Do you mean that saying “my method of communication is non-violent communication” implies that everyone else is communicating violently? That’s a reasonable point; I hadn’t really thought about it, since I’d been mostly treating NVC as a technical term or proper noun rather than as something that was intended to communicate literal meaning. (Especially since it’s often referred to as just “NVC”, so you don’t necessarily even say the words.)
To be clear, I don’t mean to imply that, and I don’t subscribe to the interpretation that people who don’t use NVC are being violent in any sense. I also think that attempts to police other people’s language by saying things like “you must always use NVC” are going against the spirit of the original. I think that using NVC is something that you do for your own sake rather than something that you require others to do. (Though I do also sympathize with people who have gotten used to using NVC and then get frustrated when other people use language that seems to leap to unfair conclusions.)
That said, since the “NVC” term has gotten established, it’d feel a little clunky to try to switch; in practice, I’d probably end up saying something like “giraffe language, more commonly known as NVC but I don’t like that term because...”. Maybe it’d be worth the overhead in some situations, though—I’m not sure how common it is for people to actually read that implication into the term.
Do you mean that saying “my method of communication is non-violent communication” implies that everyone else is communicating violently? [...] To be clear, I don’t mean to imply that, and I don’t subscribe to the interpretation that people who don’t use NVC are being violent in any sense. I also think that attempts to police other people’s language by saying things like “you must always use NVC” are going against the spirit of the original.
I’ll bite that bullet. People who aren’t communicating in the spirit of NVC are “communicating violently”. Not in the sense of “Words are literal violence!” because “sticks and stones”, but in the sense that “If you don’t give me what I want I will use sticks and stones to break your bones” is “communicating violently”.
NVC points at the important insight that much of what passes for “normal communication” is actually subtle and implicit threats, which can and do escalate to real physical harm and literal violence. “Why are you being so mean?” doesn’t pass for NVC, and that’s not unrelated to the fact that it can be used to recruit someone to do violence on your behalf against the person who you accuse of doing you wrong. It doesn’t usually get that far, in the same way that parking tickets aren’t usually enforced with guns drawn, but there’s a reason that libertarians like to point out that all laws are ultimately enforced at gunpoint and the same thing applies here.
That doesn’t mean that we should “must” at people who aren’t communicating in the spirit of NVC, because as you point out, that would be violating the spirit of NVC. But I do think the term fits, and the way to get around the hubris of saying “my method of communication is nonviolent communication!” is to 1) point out how the term “violence” is actually legit and doesn’t just mean “offensive”, 2) don’t run around claiming that you actually succeed at doing it more than you do, and 3) point out how “nonviolent” isn’t even the goal to aspire to 100% of the time and definitely not synonymous with “good”.
I would like it to be possible for people to say things like “Bob is wrong”, “Bob is lying to you”, “Bob’s products don’t work very well / are flawed”, “Bob’s studies have bad methodology”, “Bob has made horrible decisions as a leader and should be voted out”, etc. And when they do so, if Bob gets offended and escalates to violence, I want there to be a very strong presumption that Bob is absolutely wrong to do so, that this effectively proves the criticism was well-founded (not because that’s logically necessarily true, but because it disincentivizes violence). If Bob hints that he may escalate to violence, I want there to be a strong presumption that he is wrong to do so and that this proves the criticism right. If any onlookers (possibly aligned with Bob, possibly not) say, “Hey, um, you might not want to say that, it carries some risk of escalating to violence”, I want the culture to provide a strong answer of “No, Bob will not do that—or if he does, it proves to everyone that he’s monstrous and we’ll throw him in jail faster than you can say ‘uncivilized’. Civilians should act like there’s no risk to speaking up, and we will do our best to make this a correct decision.”
This ethos seems difficult to reconcile with enshrining the idea “Unless you’re very careful about what you say and how you phrase it, you may end up saying things that may provoke someone into violence” into the name of your philosophy. Like, it is possible to “expect good behavior, punish not-good behavior, but also practice how to handle bad behavior”; but to call non-careful speech violent (either implicitly, or biting the bullet and making it explicit as you do) seems to imply it’s your fault for making Bob punch you. Which is kind of true in a causal sense, but not in a “blame” sense.[1] Calling it provoking—”non-provoking communication”—would be somewhat better, though I’m not entirely happy with it. “How To Communicate With Uncivilized People Who Are Dangerously Prone To Violence” would be ideal in this sense.
Rosenberg seems to have developed and exercised his philosophy around people who are in fact dangerously prone to violence. His lecture talks about growing up with some race riots that killed people, and then (either that or another one) talks about visiting somewhere like Iraq and having someone scream “Murderer!” at him because he was an American, and getting the guy to calm down and have a valuable conversation.
To be sure, one probably will encounter, in life, a decent number of people who are dangerously prone to violence. Many of them you can probably get a good guess about, from quick observation, but not all. So it is useful to have such skills, and additionally some of them help make conversations more productive in general (the central example being to state specific observations, rather than leading with controversial interpretations of not-stated evidence). But, for abovementioned reasons, I don’t want the terminology to have any shred of implication that escalating from speech to violence is justifiable.
