You’re welcome, and I’m curious to see what you end up thinking here.
I think if you disagree with what someone thinks, or plans to do, the rational response is an argument to persuade them that they are wrong. (This is true irrespectively of whether they were, themselves, arguing, and it goes for the fruit-seller, the wrestler, etc. too.)
As pointed out by Raemon in a sibling comment, here I think we want to start using a more precise word than “rational.” [Up until this point, I think I’ve been using “engage rationally” in a ‘standard’ way instead of in a ‘Less Wrong specific way’.]
I’m going to say the ‘argumentative’ response is an ‘argument to persuade them that they are wrong’, and agree that purely argumentative responses are important for communicative rationality. The thing that’s good about argumentative responses (as opposed to, say, purely persuasive ones) is that they attempt to be weaker when the claims they favor are not true than when they are true; and this helps us sort our beliefs and end up with truer ones.
I think for many disagreements, however, I want to do a thing that doesn’t quite feel like argumentation; I want to appeal to reality. This involves two steps: first, an ‘argument’ over what observations imply about our beliefs, and second, an observation of reality that then shifts our beliefs. The first is an argument, and we do actually have to agree on the relationship between observations and beliefs for the second step to do anything useful. This doesn’t help us establish logical truths, or things that would be true in any world, except indirectly; what it does help us do is establish empirical truths, or things that are true in our world (but could be false in others). Imagine a portal across universes that allows us to communicate with aliens who live under different physics than we do; it would be a tremendous surprise for our mathematicians and their mathematicians to disagree, whereas our chemists and their chemists disagreeing wouldn’t be surprising at all.
I think that the wrestling match falls into this category; if a rival claims “I could out-wrestle Plato”, then while Plato could respond with theories of wrestling and other logic, the quickest path to truth seems to be Plato responding with “let’s settle that question in the ring.” There’s the same two-part structure of “agree on what test bears on the question” and then “actually running the test.” I don’t think buying fruit falls into this category. [“Quickest path to truth” might not be the right criterion, here, but it feels likely to be close.]
Continuing to flesh out this view, besides “appeal to logic” and “appeal to reality” there’s something like “assertion of influence.” This seems like the category that buying fruit falls into; I have some ability to change the external world to be more to my liking, and I trade some of that ability to the merchant for fruit. There seem to be ethical ways to do this (like free commerce) and unethical ways to do this (like stealing), and in particular there seem to be many ways for assertion of influence to choke off good things.
I think ‘ethical’ and ‘unethical’ look more like ‘congruent with values X’ or ‘incongruent with values X’ than it does like ‘logically valid’ or ‘logically invalid’. [In this way, it more resembles the category of empirical truth, in which things are ‘congruent with world X’ or ‘incongruent with world X’ as opposed to ‘congruent with all possible worlds’ or not.]
And so we end up with questions that look like “how do we judge what influence is congruent with our values, and what influence in incongruent with our values?”, and further questions upstream like “what do our meta-values imply our values should be?”, and so on.
[There’s much more to say here, but I think I’ll leave it at this for now.]
You’re welcome, and I’m curious to see what you end up thinking here.
As pointed out by Raemon in a sibling comment, here I think we want to start using a more precise word than “rational.” [Up until this point, I think I’ve been using “engage rationally” in a ‘standard’ way instead of in a ‘Less Wrong specific way’.]
I’m going to say the ‘argumentative’ response is an ‘argument to persuade them that they are wrong’, and agree that purely argumentative responses are important for communicative rationality. The thing that’s good about argumentative responses (as opposed to, say, purely persuasive ones) is that they attempt to be weaker when the claims they favor are not true than when they are true; and this helps us sort our beliefs and end up with truer ones.
I think for many disagreements, however, I want to do a thing that doesn’t quite feel like argumentation; I want to appeal to reality. This involves two steps: first, an ‘argument’ over what observations imply about our beliefs, and second, an observation of reality that then shifts our beliefs. The first is an argument, and we do actually have to agree on the relationship between observations and beliefs for the second step to do anything useful. This doesn’t help us establish logical truths, or things that would be true in any world, except indirectly; what it does help us do is establish empirical truths, or things that are true in our world (but could be false in others). Imagine a portal across universes that allows us to communicate with aliens who live under different physics than we do; it would be a tremendous surprise for our mathematicians and their mathematicians to disagree, whereas our chemists and their chemists disagreeing wouldn’t be surprising at all.
I think that the wrestling match falls into this category; if a rival claims “I could out-wrestle Plato”, then while Plato could respond with theories of wrestling and other logic, the quickest path to truth seems to be Plato responding with “let’s settle that question in the ring.” There’s the same two-part structure of “agree on what test bears on the question” and then “actually running the test.” I don’t think buying fruit falls into this category. [“Quickest path to truth” might not be the right criterion, here, but it feels likely to be close.]
Continuing to flesh out this view, besides “appeal to logic” and “appeal to reality” there’s something like “assertion of influence.” This seems like the category that buying fruit falls into; I have some ability to change the external world to be more to my liking, and I trade some of that ability to the merchant for fruit. There seem to be ethical ways to do this (like free commerce) and unethical ways to do this (like stealing), and in particular there seem to be many ways for assertion of influence to choke off good things.
I think ‘ethical’ and ‘unethical’ look more like ‘congruent with values X’ or ‘incongruent with values X’ than it does like ‘logically valid’ or ‘logically invalid’. [In this way, it more resembles the category of empirical truth, in which things are ‘congruent with world X’ or ‘incongruent with world X’ as opposed to ‘congruent with all possible worlds’ or not.]
And so we end up with questions that look like “how do we judge what influence is congruent with our values, and what influence in incongruent with our values?”, and further questions upstream like “what do our meta-values imply our values should be?”, and so on.
[There’s much more to say here, but I think I’ll leave it at this for now.]