Argument: Capitalism
FIRST WE ARE going to look at a brief debate on the subject of capitalism by two volunteers, one pro-capitalist (“A”) and the other anti-capitalist (“B”). The conversation presumably began when one of them made some remark indicating that he is for capitalism—and then it picks up.
A: I’m a strong advocate of capitalism, because I believe it is the only moral society, because it recognizes individual rights.
B: Well, what about other people? I mean, individual rights—you are talking here about what can happen in monopolies. I mean, when someone owns a business they can just buy up other businesses and raise prices, and then where are we?
A: Well, in a free society, you are talking about someone acquiring or earning property or earning whatever it is that they have, and if they continue to prosper, they are prospering in a society that recognizes free trade, so they are therefore earning what they get, and if they earn it with their own labor, then they deserve what it is they have earned. It has not been stolen, because it’s a free society.
B: What about the people working for them? If it wasn’t for those people working for them, then they would not be able to make any money. So, you know, they can just give the wage that they want to those people, and those people have to accept it.
A: When you have an employer and an employee, they are both trading. A man needs work done for him, he has an idea, and he either has capital or he has entered into an agreement where people will invest in his idea; then he will need labor to put it into practice. Now, in a capitalist, free society, you do not go out and conscript your labor with a gun. You go out and you offer people in exchange—
B: But look at unemployment right now. People just have to take jobs wherever they can get them. I mean, it’s so hard to find jobs.
A: Oh, no, you do not have to do anything in a free society except not initiate force. So you can choose to work for anyone who has work available. You do not have a right; you cannot force someone to pay you wages for doing something, but you have the right to work for anyone who will offer you a job.
B: Well, where else are you going to get money; where else are you going to work? They really are putting a gun to your head there, I think.
A: They are not putting a gun to your head, and that’s the idea; finding a place to work is a very strong benefit of a capitalist society, because there would be many companies trying to produce goods for the people in society.
B: Ah, but that’s what leads to depressions, because—
A: What, producing goods?
B: Yes, because—
A: This is a revelation.
B: —because there becomes an overabundance of goods, you see, and then there’s not enough money for people to buy the goods, so there’s depressions. That’s what happens when there’s too much business, namely depressions, and big business is the cause of depressions.
A: I thought we were just talking about unemployment; now you are telling me that there are too many goods.
B: Well, that’s what happens when people are free to produce as much as they want. You see, government control is what we need. Because we have government control, then we know exactly how much can be produced by any one person, which will not lead to a depression, or a recession which will lead to depression.
A: Okay, it’s hard for me to come at those one at a time. Now, on the one hand you are telling me that there’s unemployment; on the other hand you are telling me that there are too many goods, that the standard of living in a free society would be too high and people would stop wanting new, better, or additional goods. Now, I have never in my life met someone who said, “I no longer want anything; I do not want a better stereo; I do not want a yacht,” if he happens to have a rowboat, “I do not want three planes,” if he happens to have one. It’s like talking about some kind of utopia where all the goods that could ever be wanted by anyone are produced, and now there’s unemployment. Well, it just does not happen; I do not understand where you are coming from.
B: No, no, no, I think you misunderstood me. What I’m saying here is that if everybody produces as much as they want, if I own a business and I produce as much as I want, and a lot of other people are producing as much as they want also, there just gets to be too much of one product, which causes a crisis of overproduction and capacity exceeding demand, so what ends up happening is we have a depression. And the only way to solve that is that we have government control.
A: Okay, the nice thing about a capitalist system is that there is a market where, if you produce something and people want it, they will pay you for it. If you produce things and they do not want it, they will not pay you for it—
B: Ah, what about oil? They tell us what we have to pay. We have to have gas in order to run a car. So the big companies, they decide what they want to charge for oil, and we have to buy it. So I do not understand what you are saying here.
A: So now you are saying the country in fact needs oil, needs it desperately. Just a moment ago you were telling me that there’s such a problem in capitalism because they produce too much. Now, to the degree that these oil companies are left free to produce, they will continue to produce and bring new oil online if it is profitable and at a price.
B: Why did they tell us there was no oil? They told us there was no oil at one point, and then they come back and they raise prices?
A: They told us that there was no oil?
B: Yeah, the oil companies said there were no more oil reserves.
A: The oil companies have never said that there is no more oil in the ground. There is plenty of oil, and it can be extracted at various prices depending on the quantity of oil that’s needed and how fast it is needed.
B: So we suffer because they decide that they are not going to drill for oil.
A: Well, you have a right to do what you want to do. If they choose to produce oil, they will produce oil; if they choose not to, they have the right not to. Other people would jump in. If there’s a profit, then there will always be people who, in their own self-interest, will devote their labor, their capital, and their management skills to drill for oil.