If any onlookers (possibly aligned with Bob, possibly not) say, “Hey, um, you might not want to say that, it carries some risk of escalating to violence”, I want the culture to provide a strong answer of “No, Bob will not do that—or if he does, it proves to everyone that he’s monstrous and we’ll throw him in jail faster than you can say ‘uncivilized’. Civilians should act like there’s no risk to speaking up, and we will do our best to make this a correct decision.”
I see where you’re coming from, but it doesn’t actually work except for in the egregious cases and NVC highlights a more complete picture that includes the non-egregious cases. If you can’t say “I think maybe we should get pizza” without Bob explicitly threatening to punch you in the face, then yes, that is a serious problem and it is crucial that Bob gets shut down.
However, there are two important points here.
One is that even if people respond in the way you prescribe, the person being threatened probably doesn’t want to be punched in the face before you haul Bob off, and will likely be swayed by the threat anyway. If you try to pretend this doesn’t exist, and say “Oh no, Bob isn’t threatening because if he did that would be bad and we’d respond then”, then Bob gets to say “Oh yeah, totally not threatening. Would be a shame if someone punched you in the face for suggesting we get pizza. Wink wink.” and carry out his coercion while getting off scot free. This isn’t good. In order to stop this, you have to make sure Bob feels punished for communicating the threat, even though the threat was “just words”.
The second one, which gets at the heart of the issue, is that your prescribed response to Bob threatening violence is to threaten counterviolence (and in the spirit of this conversation, I’ll explicitly disclaim here that I’m not saying this is “bad”). It’s important that people feel free to express their values and beliefs without fearing violence for contributing to the cooperative endeavor, but “No risk to threatening violence” can’t work and is the opposite of what you are trying to do with Bob “speaking up” about what he will do to anyone who suggests getting pizza.
Most real world conflicts aren’t so egregious as “I will punch anyone who suggests getting pizza”. Usually it’s something like Adam lightly bumps into Bob, and Bob says “Watch where you’re going, jerk”, Adam says “Don’t call me a jerk, asshole”, Bob says “Call me an asshole again and see what happens”, Adam says “If you touch me I’ll kill you” and then eventually someone throws the first punch. Literally everything said here is said from a place of “I’m only threatening violence to suppress that guy’s unjustified violence”, and the “initial aggression”—if there was any—was simply not being careful enough not to bump into someone else. And “How careful is “careful enough?” isn’t the kind of question we can agree on with enough fidelity and reliability to keep these unstable systems from flying off the rails.
The idea that “Unprovoked violence should be suppressed with zero tolerance [backed by willingness to use violence]” immediately explodes if “microaggressions” are counted as “violence”, and so given that policy there’s reason to push back applying the term “violent” to smaller infractions. However, that’s just because it’s a bad policy. Smaller levels of aggression still exist, and if you have to pretend to not see them then you de facto have infinite tolerance for anti-social behavior just below threshold, and clever Bobs will exploit this and provoke their victims into crossing the line while playing innocent. It’s a pattern that comes up a lot.
The idea of NVC is to respond to threats of violence with less threat of violence, so that violent tension can fizzle out rather than going super-critial. That doesn’t mean you let Bob threaten to punch people who express a liking for pizza, but it does mean that you recognize “Watch where you’re going, jerk” as the first step of escalation and recognize that if you do that—or if you respond to a line like that with “Don’t call me a jerk, asshole”—you may get punched and you will have contributed (avoidably) to that outcome.
but to call non-careful speech violent (either implicitly, or biting the bullet and making it explicit as you do) seems to imply it’s your fault for making Bob punch you. Which is kind of true in a causal sense, but not in a “blame” sense.[1]
Seems to, yes. But that “seems” is coming from preexisting ideas about “who to blame”, and NVC’s whole idea is that maybe we should just do less of that in the first place.
The question is “How much do we want to avoid speaking truth so as to avoid people jumping to wrong conclusions when they combine the new truth with other false beliefs of theirs?”. Sometimes we’re kinda stuck choosing which falsehood for people to believe, but a lot of times we can just speak the truth, and then when people jump to the wrong conclusions, speak more truth.
Yes, there’s something “violent” about a lot of incautious communication. No, that does not call for further aggression, physical or otherwise. Quite the opposite.
Calling it provoking—”non-provoking communication”—would be somewhat better, though I’m not entirely happy with it.
Provocation isn’t a bad thing in general though, and doesn’t necessarily contain threat of violence. Provocation can be done playfully and cooperatively even when not playful, and is critically important whenever the truth happens to be uncomfortable to anyone involved. Heck, NVC can be quite provocative at times.
“Nonthreatening communication” would be a better fit, IMO. Or “Nonadversarial”. “Collaborative communication” works too, but kinda hides what makes it different so I do like the “define by saying what it isn’t” kind of name in this case.
“How To Communicate With Uncivilized People Who Are Dangerously Prone To Violence” would be ideal in this sense.
