side would reject the starting premise you have successfully persuaded me that I was making a mistake. So in terms of appealing to a fence sitter I can report that at least to me your argument of yours quite exceptional because it is actually pretty unusual for a single article to persuade me that I am wrong pretty much immediately in the course of reading it. Generally, it takes me at least a few hours thinking over an argument to change my mind and even so it’s unusual for a single article to accomplish it on its own. Great job and I think this is a clear example of genuine philosophical progress, or at least it appears that way from the perspective of someone who had not thought of this argument before and just received this information.
To be clear, I don’t think I was begging the question by rejecting his starting premises. What was happening was that I dismissed his argument as question begging because I thought nobody on my side accepted his starting premises. That’s fine and good, but I think Richard is correct that. Ideally what I should have done is present an argument for why I think that starting assumption is incorrect, that would at least have had some chance of persuading a hypothetical reader. Obviously, there are some cases where you cannot do this. For example where you just happen to have an intuition that the hypothetical reader either shares or does not share, but generally you can in fact make reasonable arguments as to why you think you are correct. Obviously, you can reject something as question begging it’s just that it’s not very productive in terms of producing good arguments. It’s just stops the discussion.
I love the phrase " An argument is an invitation to grapple with a problem". It's a meme that should be inscribed on the doors of meeting houses, courtrooms, congressional halls, classrooms, town halls, and even over the dining room in Thanksgiving. Thanks!
For the most part I strongly agree with this post. But I worry this step is too quick:
> An argument is an invitation to grapple with a problem: some people may have been tempted to hold all of {P1, … Pn, not-C} but this turns out to be an inconsistent set. Something has to go! (The arguer encourages switching to accepting C, but this directionality is a rhetorical artifact. The real philosophical work is just identifying the inconsistency, and readers may judge for themselves how they prefer to resolve it.)
Specifically, when you say "this directionality is a rhetorical artifact". I think in some cases the *substance* of the premises and conclusion tell us something about the right direction of argument. As you yourself said in another post (https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/its-not-wise-to-be-clueless):
> I think that the question of what matters morally has epistemic priority over the question whether we might be clueless about what matters, such that you cannot rationally revise your view of what matters merely in order to avoid apparent cluelessness. (That would be like responding to the inconsistent triad <causal determinism, incompatibilism, free will> by wishfully rejecting causal determinism. You just can’t possibly have good reason to believe in free will without having independent reason to think that either causal determinism or incompatibilism is false. Likewise, you can’t possibly have good reason to assume we have epistemic access to what matters without first having some grasp of (i) what matters, and (ii) what kind of epistemic access we have to those specified facts or events. The question of our epistemic access to what matters is purely downstream of those two prior questions, and so cannot be assumed in advance and used to revise one’s view of those strictly prior matters.)
Interesting, I find they're very common. E.g. the majority of claims "we should believe X" don't seem to be purely independently plausible, rather their plausibility is derivative of reasons why we should consider X likely.
The reason why deontologists call your "new paradox of deontology" question-begging is because it doesn't illuminate anything that anyone educated in philosophy, whether consequentialist or non-consequentialist, didn't already know: Anyone with a half-decent education in moral philosophy is aware that it is one of THE central features of standard versions of deontology that they reject the premise "If an agent can bring about W1 or W2, and it would be wrong for them to bring about W1 (but not W2), then W2 ≻ W1.". Deontologists take this to be a feature, not a bug and non-deontologists have been aware of this implication of deontology for decades, long before your "paradox".
It's literally an argument for no one, except for people who are highly uneducated in moral philosophy. Obviously you can give arguments that illuminate the uneducated, but educated people will say that these arguments are unconvincing, and rightly so.
You either don't understand the premise (the ">" indicates preferability, NOT value) or you have a parochial view of the profession. Actually MOST deontologists I've spoken to (including, e.g., full professors at Princeton) accept that premise. So the confidence with which you make egregiously false declarations about "anyone with a half-decent education in moral philosophy" is a fantastic illustration of my point about the lack of intellectual virtue that often underlies these sorts of claims. Thanks!
What game are you playing? Unless you think I'm lying, you should consider the weight of testimony from people who clearly know more about the field than you do.
You'll be hard pressed to find discussion of deontological preferability in print (adopting either position), because my paper is one of the first to highlight the issue. Since it has been published in a top journal, the list of experts you're now committed to judging incompetent includes not just me and the Princeton professor but also the journal editor, peer reviewers, etc.
Anyway, not really interested in spending any more of my weekend arguing with an ignoramus. Take a 1 day ban, and please don't comment here again until you learn some intellectual humility.
I somewhat agree but I do think there is an important issue of presentation here as well. In particular, I'd argue that it is a very important feature of intellectual hygiene not to accept arguments phrases in terms of concepts whose coherence you don't necessarily accept.
