SEVEN PREMISES CONTRARY TO HOPPE’S ARGUMENTATION ETHICS
(important)
People negotiate. They argue only to negotiate. They argue truthfully only as a special case of arguing within negotiation. People do not pursue the thruth – the pursue their intersts, and pursue the truth only when it advances their interests. If people were not negotiating, they would have no reason to argue.
Like much of Hoppe and Rothbard’s work, Hoppe engages in cherry picking(confirmation bias) for the purpose of misdirection(suggestion) to create a straw man (distraction), then uses overloading(extraordinary detail), to force the audience into reliance on introspection(abandoning reason) rather than relying upon praxeological enumeration of cases that fully account for the range of possible human actions and incentives.
In the arts, we call this effect of this overloading ‘the suspension of disbelief’ – a positive technique. But the negative use of the technique for persuasive purposes we call ‘overloading’ – causing the abandonment of criticism by exceeding our ability to judge without relying upon.
Here is the correction of Hoppe’s error:
Premise 0.1 – Man is a rational actor, he chooses boycott, avoidance, negotiation, exchange, parasitism, theft, violence, and warfare as suits his interests. Thankfully, the benefits of cooperation outweigh the benefits of conflict in the majority of cases.
Premise 0.2 – When negotiating, humans speak in avoidance, deception, signaling, negotiation, honesty, and truth-attempts, as suits their rational interest.
Premise 0.3 – The majority of human speech consists of either avoidance, deception, signaling, or negotiation.
Premise 0.4 – One of the tools humans can use in avoidance, deception, signaling, or negotiation is truth-attempts – if possessed of sufficient education, experience, and skill, one or more of the various degrees of argumentation: analogistic (religious, moral, historical), rational(reasonable, rational, logical), empirical (recorded, scientific, economic), or existential(operational + empirical + logical + fully accounted), depending upon his level of understanding.
Premise 0.5 – Almost no human argument consists of truth claims, but instead consists of negotiating statements constructed from error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, overloading, and deceit. When truth-attempts are useful in the negotiation, then man will employ them. However, truth-attempts are a complex conceptual technology, and each of the technologies of argument: analogistic, rational, empirical, and existential – can be used even more easily for deception than they can for truth-discovery. To test against deception, each truth-technology requires testing by the next degree of truth technology – because greater precision and knowledge are required for each degree.
Premise 0.6 – When humans resolve differences, we can resolve them according to who is the strongest, or by authoritarian command, or by tradition and norm, or by evolved rule, or by some logical or scientific process. The greater the degree of rule of law, the closer to logical and scientific process is necessary. The further from rule of law the more arbitrary discretion is necessary.
Premise 0.7 – Man has evolved the vast corpus of legal doctrines, headmen, judges, governments and states as insurers of those legal doctrines, all of which are enforced by violence, precisely because man rarely if ever pursues truth instead of interest, and he does so only under constant threat of violence and constant competition from those with opposing interests. The only condition we find truth is even vaguely pursued is when property is external to the argument, and signaling for having the best argument most correspondent with reality, is the only reward.
SUMMARY:
Empirically speaking, in all civilizations, in all walks of life, humans almost never pursue the truth. Instead, they pursue their interests, and they resort to the high cost of truth only if (a) it is in their interest, and (b) they possess the skill to do so, and (c) under threat of ostracization, punishment, or death if they fail to.
COMFORTING LIES THAT APPEAL TO COGNITIVE BIASES
Left feminine, Libertine Adolescent, Right Masculine biases reflect each of our evolutionary strategies given our reproductive desirability and our social class. Each of the cosmopolitan lies was constructed to appeal to the cognitive baises: left-feminine, libertarian-adolescent, and conservative-masculine through the exact same application of that process that was used to spread the lie of scriptural monotheism: Verbal overloading of a suggestion, that appeals to a cognitive bias, overwhelming the available truth-testing technology.
THE SOURCE OF LIBERTY.
There is only one source of liberty: the universal, organized application of violence to force universal sovereignty. where under universal sovereignty there is no other method of cooperation than natural, judge-discovered, common, law providing a market for dispute resolution; the market for reproduction that we call marriage and family, the market for goods, services AND information, and the market for commons we call anglo-multi-house-government, and the market for polities we call small regional nation states. Because only markets tolerate sovereignty. All else is discretion, and discretion is the opposite of sovereignty.
— Hoppe’s Premises —
“- Premise 1: All truth-claims – all claims that a given proposition is true, false, indeterminate or un-decidable or that an argument is valid and complete or not – are raised, justified and decided upon in the course of an argumentation.
– Premise 2: The truth of this proposition cannot be disputed without falling into contradiction, as any attempt to do so would itself have to come in the form of an argument. Hence, the “Apriori” of argumentation.
– Premise 3: Argumentation is not free-floating sounds but a human action, i.e., a purposeful human activity employing physical means – a person’s body and various external things – in order to reach a specific end or goal: the attainment of agreement concerning the truth-value of a given proposition or argument.
