(Disclaimer: I haven’t read DiAngelo’s book, and I know very little about her as a person. I’m curious about the question ‘what’s the nearest reasonable version of this strategy, and what would a conversation look like with a reasonable proponent of that strategy?’.
I can’t speak to whether any of that resembles how an actual conversation with DiAngelo would go, and I don’t mean to vouch for DiAngelo’s overall epistemics in any of the following. I expect the epistemics are pretty bad. But my experience has been that the flip side of ‘motte and bailey is popular’ and ‘pop culture makes good ideas memetically evolve into terrible ideas’ is ‘there’s often a much more reasonable version of a thought pattern that’s conceptually close to the unreasonable version’.)
The ‘everything you do except agree with me shows how wrong you are’ thing is really scary, because it can create a situation where confirmation bias has complete dominion and ~no evidence can allow you to update away from your original assumption (it reminds me of outgroup-Bingo).
But it also reminds me a bit of New Atheists’ frustrations with arguing with religious people. New Atheists ended up generating long lists of names for various wrong patterns of reasoning and argument, in part because they were exasperated at how religionists’ confirmation bias caused them to just keep generating more and more new Objectively Terrible rationalizations for the same old falsified claims.
The human mind is a bottomless well of rationalization, when it wants to be. Trying to refute every single object-level argument is a hopeless task (especially when you’re arguing against a religionist who’s smarter than you, or has spent more time studying the topic). But you might hope to categorize a certain kind of mistake, and/or recognize a root cause underlying many different specific mistakes. And this might indeed start looking like a Bingo card, after the fiftieth argument by a religionist gets shot down with yet another canned Fallacy Name; but that doesn’t mean the New Atheist is wrong.
So if DiAngelo is convinced enough in her view of X, and is frustrated by what appears to her to be an endless series of easily-refuted rationalizations for not-X, then I can understand why she might want to have Extremely General Counter-Arguments she can use to defeat a wide variety of objections in one fell swoop.
That still doesn’t address the problem of ‘what if you’re really sure X is true, but in fact X is false? how do you ever escape from believing X?’.
I’m not sure how to address that problem in general, other than:
Being generally epistemically cautious and rigorous, so you end up highly confident of fewer false things.
Being cautious about the strategies ‘round an opponent’s argument off to a general category and refute the category’ and ‘identify the root cause of an opponent’s argument and show the cause is epistemically suspect’; use them relatively sparingly, and put unusual effort into testing your hypotheses about such categories and causes.
Trying to stick to the object level where possible, and having some conversations where the ground rules are ‘we’re not going to use those Extremely General Counter-Arguments’.
Doing conversation in a way that causes people to rationalize and dissemble less / causes them to be more reflective about what’s really in their head. (Circling?)
When I imagine a DiAngelo-Kennaway conversation going really well, I think I imagine a version of Kennaway who clearly signals in the conversation that he’s open to criticism and admitting fault when it comes to his judgment/impartiality/character/virtue, so DiAngelo has Bayesian evidence that she’s not engaging with the equivalent of an Imperviously Rationalizing Religionist. Then DiAngelo acknowledges the Epistemic Trap problem, and explicitly notes examples in the conversation where she updated both upward and downward in her subjective estimate of ‘how racially defensive/biased Kennaway is’ (or something like that).
Then the conversation can perhaps proceed productively from there, even though both parties think the other side is totally wrong and have various theories about why they’re so wrong.
That’s not my ideal version of how this kind of conversation goes; it’s just the thing my brain tags ‘least unlikely’ when I condition on the conversation being substantive, honest, friendly, and productive.
At the opposite extreme, it might be like trying to demonstrate to an anosognosic — or to be more even-handed, two anosognosics trying to demonstrate to each other their major impairments.
(Disclaimer: I haven’t read DiAngelo’s book, and I know very little about her as a person. I’m curious about the question ‘what’s the nearest reasonable version of this strategy, and what would a conversation look like with a reasonable proponent of that strategy?’.
I can’t speak to whether any of that resembles how an actual conversation with DiAngelo would go, and I don’t mean to vouch for DiAngelo’s overall epistemics in any of the following. I expect the epistemics are pretty bad. But my experience has been that the flip side of ‘motte and bailey is popular’ and ‘pop culture makes good ideas memetically evolve into terrible ideas’ is ‘there’s often a much more reasonable version of a thought pattern that’s conceptually close to the unreasonable version’.)
The ‘everything you do except agree with me shows how wrong you are’ thing is really scary, because it can create a situation where confirmation bias has complete dominion and ~no evidence can allow you to update away from your original assumption (it reminds me of outgroup-Bingo).
But it also reminds me a bit of New Atheists’ frustrations with arguing with religious people. New Atheists ended up generating long lists of names for various wrong patterns of reasoning and argument, in part because they were exasperated at how religionists’ confirmation bias caused them to just keep generating more and more new Objectively Terrible rationalizations for the same old falsified claims.
The human mind is a bottomless well of rationalization, when it wants to be. Trying to refute every single object-level argument is a hopeless task (especially when you’re arguing against a religionist who’s smarter than you, or has spent more time studying the topic). But you might hope to categorize a certain kind of mistake, and/or recognize a root cause underlying many different specific mistakes. And this might indeed start looking like a Bingo card, after the fiftieth argument by a religionist gets shot down with yet another canned Fallacy Name; but that doesn’t mean the New Atheist is wrong.
So if DiAngelo is convinced enough in her view of X, and is frustrated by what appears to her to be an endless series of easily-refuted rationalizations for not-X, then I can understand why she might want to have Extremely General Counter-Arguments she can use to defeat a wide variety of objections in one fell swoop.
That still doesn’t address the problem of ‘what if you’re really sure X is true, but in fact X is false? how do you ever escape from believing X?’.
I’m not sure how to address that problem in general, other than:
Being generally epistemically cautious and rigorous, so you end up highly confident of fewer false things.
Being cautious about the strategies ‘round an opponent’s argument off to a general category and refute the category’ and ‘identify the root cause of an opponent’s argument and show the cause is epistemically suspect’; use them relatively sparingly, and put unusual effort into testing your hypotheses about such categories and causes.
Trying to stick to the object level where possible, and having some conversations where the ground rules are ‘we’re not going to use those Extremely General Counter-Arguments’.
Doing conversation in a way that causes people to rationalize and dissemble less / causes them to be more reflective about what’s really in their head. (Circling?)
When I imagine a DiAngelo-Kennaway conversation going really well, I think I imagine a version of Kennaway who clearly signals in the conversation that he’s open to criticism and admitting fault when it comes to his judgment/impartiality/character/virtue, so DiAngelo has Bayesian evidence that she’s not engaging with the equivalent of an Imperviously Rationalizing Religionist. Then DiAngelo acknowledges the Epistemic Trap problem, and explicitly notes examples in the conversation where she updated both upward and downward in her subjective estimate of ‘how racially defensive/biased Kennaway is’ (or something like that).
Then the conversation can perhaps proceed productively from there, even though both parties think the other side is totally wrong and have various theories about why they’re so wrong.
That’s not my ideal version of how this kind of conversation goes; it’s just the thing my brain tags ‘least unlikely’ when I condition on the conversation being substantive, honest, friendly, and productive.
At the opposite extreme, it might be like trying to demonstrate to an anosognosic — or to be more even-handed, two anosognosics trying to demonstrate to each other their major impairments.