And you can often rephrase those arguments without using those concepts to put pressure on those who don't accept them but it is pretty important you do that. Indeed, I'd argue that there are quite a few places in modern philosophy where our judgements are biased because a concept is subtly incoherent and we effectively end up demanding the person who rejects the argument provide what amounts to a proof of impossibility rather than demand the challenger phrase the argument without assuming the concept in question. My personal pet peeve in this regard is the surprise quiz -- if you want to suggest it is puzzling you are on the hook for convincing me you have a definition of surprise that raises problems (imo it's just ambiguity between different ways of using that word).
I mean with respect to how you phrased the preferability argument on substack -- if I'm not misremembering -- it was phrased directly in terms of this notion of preferability that the deontologist would be inclined to reject. I didn't find that very convincing. However, when I read the corresponding paper it seemed much more clearly framed in terms of a dilemma for the deontologist and I found that quite convincing.
It's possible that was just an ancillary issue I was hung up on but I remember being really impressed with how you framed it in the paper to specifically address concerns about the conceptual incoherence and I really want to encourage that.
So I think it is totally appropriate to ask the person challenging a theory to state the challenge in terms about the bullets the theory has to bite on its own terms (which can include: you would have to deny that there is a notion ...). Though I agree that as a matter of personal intellectual hygiene one should try to do that oneself if it isn't done for you.
I question the notion that transparency is essential to question begging. Suppose I present the following argument:
People sometimes feel pain.
If illusionism is true, no one feels pain.
Therefore, illusionism is false
This argument does not seem to me to meet the transparency condition. However, once we disambiguate the terms used in this argument, it becomes apparent that the only way this argument could possibly work requires understanding the terms in a way that simply restates the conclusion. This is because “feels pain” is ambiguous. Illusionism is roughly the view that people mistakenly believe they have phenomenal states. That people mistakenly believe this is irrelevant to the objection, so the only thing that’s relevant is that it denies that there are phenomenal states. And we can distinguish between the only relevant senses of “feels pain”: one that involves pain phenomenal states and one that doesn’t. Illusionism denies all phenomenal states, not just pain phenomenal states, so pain itself is irrelevant. All that matters is that it denies there are phenomenal states. And the denial of the view that there are no phenomenal states, is, in this case, functionally equivalent to asserting that there are phenomenal states. Once we fully unpack this argument, then, we get something like:
There are phenomenal states.
If there are no phenomenal states, then there are no phenomenal states.
Therefore, there are phenomenal states. (Or, alternatively, it is false that there are no phenomenal states)
If this is used as an argument against the view that there are no phenomenal states, the first premise is clearly question begging. The issue with the transparency condition is that it conceals the vacuity of objections like the pain argument above behind a superficial veil of substance. When disambiguated, the relevant terms either trivially entail the conclusion in a superficial and trivial way that presupposes the conclusion or something that entails the conclusion, or at least one premise is going to be false and the conclusion doesn’t go through.
It is also question begging in the sense you specify in the article: You say that charging an argument as question-begging is “to deny that it raises any interesting problem.” I think this is true in the above case. The objection to illusionism on offer here does not raise any interesting objections to illusionism. It simply consists of asserting the contrary and vacuously repeating the implications of illusionism.
My point here is that even when an argument isn’t transparently question begging, it can be just as useless, vacuous, and presumptuous, and this is merely concealed behind terminological camouflage. There are no hidden implications or untapped considerations here. The argument’s entire force comes from rhetorically hoodwinking readers into thinking something substantive has been presented. I think this is true of many arguments: they are presumptuous and presume their conclusion in questionable ways, but conceal this. There’s no serious intellectual work to do in engaging with these objections. Given this, I question whether the transparency condition should really be maintained.
I agree that, if every disambiguation of one's claim/argument is transparently question-begging (or transparently unsound/irrelevant), then that also qualifies!
I see! But I worry that this won't always be *transparent*. It takes work to show that the disambiguation conceals a vacuous argument.
Fair enough - point taken.
Btw: Sorry for being so disagreeable. I agreed with and appreciated most of the article. I need to make a point of saying that more, instead of always going for critiques.
Critiques are welcome! Such points of possible disagreement tend to be the most illuminating points to explore, after all :-)
I don't think it is only a matter of disambiguation: more generally, in subtle cases of question-begging, there's a tacit premise (which may or may not have been made and slips by unnoticed on account of some ambiguity) needing to be teased out to reveal the problem (though I suppose that if one wanted to, one could distinguish question-begging from circular reasoning on the basis of transparency.)
The resolution, I feel, can be stated quite simply (though not so easily applied): claims of question-begging are not exempt from the need for justification in order to be persuasive.
I agree with this, but I would go a little further. Consider two types of premises: assertions about what is true (e.g., that illusionism is false) and statements of implication (e.g., if illusionism is true, then there are no phenomenal states). Statements of what a philosophical theory implies are logically vacuous in the sense that they are determined by what a philosophical theory says. That leaves the assertions—but the proponents of the theory in question already accept the theory.
This suggests that, once we disambiguate arguments and clarify their implications, there is no philosophical work for deductive arguments to do. Either they make logically vacuous statements, or they make assertions that the proponents of the theory already reject.