That is a great use case, heh. But that undersells the utility among people who aren’t uncivilized or dangerously prone to violence, and obscures why it works with those who are.
But, for abovementioned reasons, I don’t want the terminology to have any shred of implication that escalating from speech to violence is justifiable.
I guess I’m less worried about that. I’d prefer those misunderstandings have a chance to surface and be dealt with, because without that it’s hard to actually convey the important insights behind NVC.
I’m deeply suspicious of any use of the term “violence” in interpersonal contexts that do not involve actual risk-of-blood violence, having witnessed how the game of telephone interacts with such use, and having been close enough to be singed a couple times.
It’s a motte and bailey: the people who use the word as part of a technical term clearly and explicitly disavow the implication, but other people clearly and explicitly call out the implication as if it were fact. Accusations of gaslighting sometimes follow.
It’s as if “don’t-kill-everyoneism” somehow got associated with the ethics-and-unemployment branch of alignment, but then people started making arguments that opposing, say, RLHF-imposed guardrails for proper attribution, implied that you were actively helping bring about the robot apocalypse, merely because the technical term happens to include “kill everyone”.
Downside of most any information being available to use from any context, I guess.
I’ve seen/heard the term NVC for this in multiple places, and “non-violent communication” as the expansion whenever I’ve asked. I agree with others that the name is not great. The hyperbole of violence and the implication that not using it is akin to aggression is a pretty aggressive move itself. The term “NVC” is at odds with the tenets of NVC.
But it’s established and out there, and I generally have low hopes of changing a common usage. I hope the poor name doesn’t devalue the actual concept and attempt to separate observation from interpretation. Especially hyperbolic interpretation.
The term gets its name from its historical association with the nonviolence movement (Think Ghandi and MLK.) The basic concept in THAT movement is that when opposing the state or whatever, you essentially say “We wont use violence on you, even if you go as far as to use violence on us, but in doing that you forfeit all moral justification for your violence” as a way to attempt to force the authoritarian entity targeted to empathise with the protestor and recognize the humanity.
So from that NVC attempts to do something similar with communications. Presumably in its roots in the 1960s non violence movement and rhetorical and communicative techniques used by black folk in the south to try and get government and civil officials to see black folks as equal humans.
How this translates into a modern context separated away from that specific historical setting is another matter, but within its origin, I dont think hyperbole is quite the right term, as at that point in history black folks where very much in danger of violence, particularly in the more regresive parts of the south. Again, outside of those contexts, its unclear as to how the term “violence” works here.
It should be noted that Marshall Rosenberg who originated the methodology was not a fan of the term as he disliked it being defined in the negative (ie “not violent”, negative) and prefered terms that defined it in the positive like “compassionate communication” (“is compassionate”, positive)
It occurs to me that “peacemaker communication” would be historically accurate, conveys what seems appropriate, and seems much better at avoiding controversial implications.
It’s a motte and bailey: the people who use the word as part of a technical term clearly and explicitly disavow the implication, but other people clearly and explicitly call out the implication as if it were fact.
If some people consistently and explicitly disavow the implication, but other people consistently and explicitly endorse the implication, then I don’t think that that’s motte and bailey? As I understand it, M&B involves the same person being inconsistent about the meaning, not different people sticking to consistent but conflicting interpretations; that’s just people disagreeing with each other.
My understanding is that M&B is intended to be broader than that, as per:
“So it is, perhaps, noting the common deployment of such rhetorical trickeries that has led many people using the concept to speak of it in terms of a Motte and Bailey fallacy. Nevertheless, I think it is clearly worth distinguishing the Motte and Bailey Doctrine from a particular fallacious exploitation of it. For example, in some discussions using this concept for analysis a defence has been offered that since different people advance the Motte and the Bailey it is unfair to accuse them of a Motte and Bailey fallacy, or of Motte and Baileying. That would be true if the concept was a concept of a fallacy, because a single argument needs to be before us for such a criticism to be made. Different things said by different people are not fairly described as constituting a fallacy. However, when we get clear that we are speaking of a doctrine, different people who declare their adherence to that doctrine can be criticised in this way. Hence we need to distinguish the doctrine from fallacies exploiting it to expose the strategy of true believers advancing the Bailey under the cover provided by others who defend the Motte.” [bold mine]
So there’s something to that, but I’m a little wary about taking that interpretation too far. Taken far enough, it implies that if group A has a sensible take on a concept, then as soon as a group B shows up that has a bad take on it, you can use it to discredit A as a motte for B. It seems bad if we can discredit any concept—including valuable ones—just by making up a bad take on it and spreading it.
But suppose that we were discussing something of which there were both sensible and crazy interpretations—held by different people. So:
group A consistently makes and defends sensible claim A1
group B consistently makes and defends crazy claim B1
and maybe even:
group C consistently makes crazy claim B1, but when challenged on it, consistently retreats to defending A1
Now we are at the worst possible situation. Suppose that I belong to group A, and want to defend my group against an accusation. I say that no, we don’t believe in crazy claim B1, we actually consistently maintain claim A1, and always have. I have links to back this up.
