> It’s clear why tone arguments are epistemically invalid. If someone says X, then X’s truth value is independent of their tone, so talking about their tone is changing the subject.
If tone is independent of truth then it should be possible to make a truth-compliant and tone-compliant comment. That is the thing should be bad even if you sugarcoat it. you don’t need ot be anti-tone to be pro-truth althought it is harder to be compliant on both and people typically need to spread their skills over those goods. There is the kind of problematic thing where any negative implication is forbidden. But then tone and truth are mingled.
Sometimes I value safety a lot and I have pretty general principle that discussions should be safe. I would totally lie to prevent my face from being punched. But even if I did that I don’t think I would be acting in bad faith. If I am going to be talking about a touchy subject I need to be certain that I won’t be touched in anger even if the other participant becomes furious. Bad faith can come to play if I exploit the safety boundaries to “be winning”. But I don’t need to be able to withstand all truths to be able to have a conversation. Some truths might be devastating and you as the messenger might not be committed to build me back up to working condition (ie building myself back to psychological working condition is my personal problem). So in a touchy subject conversation I might have a edge condition that I not be devastated and need at each step be sure that I am not left devastated. Sure it’s tricky if I can’t communicate that my participating is limited because of psychological self-preservance and I might not be always be aware that this is going on.
If someone doesn’t share the commitment that everything that could be destoyred by the truth should it doesn’t mean they are the champion of falsehood. That you trip over comfort safe guards in the name of truth doesn’t mean you want to optimise for most tortorous discussion. If one person is truth ambivalent and the other person is comfort ambivalent it means a comfort-truth solution might exist and trying to enforce comfort-ambivalence over comfort-seekment is likely to be ineffective. If one ends up playing prisoners dilemma between a truth seeker and a comfort seeker then the quadrant to shoot for might not be the highest in truth value.
You don’t have to redefine bad faith to exclude (lying to protect yourself) to morally justify it. By definition, bad faith is intent to deceive, so lying would count even if it’s for your protection and morally justified.
People can seek truth in some spaces and not seek truth in other spaces. Not everyone has to seek truth, and those that do don’t have to do it all the time. And there can be “partial truth seeking” spaces, where the norms only partially optimize for the truth.
I have had good conversations where one or both parties says, “Ok, what you’re saying might be true, but I’m having a hard time considering it due to X. Can we discuss X?” That’s very different from saying something like “You should be more polite in order to get more people to listen to you”. It’s taking responsibility for having a hard time absorbing the information.
I had a very approximate reading and understanding how the concept of “bad faith” enters into the mix. In my mind I was thinking of a situation that if what I say mainly implies whether I get hit in the face in the next second what I let out of my mouth can’t be said to attest to the truth of any matter. Consent under duress is no consent and in a similar way testimony under duress would spoil it from being any claim of fact making it incapable of being a lie (yet I used term “lie” to refer to a statement that would on literal english level be a claim of fact which in a speech act sense it would not be). In a way when you give into a “appeal to stick” you are yielding, not affirming anything.
> It’s clear why tone arguments are epistemically invalid. If someone says X, then X’s truth value is independent of their tone, so talking about their tone is changing the subject.
If tone is independent of truth then it should be possible to make a truth-compliant and tone-compliant comment. That is the thing should be bad even if you sugarcoat it. you don’t need ot be anti-tone to be pro-truth althought it is harder to be compliant on both and people typically need to spread their skills over those goods. There is the kind of problematic thing where any negative implication is forbidden. But then tone and truth are mingled.
Sometimes I value safety a lot and I have pretty general principle that discussions should be safe. I would totally lie to prevent my face from being punched. But even if I did that I don’t think I would be acting in bad faith. If I am going to be talking about a touchy subject I need to be certain that I won’t be touched in anger even if the other participant becomes furious. Bad faith can come to play if I exploit the safety boundaries to “be winning”. But I don’t need to be able to withstand all truths to be able to have a conversation. Some truths might be devastating and you as the messenger might not be committed to build me back up to working condition (ie building myself back to psychological working condition is my personal problem). So in a touchy subject conversation I might have a edge condition that I not be devastated and need at each step be sure that I am not left devastated. Sure it’s tricky if I can’t communicate that my participating is limited because of psychological self-preservance and I might not be always be aware that this is going on.
If someone doesn’t share the commitment that everything that could be destoyred by the truth should it doesn’t mean they are the champion of falsehood. That you trip over comfort safe guards in the name of truth doesn’t mean you want to optimise for most tortorous discussion. If one person is truth ambivalent and the other person is comfort ambivalent it means a comfort-truth solution might exist and trying to enforce comfort-ambivalence over comfort-seekment is likely to be ineffective. If one ends up playing prisoners dilemma between a truth seeker and a comfort seeker then the quadrant to shoot for might not be the highest in truth value.
You don’t have to redefine bad faith to exclude (lying to protect yourself) to morally justify it. By definition, bad faith is intent to deceive, so lying would count even if it’s for your protection and morally justified.
People can seek truth in some spaces and not seek truth in other spaces. Not everyone has to seek truth, and those that do don’t have to do it all the time. And there can be “partial truth seeking” spaces, where the norms only partially optimize for the truth.
I have had good conversations where one or both parties says, “Ok, what you’re saying might be true, but I’m having a hard time considering it due to X. Can we discuss X?” That’s very different from saying something like “You should be more polite in order to get more people to listen to you”. It’s taking responsibility for having a hard time absorbing the information.
I had a very approximate reading and understanding how the concept of “bad faith” enters into the mix. In my mind I was thinking of a situation that if what I say mainly implies whether I get hit in the face in the next second what I let out of my mouth can’t be said to attest to the truth of any matter. Consent under duress is no consent and in a similar way testimony under duress would spoil it from being any claim of fact making it incapable of being a lie (yet I used term “lie” to refer to a statement that would on literal english level be a claim of fact which in a speech act sense it would not be). In a way when you give into a “appeal to stick” you are yielding, not affirming anything.