– Premise 4: While motivated by some initial disagreement, dispute or conflict concerning the validity of some truth-claim, every argumentation between a proponent and an opponent is itself a conflict-free – mutually agreed on, peaceful – form of interaction aimed at resolving the initial disagreement and reaching some mutually agreed-on answer as to the truth-value of a given proposition or argument.
– Premise 5: The truth or validity of the norms or rules of action that make argumentation between a proponent and an opponent at all possible – the praxeological presuppositions of argumentation – cannot be argumentatively disputed without falling into a pragmatic or performative contradiction.
– Premise 6: The praxeological presuppositions of argumentation, then, i.e., what makes argumentation as a specific form of truth-seeking activity possible, are twofold: a) each person must be entitled to exclusive control or ownership of his physical body (the very mean that he and only he can control directly, at will) so as to be able to act independently of one another and come to a conclusion on his own, i.e., autonomously; and b), for the same reason of mutually independent standing and autonomy, both proponent and opponent must be entitled to their respective prior possessions, i.e., the exclusive control of all other, external means of action appropriated indirectly by them prior to and independent of one another and prior to the on-set of their argumentation.
Conclusion: Any argument to the contrary: that either the proponent or the opponent is not entitled to the exclusive ownership of his body and all prior possessions cannot be defended without falling into a pragmatic or performative contradiction. For by engaging in argumentation, both proponent and opponent demonstrate that they seek a peaceful, conflict-free resolution to whatever disagreement gave rise to their arguments. Yet to deny one person the right to self-ownership and prior possessions is to deny his autonomy and his autonomous standing in a trial of arguments. It affirms instead dependency and conflict, i.e., heteronomy, rather than conflict-free and autonomously reached agreement and is thus contrary to the very purpose of argumentation.”
— Doolittle’s Criticisms —
Hoppe’s thesis: Since I do not physically aggress against your body and your property while in engaging in ‘argument'(negotiation), then I demonstrate when in argument(negotiation), that non-aggression against life and property is required for cooperation – which I can restate as the criteria for ethical action.
ISSUES
If I am trying to deceive you, and I make no claim that what I say is true, then how can I engage in a performative contradiction?
The only conditions under which performative contradiction matters is justification in court.
If people seek to justify their wants(negotiate) in trade, not seek to speak truthfully(conduct scientific investigation), then they are rarely if ever engaged in argument(truth), and almost always enagaged in negotiation (not-truth)
People engage in this spectrum actions:
Avoidance, Violence, Threat, Deception, Negotiation, Argument, Insurance(gifts etc), Sacrifice (kin selection),
People engage in i) argument over ‘goods'(common property), they ii) engage in negotiation of exchanges(several property), they engage in iii) threats to force transfers(possessions). But violence and deception are part of the argument, exchange or transfer, as much or more so than is any degree of truth.
Only when they argue over commons (goods) within an existing contract for cooperation(ethics), do they make truth claims. In negotiation they engage in deceptions, and by threats they deny property exists, only that possessions exist.
“…just talking, without any consequence of talking…”–hoppe
He conflates purposeless speech with deceptive speech. This is a straw man argument since we do not claim to make truth claims.
“…to be TRUE only for the parties involved in the..” – hoppe
Argument(negotiation) requires a truth claim, negotiation and threat do not require truth claims – they eschew them. Continuing the straw man. We do not make truth claims.
“….why should anyone pay attention to merely personal truths…”-hoppe
(a) no one is claiming truth, (b) under threat of loss of possessions you possess the need to pay attention, unless the threat is inconsequential. Continuing the straw man.
“…critics are engaging in a counter argument…”
This is true. But then the critics (like me) are conduction an argument (truth inquiry), not a negotiation or a threat. That says only that we are seeking truth (attempting to produce a commons we refer to as the general rule of ethical action- the terms of the contract for cooperation).
“…they engage in a performative contradiction…they say what they claim about argumentation is true…”
Continuing the straw man. They make no truth claim. In fact they (we, I) deny that people engage in argument, and instead engage in threat(command), and negotiation(deception), and that only in rare cases do they engage in argument (truth claims).
“….it is true for everyone capable of argumentation…”
Except that we are not making the claim that people are engaged in argument, but threat, deception, and justification.
“…argument…to resolve a conflict between rival truth claims…”
Except that we are not enaging in arguments, or making truth claims when threatening or negotiating or justifying. We are merely seeking information that we can exploit through violence, payment, or persuasion (threat).
“…argumentation implies one should accept the consequences of the outcome, otherwise why argue?…”
We aren’t arguing. We’re negotiating.
“…it would be contradictory for a judge in a trial to say…”
Well this is the point. Argumentation ethics applies only in court where we justify our actions by correspondence with law. It says nothing about the origin and limits of the conditions from which we must deduce basic rules of cooperation (ethics).
ARGUMENT IS A SPECIAL CASE OF COOPERATION NOT A GENERAL RULE
Hoppe’s argument is a case of special pleading proposed as a general rule. it is just that this case of special pleading overloads the cogntivive biases of those people who self select for libertarianism.
How could we test these hypotheses? Empirically. And without much effort I am more than confident that finding cases of argument by truth not under the threat of violence when property is in play, will be statistically irrelevant.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine
Source date (UTC): 2016-10-13 13:00:00 UTC