The other person says that this is just a motte and bailey, digging up links of group C using A1 as a motte—and is entirely correct.
In the comments of that post, the most upvoted comment was one suggesting that you can distinguish a motte and bailey by looking at whether one of the groups actively disclaims the other:
If different people in the group make sensible and crazy interpretations, and you’re arguing with someone who claims to be making only the sensible interpretation, I’d expect that that person would at least be willing to
1) admit that other members of the group are saying things that are crazy. They don’t have to preemptively say it ahead of time, but they could at least say it when they are challenged on it.
2) treat known crazy-talking people as crazy-talking people, rather than glossing over their craziness in the interests of group solidarity.
I’m also very suspicious when the person with the reasonable interpretation benefits too much from the existence of (and the failure to challenge) the person with the crazy interpretation. His refusal to condemn the other guy then looks suspicious. The term for this is “good cop, bad cop”, and the fact that we have already have a term for it should hint that it actually happens.
So if we think that a party not explicitly disclaiming a bad interpretation makes it more of a motte and bailey, then a situation where a party does explicitly disclaim it should make it less.
Also, with regard to the bit you quoted… I’m not sure if you could characterize it as “true believers advancing the Bailey under the cover provided by others who defend the Motte” if the ones who defend the Bailey and the ones who defend the Motte have positions that are the exact opposites of each other?
The original example of motte and bailey, as explained by Scott Alexander, was:
The original Shackel paper is intended as a critique of post-modernism. Post-modernists sometimes say things like “reality is socially constructed”, and there’s an uncontroversially correct meaning there. We don’t experience the world directly, but through the categories and prejudices implicit to our society; for example, I might view a certain shade of bluish-green as blue, and someone raised in a different culture might view it as green. Okay.
Then post-modernists go on to say that if someone in a different culture thinks that the sun is light glinting off the horns of the Sky Ox, that’s just as real as our own culture’s theory that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas. If you challenge them, they’ll say that you’re denying reality is socially constructed, which means you’re clearly very naive and think you have perfect objectivity and the senses perceive reality directly.
Here what’s going is that the motte and bailey are basically weak and strong versions of the same claim, so people believing in the strong version can take support from arguments in defense of the weak claim. But if some people say that “yes I think people who don’t use NVC are being violent” and others say that “no that just happens to be an unfortunate established term, what kind of language you use has no bearing on whether you’re violent or not”… then that doesn’t seem like the strong and weak versions of the same claim? That’d be like saying that creationists and evolutionary biologists together form a motte and bailey, because both use the term “evolution” but assign different meanings to it (some saying that it’s true, some saying that it’s false).
Do you mean that saying “my method of communication is non-violent communication” implies that everyone else is communicating violently?
That kind of thing, yes. I should mention that I have no systematic perspective here—I’ve had several acquaintances mention they’ve learned about NVC, and seen various internet discussions, but I have no idea what the “usual” or “average” usage is like. (I’ll also mention that I think at least some of the central techniques are good ones—I’ve elsewhere encountered the formulation of “I statements”, as in “I see X” and “When Y, I feel Z”.)
I have seen a few people say that abusive people have used NVC as a tool. Essentially using it as a way of communicating, legitimizing, and lending weight to their unreasonable desires. Googling, I found this (I don’t endorse everything this article says, and much of it is “I have no idea how often what you’re saying happens in practice”, but posed as a hypothetical it makes sense):
Consider this situation:
An abuser has an emotional need for respect. He experiences it as deeply hurtful when his partner has conversations with other men. When she talks to other men anyway, he feels betrayed. He says “When you talk to other men, I feel hurt because I need mutual respect.”
Using NVC principles, how do you say that what he is doing is wrong?
My memory traces also include (a) someone saying he and his ~10-year-old kid took a class on it, and (b) a boss using it with her employees [although the source I found on this seems to be a hypothetical], both cases leading to discovering how to use it for emotional blackmail. (I think someone opined that NVC shouldn’t be used when there is a power disparity; I wonder if this is common advice.)
I mean, to some extent any improved communication technique is going to be a tool that increases the options available to an abuser, especially when their interlocutor isn’t very sophisticated. The existence of misusers doesn’t prove it’s bad on net.
Still, having the name be as virtuous-sounding as “Nonviolent Communication” seems to make a couple of things easier:
pressuring someone to go along with it (“How could you possibly object to this?”, or someone anticipating that response and staying silent)
practitioners and teachers being blithely unaware of possible misuses by themselves or others
It may also turn away some of the more scrupulous, who instinctively avoid a label that sounds like it encourages failure mode 2 above (I think I’m in this category); and some who perceive the naming choice as a manipulative move.
And problems with a naming choice seem to matter more for a philosophy that is deeply concerned with the use of language. (Another case of this comes to mind, which I’ll avoid mentioning because it’s political.)