B: But do I have a choice there? How many people can open up their own oil company? It takes an awful lot of money to be able to do that. I mean, the industry is controlled by only a few people, you know, the few people that are manipulating prices and buying up all these concerns. How could I compete with someone like that?
A: You could not, which is the reason you are not producing oil. It takes a massive amount of knowledge, a great deal of accumulation of wealth, and the people who have been producing it over a long period of time have built up the expertise, the capital—
B: Ah, but what if it was passed down to them by their parents? I mean, then I do not have a chance to even compete with them because they are given this money by their parents—that’s unfair advantage to another person.
A: I see; now you are not talking about monopolies; you are talking about should there be inheritance.
B: Yes.
A: Well, you see, in capitalism, you have the right to your life, to the products of your life, and to dispose of them or not dispose of them in any way you see fit. If you wish to give them to your children, or to your friend, then you have the right to do it, because you produced it; it is yours by right; you have earned it. As long as we do not have a totalitarian state, you can do anything you want with what you have earned as long as you do not interfere with someone else. If you want to pass it on to the children, it is your right to do so, because it’s yours. No one can tell you that they think you should give it to person X when you want to give it to person Y. It’s your life, and you are free to do that.
B: Okay, well, I can go along with that a little bit.
COMMENTARY
Let me preface the discussion of this by saying that there is no doubt that the defense of the positive is much, much harder in this type of format, because the attacker can have sublime, blissful irresponsibility. She can simply hurl any accusation she has ever heard from any left-wing newspaper or history book, without any basis, and he has to try to dig out the whole thing, and he just gets halfway through and she hits him with another one. That, of course, is true whenever you are taking a view that is widely unknown and undefended; you cannot count on a context, and you have to give a whole lecture on every point. Therefore, I could hear the pro-capitalist sigh each time, as though his mind were saying, “Oh, that one, too?” The anti-capitalist did an excellent job. She not only took all the kinds of things that you would hear, but she got them in appropriately. Every time her opponent got into midflight, she would cut him down with the next one, and then he’d just pick himself up and she would zing right in again. That was really very effectively done. You see how easy the other side has it—they do not have to defend anything; they just toss points out.
We have to focus the critique on the pro-capitalist speaker, because he is the one who had the ball to carry. I would say he did a mixed job, with one or two definite problems that ran throughout. He did a lot very well, by the way; I should preface the criticism by saying that on many individual points, he did as well as he could within the time and under the circumstances. That is, he started to re-create his context until his opponent attacked it again. But the point is, the approach that the pro-capitalist speaker was trying had a fatal flaw: He entirely let his opponent set the terms. The way the debate was structured, she had carte blanche to say anything. She could say, “Capitalism has exploitation, monopolies, unemployment, depressions, oil, et cetera,” and whichever she brought up, he, in effect, yielded. He gave himself as his assignment, “Now I have got to answer that one.” That is inherently hopeless as a method of argument.
To a limited extent, you do have to do that; this is not a lecture by you. If your opponent raises an objection, you cannot say, “That is irrelevant, next point,” because she will not acknowledge that it is irrelevant. But as far as possible, you have to try to steer the direction of the debate, rather than let her do so. If you let her do so, what happens? She is completely disorganized; she has no overall view, and she will just jump from point to point and hit you on the head time after time. You never get a chance to develop any one point; you never establish your premise, nor ever find out what her premises are. Therefore, it goes on and on, and the net effect is that you feel demoralized, because you never really made anything clear, and she feels, “This guy has got nothing to say; there are thousands of objections to capitalism, and he has no real answers.” So you do not accomplish anything.
What could the pro-capitalist speaker have done differently, short of giving a lecture? Suppose he had taken her first objection to capitalism, which was the existence of monopolies, and shown that government controls require the use of force. Then she would say, “Yes, but it is force in a good cause, because we have to prevent these evil monopolists from harming the people.” He would be hard-pressed if he started on monopolies (although she is well-advised to start there, because their existence is taken for granted).
That capitalism leads to monopolies is not a philosophic issue; it is economics. It therefore comes under the heading of facts. The anti-capitalist’s method was to drown her opponent in alleged facts—monopolies, unemployment, oil crises, and so on. She stuck to journalistic things, and she did not say much about philosophy, except that every once in a while she would inject a comment about unfairness, exploitation, and the like. As soon as you see that it is this type of argument, if you want to establish your terms and not just be bombarded by one “fact” after the other forever, what do you have to do? You might want to get it over to some point within politics, such as individual rights versus society. But that in itself is not going to be enough, because she will say, “Individual rights are all very fine, but what about monopolies and unemployment?” She will have that whole arsenal, which you have to hit on the head. There are two ways of hitting it on the head. One is to reply to each objection one at a time, as this speaker did—but then she goes on forever, because by the time you get to her last one, she has got research assistants coming in with more. So you cannot do it that way.
