I’m sure your intention was to present an unbiased summary. Unfortunately, this is very difficult to do when you strongly identify with one side of a dispute. It also doesn’t help that Mills is not a very clear writer. I’ve noticed that when I read an argument for a conclusion I do not agree with, and the argument doesn’t seem to make much sense, my default is to assume it must be a bad argument, and to attribute the lack of sense to the author’s confusion rather than my own. On the other hand, when the conclusion is one with which I agree, and especially if its a conclusion I think is underappreciated or nonobvious, an unconscious principle of charity comes into play. If I can’t make sense of an argument, I think I must be missing something and try harder to interpret what the author is saying.
This is probably a reasonably effective heuristic in general. There’s only so much time I can spend trying to parse arguments, and in the absence of other information, using the conclusion as a filter to determine how much credibility (and therefore time) I should assign to the source isn’t a terrible strategy. When I’m trying to provide a fair paraphrase of someone’s argument though, the heuristic needs to be actively suppressed. I need to ignore the signals that the person isn’t all that smart or well-informed and engage with the argument under the working assumption that the person is very smart, so that an inability to understand is an indication of a failure on my part. Only if concentrated effort is insufficient to produce an interpretation that I think makes sense do I conclude that the argument is genuinely bad.
If you think a debate is worth reporting on (for purposes other than mockery of one side), then it is worth engaging in this manner. Part of what makes your paraphrase tendentious is that I get the sense you are so convinced that Mills is out of his depth here (which might well be true) that you haven’t tried to read his arguments with care to see if there’s an important point you might be missing. I’ve posted my own attempt at a charitable reading of Mills’ argument elsewhere in the thread, but I think CuSithBell and Khoth have pointed out important lacunae in your presentation. Just including the points they articulate would make Mills come across as much less of an analytic incompetent than he does in your post.
I’m sure your intention was to present an unbiased summary. Unfortunately, this is very difficult to do when you strongly identify with one side of a dispute. It also doesn’t help that Mills is not a very clear writer. I’ve noticed that when I read an argument for a conclusion I do not agree with, and the argument doesn’t seem to make much sense, my default is to assume it must be a bad argument, and to attribute the lack of sense to the author’s confusion rather than my own. On the other hand, when the conclusion is one with which I agree, and especially if its a conclusion I think is underappreciated or nonobvious, an unconscious principle of charity comes into play. If I can’t make sense of an argument, I think I must be missing something and try harder to interpret what the author is saying.
This is probably a reasonably effective heuristic in general. There’s only so much time I can spend trying to parse arguments, and in the absence of other information, using the conclusion as a filter to determine how much credibility (and therefore time) I should assign to the source isn’t a terrible strategy. When I’m trying to provide a fair paraphrase of someone’s argument though, the heuristic needs to be actively suppressed. I need to ignore the signals that the person isn’t all that smart or well-informed and engage with the argument under the working assumption that the person is very smart, so that an inability to understand is an indication of a failure on my part. Only if concentrated effort is insufficient to produce an interpretation that I think makes sense do I conclude that the argument is genuinely bad.
If you think a debate is worth reporting on (for purposes other than mockery of one side), then it is worth engaging in this manner. Part of what makes your paraphrase tendentious is that I get the sense you are so convinced that Mills is out of his depth here (which might well be true) that you haven’t tried to read his arguments with care to see if there’s an important point you might be missing. I’ve posted my own attempt at a charitable reading of Mills’ argument elsewhere in the thread, but I think CuSithBell and Khoth have pointed out important lacunae in your presentation. Just including the points they articulate would make Mills come across as much less of an analytic incompetent than he does in your post.