Again, I have no idea how often NVC is used well vs used badly. But it does seem to me that very thoughtful practitioners of it should at least be aware of the naming issue, and that it would reflect badly on such practitioners if they’d never thought of it (sorry) and on the practice in general if none of the “top brass” (so to speak) were aware of it either. Hence my wanting to probe on it.
An abuser has an emotional need for respect. He experiences it as deeply hurtful when his partner has conversations with other men. When she talks to other men anyway, he feels betrayed. He says “When you talk to other men, I feel hurt because I need mutual respect.”
Using NVC principles, how do you say that what he is doing is wrong?
NVC generally wouldn’t say that having a need is wrong by itself. Rather its defense against unreasonable demands is to emphasize that when responding to a request from someone else, you should first check how those fit with your own needs, and only accept requests that are actually aligned with your needs. (NVC does not say that anyone would have an obligation to fulfill other people’s needs.) So one could respond to that by saying that they e.g. have a need for the freedom to talk with anyone they like, so they aren’t willing to fulfill this man’s request.
NVC explicitly tries to get away from the frame of needs being reasonable or unreasonable, and I think that this can actually be a strong defense against manipulation. If you accept the frame of reasonable/unreasonable needs, then you open yourself to the possibility of being convinced that your needs might be unreasonable and the abuser’s need to abuse you might be somehow reasonable. Whereas if you stick to “everyone’s needs are valid but nobody is obligated to fulfill other people’s needs” then you can eliminate that whole angle of attack. (Speaking from experience—I’ve at least once been caught in an abusive situation where the other person was very good at convincing me that their needs were more reasonable and important than mine, and I could only get out by rejecting that whole frame. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that knowing about NVC allowed me to get out, but I do think that it helped.)
I mean, to some extent any improved communication technique is going to be a tool that increases the options available to an abuser, especially when their interlocutor isn’t very sophisticated.
Yeah, that’s my view too.
But it does seem to me that very thoughtful practitioners of it should at least be aware of the naming issue, and that it would reflect badly on such practitioners if they’d never thought of it (sorry) and on the practice in general if none of the “top brass” (so to speak) were aware of it either. Hence my wanting to probe on it.
Do you mean that saying “my method of communication is non-violent communication” implies that everyone else is communicating violently? That’s a reasonable point; I hadn’t really thought about it, since I’d been mostly treating NVC as a technical term or proper noun rather than as something that was intended to communicate literal meaning. (Especially since it’s often referred to as just “NVC”, so you don’t necessarily even say the words.)
To be clear, I don’t mean to imply that, and I don’t subscribe to the interpretation that people who don’t use NVC are being violent in any sense. I also think that attempts to police other people’s language by saying things like “you must always use NVC” are going against the spirit of the original. I think that using NVC is something that you do for your own sake rather than something that you require others to do. (Though I do also sympathize with people who have gotten used to using NVC and then get frustrated when other people use language that seems to leap to unfair conclusions.)
That said, since the “NVC” term has gotten established, it’d feel a little clunky to try to switch; in practice, I’d probably end up saying something like “giraffe language, more commonly known as NVC but I don’t like that term because...”. Maybe it’d be worth the overhead in some situations, though—I’m not sure how common it is for people to actually read that implication into the term.
I’ll bite that bullet. People who aren’t communicating in the spirit of NVC are “communicating violently”. Not in the sense of “Words are literal violence!” because “sticks and stones”, but in the sense that “If you don’t give me what I want I will use sticks and stones to break your bones” is “communicating violently”.
NVC points at the important insight that much of what passes for “normal communication” is actually subtle and implicit threats, which can and do escalate to real physical harm and literal violence. “Why are you being so mean?” doesn’t pass for NVC, and that’s not unrelated to the fact that it can be used to recruit someone to do violence on your behalf against the person who you accuse of doing you wrong. It doesn’t usually get that far, in the same way that parking tickets aren’t usually enforced with guns drawn, but there’s a reason that libertarians like to point out that all laws are ultimately enforced at gunpoint and the same thing applies here.
That doesn’t mean that we should “must” at people who aren’t communicating in the spirit of NVC, because as you point out, that would be violating the spirit of NVC. But I do think the term fits, and the way to get around the hubris of saying “my method of communication is nonviolent communication!” is to 1) point out how the term “violence” is actually legit and doesn’t just mean “offensive”, 2) don’t run around claiming that you actually succeed at doing it more than you do, and 3) point out how “nonviolent” isn’t even the goal to aspire to 100% of the time and definitely not synonymous with “good”.
There is something to that. However...
I would like it to be possible for people to say things like “Bob is wrong”, “Bob is lying to you”, “Bob’s products don’t work very well / are flawed”, “Bob’s studies have bad methodology”, “Bob has made horrible decisions as a leader and should be voted out”, etc. And when they do so, if Bob gets offended and escalates to violence, I want there to be a very strong presumption that Bob is absolutely wrong to do so, that this effectively proves the criticism was well-founded (not because that’s logically necessarily true, but because it disincentivizes violence). If Bob hints that he may escalate to violence, I want there to be a strong presumption that he is wrong to do so and that this proves the criticism right. If any onlookers (possibly aligned with Bob, possibly not) say, “Hey, um, you might not want to say that, it carries some risk of escalating to violence”, I want the culture to provide a strong answer of “No, Bob will not do that—or if he does, it proves to everyone that he’s monstrous and we’ll throw him in jail faster than you can say ‘uncivilized’. Civilians should act like there’s no risk to speaking up, and we will do our best to make this a correct decision.”