You do want to get the argument into philosophy, but you cannot just say, “Let us discuss rights.” You have to have some way of undercutting her in this assault. One crucial thing is to separate the system you want to defend from today’s state of affairs. That is not the broad point, but that is one thing the pro-capitalist did not do, and is very important in arguing any political or practical topic. Everybody thinks that by “capitalism” you mean what goes on today. Therefore, they are filled with the idea, “Every problem of today’s society is a problem of capitalism.” They thus feel entirely free to toss every problem of the mixed economy at you and say, “What about unemployment, what about inherited wealth, what about the oil crisis?” Without anything further, if all you do is say, “We really do create jobs, and we really do produce oil,” and so on, she comes right back with, “But look at the unemployment figures, and look at the oil crisis,” and so on. You have to take the approach of saying: “Everything you are saying is irrelevant. There is no use arguing on that level, because you are not talking about capitalism. None of your objections have anything to do with capitalism.”
Normally, she then says, “What do you mean?” Then you say, “By ‘capitalism’ I mean the complete separation of state and economics—no government control over roads and post offices, no antitrust regulations, no welfare,” and so on. When she hears that, you have already changed the nature of the debate. You are telling her, “Think before you raise an objection; be sure it pertains to capitalism, and not to a system that I repudiate.” That in itself puts her in a hard spot, because after even that much, she has to think to herself, “I cannot just trot out anything. He has put a certain distinction here. Some things apparently do not apply to capitalism.” In other words, she has got to be much more cautious now. She cannot ask about today’s oil situation, for instance, because you will say, “We never had an oil crisis when the economy was freer; we did not have unemployment, and so on. Therefore, all the things you are pointing out are irrelevant.” You would thus use the wholesale approach to undercut a whole bunch of objections. It would not undercut all of them, but it would get rid of a certain amount.
Assuming you wanted to make it philosophical, what would you do to force such a militantly unphilosophical opponent, filled with all these disconnected facts, onto a philosophic point? The best way I know is that when she throws out the first alleged evil of capitalism, you could simply say, “There are no monopolies under capitalism. So whatever you are talking about is not capitalism.” When she gets to the next one, about there not being enough jobs or whatever, you already have two examples, enough to draw an abstraction, and that is the point at which I would say: “Look, we have a basic disagreement here, so we may as well not argue about the details of it. None of the things that you have mentioned, and ten thousand others like them, ever happened under capitalism. All of it is completely wrong.” She has just said monopolies and unemployment, so you say, “Capitalism never led to monopolies, never led to unemployment, never led to starving widows and orphans,” and you list about eight possible objections in advance of her saying them, so she knows you know the whole thing. Then you say, “Now, if you are going to argue on this kind of factual point, that is a historical question, and we will have to go to the history books. What history do you know, how do you know it, and what makes you think all these things happened? I say not one of them happened, and you have not got a leg to stand on.” You simply make a flat denial, and that puts her on the spot—why does she think capitalism causes unemployment, in which year, in which industry, how many people, what were the conditions, what were the wages, and so on? She obviously does not know any of that.
Now you say, “Let us discuss this question seriously. Capitalism is simply a system in which people are left free to use their minds, produce, and trade. You tell me why anything inherent in that would lead to all these catastrophes. Tell me, what would? Then, if you like, we will discuss the alternative you propose, and I will tell you why all those catastrophes are inherent in your definition. If you can make it clear, you are free to argue. But show me why it follows from the essence of the system, because I say it does not. There is no use in arguing facts; if it follows logically, you can show it.” As soon as she tries, you can immediately go on to philosophy. She says, for instance, “Monopolies follow because of greed.” You reply, “What is greed?” She is already on the defensive; she has to define a term (and it is relevant—you are not being dishonest in demanding it). She says, “Well, greed is getting what you want by hurting other people.” You reply, “You think production is possible only by hurting other people? Let me explain otherwise.” Little by little, you would have to indicate your case. How successfully you could do it is a different question; it depends on your own knowledge, her honesty and interest, and the length of time available to you.
The main thing you have to do, though, which this speaker did not do, is switch over from arguing facts to arguing philosophy. He did not give himself the assignment, “Put an end to this level of discussion, turn it to philosophy, and get my basic premises on the table.” You have to get your cards on the table. You have to get out as soon as possible, “I stand for complete laissez-faire. It is based on man’s rights, it means the freedom of the mind, and anything else is death and destruction.” That much is all. Once you have that, then the other person has to worry what to do in the face of that. But this speaker never got his premises out, nor hers. This debate was, then, an instance in which the debater could have benefited from trying more deliberately to go into philosophic discussion and philosophic detection, rather than remaining on the defensive. The thing was drowning in facts, and my instinct would have been to make it as abstract as possible right away, in order to assert my terms and make it philosophical.
