More Conviction

Again, updated and adapted from the Moot, from an ongoing exchange with Friend of Blog JimF:

I was simply noting that as a believer in "science within reason", I do not expect to be able to convince (or even to have a profitable conversation on certain subjects with) a person who believes in revealed truths about the "larger questions" of life

I guess I misunderstood the thrust of your point then. It seemed to me you were suggesting that for those who apply scientific standards where these are warranted or logical standards where these are warranted or more parochially situated moral or aesthetic or legal standards where these are warranted, that to have a "profitable conversation" with those who refuse to do the same -- even while they are demanding at least some of the time the recognition and status of people who do -- it is the responsibility of those of us who do to enable the false pretense to the contrary of those who do not, where it seems to me this is a functional abdication of reasonableness masquerading as an effort at reasonableness qua tolerance or charity (I mean that in its epistemological reference).

Part of what it means to affirm criteria of warrant as the warrants they are is to act like you mean it when you say they are, and even if we grant that these warrants are historical constructions and context-dependent they still have to be treated as what they are to do what they do. Of course, I happen to pluralize the domains of reasonable belief ascription and their concomitant criteria of warrant and so I find it quite easy to accommodate many positions that typically get straightforwardly dismissed as irrationality by many of the folks who sound like they are offering up intolerant defenses of reasonableness like the one I just offered (that's why I can sound like such a hard-ass and yet still get pilloried as an effete elite aesthete pomo relativist on the other hand in a worst of both worlds sort of way all too typical of the intellectual positions I tend to find my way to).

I certainly do agree with you that there are some people who cannot be reached argumentatively in ways that accord with the criteria of warrant associated with the domain of reasonable belief in play. And, fortunately, quite often it is perfectly right and reasonable to leave them be or ignore them (often these are matters of moral or aesthetic or commercial taste that are quite rightly parochial after all).

But if someone wants to pretend their imperializing moralism is ethically universalizable, or that their personal faith or madness is consensus scientific, or that their commercial interests trump the prior demands of political reconciliation and then not only says these foolish things but also acts on them in public places in ways that are a threat to people, then I'm afraid such people must be educated, marginalized, or fought (and possibly institutionalized) so long as they cannot be made to see sense or at any rate act in ways that accede to nonviolent adjudication of such disputes.

Abdications of reasonableness just amount to pre-emptive surrenders to unreasonableness in such matters and such misbegotten strategies should not be misconstrued as tolerant or nonviolent or relativist meta-reasonablenesses of all things. I guess I mis-read you as advocating such a viewpoint. I so regularly get mis-read as advocating such a viewpoint myself you can be sure you have my sympathies.