This ethos seems difficult to reconcile with enshrining the idea “Unless you’re very careful about what you say and how you phrase it, you may end up saying things that may provoke someone into violence” into the name of your philosophy. Like, it is possible to “expect good behavior, punish not-good behavior, but also practice how to handle bad behavior”; but to call non-careful speech violent (either implicitly, or biting the bullet and making it explicit as you do) seems to imply it’s your fault for making Bob punch you. Which is kind of true in a causal sense, but not in a “blame” sense.[1] Calling it provoking—”non-provoking communication”—would be somewhat better, though I’m not entirely happy with it. “How To Communicate With Uncivilized People Who Are Dangerously Prone To Violence” would be ideal in this sense.
Rosenberg seems to have developed and exercised his philosophy around people who are in fact dangerously prone to violence. His lecture talks about growing up with some race riots that killed people, and then (either that or another one) talks about visiting somewhere like Iraq and having someone scream “Murderer!” at him because he was an American, and getting the guy to calm down and have a valuable conversation.
To be sure, one probably will encounter, in life, a decent number of people who are dangerously prone to violence. Many of them you can probably get a good guess about, from quick observation, but not all. So it is useful to have such skills, and additionally some of them help make conversations more productive in general (the central example being to state specific observations, rather than leading with controversial interpretations of not-stated evidence). But, for abovementioned reasons, I don’t want the terminology to have any shred of implication that escalating from speech to violence is justifiable.
This raises something of a parallel with the whole “What was she wearing? To what extent is it her fault she got sexually assaulted?” thing.
I see where you’re coming from, but it doesn’t actually work except for in the egregious cases and NVC highlights a more complete picture that includes the non-egregious cases. If you can’t say “I think maybe we should get pizza” without Bob explicitly threatening to punch you in the face, then yes, that is a serious problem and it is crucial that Bob gets shut down.
However, there are two important points here.
One is that even if people respond in the way you prescribe, the person being threatened probably doesn’t want to be punched in the face before you haul Bob off, and will likely be swayed by the threat anyway. If you try to pretend this doesn’t exist, and say “Oh no, Bob isn’t threatening because if he did that would be bad and we’d respond then”, then Bob gets to say “Oh yeah, totally not threatening. Would be a shame if someone punched you in the face for suggesting we get pizza. Wink wink.” and carry out his coercion while getting off scot free. This isn’t good. In order to stop this, you have to make sure Bob feels punished for communicating the threat, even though the threat was “just words”.
The second one, which gets at the heart of the issue, is that your prescribed response to Bob threatening violence is to threaten counterviolence (and in the spirit of this conversation, I’ll explicitly disclaim here that I’m not saying this is “bad”). It’s important that people feel free to express their values and beliefs without fearing violence for contributing to the cooperative endeavor, but “No risk to threatening violence” can’t work and is the opposite of what you are trying to do with Bob “speaking up” about what he will do to anyone who suggests getting pizza.
Most real world conflicts aren’t so egregious as “I will punch anyone who suggests getting pizza”. Usually it’s something like Adam lightly bumps into Bob, and Bob says “Watch where you’re going, jerk”, Adam says “Don’t call me a jerk, asshole”, Bob says “Call me an asshole again and see what happens”, Adam says “If you touch me I’ll kill you” and then eventually someone throws the first punch. Literally everything said here is said from a place of “I’m only threatening violence to suppress that guy’s unjustified violence”, and the “initial aggression”—if there was any—was simply not being careful enough not to bump into someone else. And “How careful is “careful enough?” isn’t the kind of question we can agree on with enough fidelity and reliability to keep these unstable systems from flying off the rails.
The idea that “Unprovoked violence should be suppressed with zero tolerance [backed by willingness to use violence]” immediately explodes if “microaggressions” are counted as “violence”, and so given that policy there’s reason to push back applying the term “violent” to smaller infractions. However, that’s just because it’s a bad policy. Smaller levels of aggression still exist, and if you have to pretend to not see them then you de facto have infinite tolerance for anti-social behavior just below threshold, and clever Bobs will exploit this and provoke their victims into crossing the line while playing innocent. It’s a pattern that comes up a lot.
The idea of NVC is to respond to threats of violence with less threat of violence, so that violent tension can fizzle out rather than going super-critial. That doesn’t mean you let Bob threaten to punch people who express a liking for pizza, but it does mean that you recognize “Watch where you’re going, jerk” as the first step of escalation and recognize that if you do that—or if you respond to a line like that with “Don’t call me a jerk, asshole”—you may get punched and you will have contributed (avoidably) to that outcome.