Did you read what my original post said about logical omniscience? Substantive philosophy consists in drawing attention to neglected implications.
Brilliant post and I really like how you offer excellent criticism of your own position before explaining why you think your position is better. As somebody who has absolutely been guilty of dismissing objections as question begging when I thought almost everyone on my side would reject the starting premise you have successfully persuaded me that I was making a mistake. So in terms of appealing to a fence sitter I can report that at least to me your argument of yours quite exceptional because it is actually pretty unusual for a single article to persuade me that I am wrong pretty much immediately in the course of reading it. Generally, it takes me at least a few hours thinking over an argument to change my mind and even so it’s unusual for a single article to accomplish it on its own. Great job and I think this is a clear example of genuine philosophical progress, or at least it appears that way from the perspective of someone who had not thought of this argument before and just received this information.
Thanks!
To be clear, I don’t think I was begging the question by rejecting his starting premises. What was happening was that I dismissed his argument as question begging because I thought nobody on my side accepted his starting premises. That’s fine and good, but I think Richard is correct that. Ideally what I should have done is present an argument for why I think that starting assumption is incorrect, that would at least have had some chance of persuading a hypothetical reader. Obviously, there are some cases where you cannot do this. For example where you just happen to have an intuition that the hypothetical reader either shares or does not share, but generally you can in fact make reasonable arguments as to why you think you are correct. Obviously, you can reject something as question begging it’s just that it’s not very productive in terms of producing good arguments. It’s just stops the discussion.
I love the phrase " An argument is an invitation to grapple with a problem". It's a meme that should be inscribed on the doors of meeting houses, courtrooms, congressional halls, classrooms, town halls, and even over the dining room in Thanksgiving. Thanks!
For the most part I strongly agree with this post. But I worry this step is too quick:
> An argument is an invitation to grapple with a problem: some people may have been tempted to hold all of {P1, … Pn, not-C} but this turns out to be an inconsistent set. Something has to go! (The arguer encourages switching to accepting C, but this directionality is a rhetorical artifact. The real philosophical work is just identifying the inconsistency, and readers may judge for themselves how they prefer to resolve it.)
Specifically, when you say "this directionality is a rhetorical artifact". I think in some cases the *substance* of the premises and conclusion tell us something about the right direction of argument. As you yourself said in another post (https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/its-not-wise-to-be-clueless):
> I think that the question of what matters morally has epistemic priority over the question whether we might be clueless about what matters, such that you cannot rationally revise your view of what matters merely in order to avoid apparent cluelessness. (That would be like responding to the inconsistent triad <causal determinism, incompatibilism, free will> by wishfully rejecting causal determinism. You just can’t possibly have good reason to believe in free will without having independent reason to think that either causal determinism or incompatibilism is false. Likewise, you can’t possibly have good reason to assume we have epistemic access to what matters without first having some grasp of (i) what matters, and (ii) what kind of epistemic access we have to those specified facts or events. The question of our epistemic access to what matters is purely downstream of those two prior questions, and so cannot be assumed in advance and used to revise one’s view of those strictly prior matters.)
More on this in this post: https://anthonydigiovanni.substack.com/p/how-to-not-do-decision-theory-backwards
Right, there can be special cases of inferential asymmetry. But I think those are fairly rare.
Interesting, I find they're very common. E.g. the majority of claims "we should believe X" don't seem to be purely independently plausible, rather their plausibility is derivative of reasons why we should consider X likely.
The reason why deontologists call your "new paradox of deontology" question-begging is because it doesn't illuminate anything that anyone educated in philosophy, whether consequentialist or non-consequentialist, didn't already know: Anyone with a half-decent education in moral philosophy is aware that it is one of THE central features of standard versions of deontology that they reject the premise "If an agent can bring about W1 or W2, and it would be wrong for them to bring about W1 (but not W2), then W2 ≻ W1.". Deontologists take this to be a feature, not a bug and non-deontologists have been aware of this implication of deontology for decades, long before your "paradox".
It's literally an argument for no one, except for people who are highly uneducated in moral philosophy. Obviously you can give arguments that illuminate the uneducated, but educated people will say that these arguments are unconvincing, and rightly so.
You either don't understand the premise (the ">" indicates preferability, NOT value) or you have a parochial view of the profession. Actually MOST deontologists I've spoken to (including, e.g., full professors at Princeton) accept that premise. So the confidence with which you make egregiously false declarations about "anyone with a half-decent education in moral philosophy" is a fantastic illustration of my point about the lack of intellectual virtue that often underlies these sorts of claims. Thanks!
What game are you playing? Unless you think I'm lying, you should consider the weight of testimony from people who clearly know more about the field than you do.
You'll be hard pressed to find discussion of deontological preferability in print (adopting either position), because my paper is one of the first to highlight the issue. Since it has been published in a top journal, the list of experts you're now committed to judging incompetent includes not just me and the Princeton professor but also the journal editor, peer reviewers, etc.
Anyway, not really interested in spending any more of my weekend arguing with an ignoramus. Take a 1 day ban, and please don't comment here again until you learn some intellectual humility.