ADVICE FOR ACTIVISTS: MASTER YOUR NICHE – DON’T TRY TO MONOPOLIZE THE DIALOG Eve

ADVICE FOR ACTIVISTS: MASTER YOUR NICHE – DON’T TRY TO MONOPOLIZE THE DIALOG

Every person can participate in political discourse if he works within his abilities, using the form of political discourse that he is capable of.

Each “Degree Of Political Argument” requires greater understanding of the speaker and the audience. But given the distribution of knowledge and ability in the population, any political argument that is successful, must satisfy one or more argumentative demographics, using the language of argument available to that demographic.

The art in creating advanced rhetoric is to satisfy the needs of each ‘argumentative demographic’.

Unfortunately, the fantasy that we are all capable of the same degree of thought is counter-factual. We are not. As such no argument is sufficiently persuasive unless it satisfies the constraints of the majority of most argumentative demographics.

Contrary to popular intellectual self aggrandizement, less sophisticated arguments, because they affect a larger number of people, are more influential than more sophisticated arguments.

Scientists discover facts, philosophers integrate them into the base of knowledge, public intellectuals convert them into ideology, people elect politicians, and politicians convert them into policy.

SECTION 1 – METHODS OF ARGUMENT

I. PERSONAL – (SOLIPSISTIC)

1) EXPRESSIVE (emotional agreement or disagreement): a type of argument where a person expresses approval or disapproval based upon his emotional response to the subject.

II. INTERPERSONAL – PERCEPTIBLE WITHOUT INSTRUMENTATION

2) SENTIMENTAL (biological): a type of argument that relies upon one of the five (or six) human sentiments, and their artifacts as captured in human traditions, morals, or other unarticulated, but nevertheless consistently and universally demonstrated preferences and behaviors.

3) MORAL (normative) : a type of argument that relies upon a set of assumedly normative rules of whose origin is either (a)socially contractual, (b)biologically natural, (c) economically necessary, or even (d)divine.

7) PROPERTARIAN (Causal) A rationally articulated argument that, by reducing all actions to statements of property and its voluntary and involuntary transfer, within a specified portfolio of property rights, renders all moral, ethical and political questions commensurable, by subjecting all transfers to sympathetic testing of incentives, ethics, and morality.

III. POLITICAL – IMPERCEPTIBLE WITHOUT INSTRUMENTATION

4) HISTORICAL (analogical): A spectrum of analogical arguments – from Historical to Anecdotal — that rely upon a relationship between a historical sequence of events, and a present sequence events, in order to suggest that the current events will come to the same conclusion as did the past events, or can be used to invalidate or validate assumptions about the current period.

5) SCIENTIFIC (directly empirical): The use of a set of measurements that produce data that can be used to prove or disprove an hypothesis, but which are subject to human cognitive biases and preferences. ie: ‘Bottom up analysis”

6) ECONOMIC: (indirectly empirical): The use of a set of measures consisting of uncontrolled variables, for the purpose of circumventing the problems of direct human inquiry into human preferences, by the process of capturing demonstrated preferences, as expressed by human exchanges, usually in the form of money. ie: “Top Down Analysis”. The weakness of economic arguments is caused by the elimination of properties and causes that are necessary for the process of aggregation.

IIII. SYNTHETIC – (AUTISTIC)

8) ANALYTIC / RATIONAL (Comprehensive: Using all above): A rationally articulated argument that makes use of propertarian, economic, scientific, historical, normative and sentimental information to comprehensively demonstrate that a position is defensible under all objections.

SECTION 2. SOURCES OF ARGUMENT

1) GENETIC INTUITION

2) NORMATIVE INTUITION

3) RELIGIOUS ARGUMENT

4) IDEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

5) PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENT

6) SCIENTIFIC ARGUMENT

7) REALITY AS IT EXISTS INDEPENDENT OF OUR PERCEPTIONS

—Note for refinement—

1) Injunction : “if you want to know this you must do this.” Scientific knowledge is paradigm dependent (instrumentalist paradigms) (paradigm people)

Propertarianism: instrumentalism. (a) You must create instruments (logical or physical) to record what you cannot currently experience. (b) all paradigms are instrument-dependent, and changes in paradigms are changes in instruments.

2) Apprehension : experience (empirical/observable)

Propertarianism: reducible to either experience or analogy to experience.

3) Confirmation : falsifiability

Propertarianism: additional criteria that any action is subject to praxeological testing of the rationality of incentives.