Seems to, yes. But that “seems” is coming from preexisting ideas about “who to blame”, and NVC’s whole idea is that maybe we should just do less of that in the first place.
The question is “How much do we want to avoid speaking truth so as to avoid people jumping to wrong conclusions when they combine the new truth with other false beliefs of theirs?”. Sometimes we’re kinda stuck choosing which falsehood for people to believe, but a lot of times we can just speak the truth, and then when people jump to the wrong conclusions, speak more truth.
Yes, there’s something “violent” about a lot of incautious communication. No, that does not call for further aggression, physical or otherwise. Quite the opposite.
Provocation isn’t a bad thing in general though, and doesn’t necessarily contain threat of violence. Provocation can be done playfully and cooperatively even when not playful, and is critically important whenever the truth happens to be uncomfortable to anyone involved. Heck, NVC can be quite provocative at times.
“Nonthreatening communication” would be a better fit, IMO. Or “Nonadversarial”. “Collaborative communication” works too, but kinda hides what makes it different so I do like the “define by saying what it isn’t” kind of name in this case.
That is a great use case, heh. But that undersells the utility among people who aren’t uncivilized or dangerously prone to violence, and obscures why it works with those who are.
I guess I’m less worried about that. I’d prefer those misunderstandings have a chance to surface and be dealt with, because without that it’s hard to actually convey the important insights behind NVC.
I’m deeply suspicious of any use of the term “violence” in interpersonal contexts that do not involve actual risk-of-blood violence, having witnessed how the game of telephone interacts with such use, and having been close enough to be singed a couple times.
It’s a motte and bailey: the people who use the word as part of a technical term clearly and explicitly disavow the implication, but other people clearly and explicitly call out the implication as if it were fact. Accusations of gaslighting sometimes follow.
It’s as if “don’t-kill-everyoneism” somehow got associated with the ethics-and-unemployment branch of alignment, but then people started making arguments that opposing, say, RLHF-imposed guardrails for proper attribution, implied that you were actively helping bring about the robot apocalypse, merely because the technical term happens to include “kill everyone”.
Downside of most any information being available to use from any context, I guess.
I’ve seen/heard the term NVC for this in multiple places, and “non-violent communication” as the expansion whenever I’ve asked. I agree with others that the name is not great. The hyperbole of violence and the implication that not using it is akin to aggression is a pretty aggressive move itself. The term “NVC” is at odds with the tenets of NVC.
But it’s established and out there, and I generally have low hopes of changing a common usage. I hope the poor name doesn’t devalue the actual concept and attempt to separate observation from interpretation. Especially hyperbolic interpretation.
The term gets its name from its historical association with the nonviolence movement (Think Ghandi and MLK.) The basic concept in THAT movement is that when opposing the state or whatever, you essentially say “We wont use violence on you, even if you go as far as to use violence on us, but in doing that you forfeit all moral justification for your violence” as a way to attempt to force the authoritarian entity targeted to empathise with the protestor and recognize the humanity.
So from that NVC attempts to do something similar with communications. Presumably in its roots in the 1960s non violence movement and rhetorical and communicative techniques used by black folk in the south to try and get government and civil officials to see black folks as equal humans.
How this translates into a modern context separated away from that specific historical setting is another matter, but within its origin, I dont think hyperbole is quite the right term, as at that point in history black folks where very much in danger of violence, particularly in the more regresive parts of the south. Again, outside of those contexts, its unclear as to how the term “violence” works here.
It should be noted that Marshall Rosenberg who originated the methodology was not a fan of the term as he disliked it being defined in the negative (ie “not violent”, negative) and prefered terms that defined it in the positive like “compassionate communication” (“is compassionate”, positive)
It occurs to me that “peacemaker communication” would be historically accurate, conveys what seems appropriate, and seems much better at avoiding controversial implications.
If some people consistently and explicitly disavow the implication, but other people consistently and explicitly endorse the implication, then I don’t think that that’s motte and bailey? As I understand it, M&B involves the same person being inconsistent about the meaning, not different people sticking to consistent but conflicting interpretations; that’s just people disagreeing with each other.
My understanding is that M&B is intended to be broader than that, as per:
“So it is, perhaps, noting the common deployment of such rhetorical trickeries that has led many people using the concept to speak of it in terms of a Motte and Bailey fallacy. Nevertheless, I think it is clearly worth distinguishing the Motte and Bailey Doctrine from a particular fallacious exploitation of it. For example, in some discussions using this concept for analysis a defence has been offered that since different people advance the Motte and the Bailey it is unfair to accuse them of a Motte and Bailey fallacy, or of Motte and Baileying. That would be true if the concept was a concept of a fallacy, because a single argument needs to be before us for such a criticism to be made. Different things said by different people are not fairly described as constituting a fallacy. However, when we get clear that we are speaking of a doctrine, different people who declare their adherence to that doctrine can be criticised in this way. Hence we need to distinguish the doctrine from fallacies exploiting it to expose the strategy of true believers advancing the Bailey under the cover provided by others who defend the Motte.” [bold mine]
http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2014/09/motte-and-bailey-doctrines/
So there’s something to that, but I’m a little wary about taking that interpretation too far. Taken far enough, it implies that if group A has a sensible take on a concept, then as soon as a group B shows up that has a bad take on it, you can use it to discredit A as a motte for B. It seems bad if we can discredit any concept—including valuable ones—just by making up a bad take on it and spreading it.
I talked about that in this post:
In the comments of that post, the most upvoted comment was one suggesting that you can distinguish a motte and bailey by looking at whether one of the groups actively disclaims the other:
So if we think that a party not explicitly disclaiming a bad interpretation makes it more of a motte and bailey, then a situation where a party does explicitly disclaim it should make it less.
Also, with regard to the bit you quoted… I’m not sure if you could characterize it as “true believers advancing the Bailey under the cover provided by others who defend the Motte” if the ones who defend the Bailey and the ones who defend the Motte have positions that are the exact opposites of each other?
The original example of motte and bailey, as explained by Scott Alexander, was:
Here what’s going is that the motte and bailey are basically weak and strong versions of the same claim, so people believing in the strong version can take support from arguments in defense of the weak claim. But if some people say that “yes I think people who don’t use NVC are being violent” and others say that “no that just happens to be an unfortunate established term, what kind of language you use has no bearing on whether you’re violent or not”… then that doesn’t seem like the strong and weak versions of the same claim? That’d be like saying that creationists and evolutionary biologists together form a motte and bailey, because both use the term “evolution” but assign different meanings to it (some saying that it’s true, some saying that it’s false).
That kind of thing, yes. I should mention that I have no systematic perspective here—I’ve had several acquaintances mention they’ve learned about NVC, and seen various internet discussions, but I have no idea what the “usual” or “average” usage is like. (I’ll also mention that I think at least some of the central techniques are good ones—I’ve elsewhere encountered the formulation of “I statements”, as in “I see X” and “When Y, I feel Z”.)
I have seen a few people say that abusive people have used NVC as a tool. Essentially using it as a way of communicating, legitimizing, and lending weight to their unreasonable desires. Googling, I found this (I don’t endorse everything this article says, and much of it is “I have no idea how often what you’re saying happens in practice”, but posed as a hypothetical it makes sense):
My memory traces also include (a) someone saying he and his ~10-year-old kid took a class on it, and (b) a boss using it with her employees [although the source I found on this seems to be a hypothetical], both cases leading to discovering how to use it for emotional blackmail. (I think someone opined that NVC shouldn’t be used when there is a power disparity; I wonder if this is common advice.)
I mean, to some extent any improved communication technique is going to be a tool that increases the options available to an abuser, especially when their interlocutor isn’t very sophisticated. The existence of misusers doesn’t prove it’s bad on net.
Still, having the name be as virtuous-sounding as “Nonviolent Communication” seems to make a couple of things easier:
pressuring someone to go along with it (“How could you possibly object to this?”, or someone anticipating that response and staying silent)
practitioners and teachers being blithely unaware of possible misuses by themselves or others
It may also turn away some of the more scrupulous, who instinctively avoid a label that sounds like it encourages failure mode 2 above (I think I’m in this category); and some who perceive the naming choice as a manipulative move.
And problems with a naming choice seem to matter more for a philosophy that is deeply concerned with the use of language. (Another case of this comes to mind, which I’ll avoid mentioning because it’s political.)
Again, I have no idea how often NVC is used well vs used badly. But it does seem to me that very thoughtful practitioners of it should at least be aware of the naming issue, and that it would reflect badly on such practitioners if they’d never thought of it (sorry) and on the practice in general if none of the “top brass” (so to speak) were aware of it either. Hence my wanting to probe on it.
NVC generally wouldn’t say that having a need is wrong by itself. Rather its defense against unreasonable demands is to emphasize that when responding to a request from someone else, you should first check how those fit with your own needs, and only accept requests that are actually aligned with your needs. (NVC does not say that anyone would have an obligation to fulfill other people’s needs.) So one could respond to that by saying that they e.g. have a need for the freedom to talk with anyone they like, so they aren’t willing to fulfill this man’s request.
NVC explicitly tries to get away from the frame of needs being reasonable or unreasonable, and I think that this can actually be a strong defense against manipulation. If you accept the frame of reasonable/unreasonable needs, then you open yourself to the possibility of being convinced that your needs might be unreasonable and the abuser’s need to abuse you might be somehow reasonable. Whereas if you stick to “everyone’s needs are valid but nobody is obligated to fulfill other people’s needs” then you can eliminate that whole angle of attack. (Speaking from experience—I’ve at least once been caught in an abusive situation where the other person was very good at convincing me that their needs were more reasonable and important than mine, and I could only get out by rejecting that whole frame. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that knowing about NVC allowed me to get out, but I do think that it helped.)
Yeah, that’s my view too.
It’s a fair point! Appreciate you raising it.