Argument: the Existence of God
This next argument is on the topic of God, or religion, and it features an atheist (“B”) against someone (“A”) who is going to be defending a religious viewpoint.
A: I understand that you do not believe in anything called “God,” and I do, and I’d just like to say what I think God is. To me, God is a superior living entity, superior to any other living entity, regardless of what that other living entity is or where it lives. And that’s what I mean when I say “God.”
B: So you say that that’s your definition of “God.” Are you saying at the same time that you believe that God exists, or that you accept the existence of a God?
A: Well, I believe God is an entity that’s extremely powerful, extremely creative, extremely intelligent, and responsible for my existence and the existence of everything in reality. That’s what I believe.
B: Yes, but you used the word “believe,” and I’m familiar with that word, and I think that it means according to the dictionary that you are placing your faith in something for which no logical proof exists. And if you use the word “believe,” then you are saying in essence that you are placing your faith in something for which no logical proof exists.
A: Well, I do not know exactly what you mean by “faith,” but I’m convinced of what I’m saying. For example, I would not maintain that God built the Statler Hilton Hotel. That’s silly; individuals did that. What I say is, God created the means. For example, science. And in science, there’s a principle which states nothing can be created or destroyed, only changed in form. Which means everything that is, was; everything that is, always will be. And my Baltimore catechism told me God was and always will be, and that’s what God is. And therefore, I’m convinced God is, because there is something in reality and always was and always will be, and that’s what they told me God was, and that’s what I’m convinced of.
B: So in other words, you are saying they told you, and you have accepted what they have told you, without proving it to yourself or anybody else?
A: Not exactly. For example, I know that everything in the universe always was. Its form was different, but it always was. It is now, and it always will be. And to me, that’s God, and that’s what I have to hold. What I do not know completely is that it’s an actual living physical being, but it’s something that’s superior to me and superior to any other living entity, and is responsible for my existence, my life, my mind, my everything.
B: If, for the sake of argument, what you say or what you believe happens to be true, how do you place something for which no proof exists above what your senses tell you, what your mind tells you?
A: I try not to. I will agree with you that there does not seem to be too much evidence for God. But what I would say is—see, I would never argue, like some people would, that God is unknowable, because then you are arguing about nothing. I would say that more likely, to me, God is unknown. That is, there is enough evidence out there, if I’m willing to check it out—the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, some historical writings, different things—that I could prove the existence of God to myself if I wished to. So I say God is unknown. But that does not mean he does not exist.
B: But you are saying that something exists. If I say that I do not accept the existence of your God, then you have to prove that to me.
A: Yeah, and I would first refer you to the Bible; then I would refer you to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and—
B: Okay, okay, but if you refer me to the Bible, you could probably refer me to the story of Moses, for instance, who, the Bible says, raised his arms and the sea opened up and everybody walked through the middle of the sea. Now, do you accept that?
A: What I accept is, it’s been shown historically that when people from Israel went to the Dead Sea, it was at low tide, and later, when the soldiers came, it was high tide. What I’m saying is the Bible made it dramatic, and that God is the one who caused it to be at low tide when they came and caused it to be at high tide when the soldiers came.
B: I really do not know what to say to that, except I have never seen it happen, and I have really never met anyone who can seriously say—
A: Well, let me tell you something that happened to me Sunday night. I was standing on the platform of the subway at 34th Street and Sixth Avenue and a young boy, when a train was coming in, pushed me, and I nearly fell into the tracks and I was nearly crushed to death. Fortunately, my body went backward and the train missed me. If I say the hand of God pulled me back, who are you to say it wasn’t?
B: Um, what did the hand look like?
A: I didn’t see it, but I felt it, and it saved my life.
B: Well, I feel a lot of things, but that does not necessarily mean that they exist in reality.
A: That’s true, but do you believe in Thomas Jefferson?
B: I accept the existence of a person named Thomas Jefferson—
A: Thomas Jefferson was a myth and he was invented by the Founding Fathers and you could not prove to me otherwise.
B: But there are pictures that have been painted—
A: I have paintings of God.
B: If you have a painting of God, please show it to me; I have never seen one. I have seen paintings of a man who was called Jesus Christ; I have never seen a painting of God, but that is not what we are talking about. Somebody could imagine that a god exists, and they could paint what they imagined, but that does not prove the point—
A: Well, someone could have imagined that Thomas Jefferson exists and painted a picture of Jefferson.
B: No, there is historical evidence for the existence of—
A: Such as?
B: He wrote the Declaration of Independence.
A: There is some evidence to indicate that he did not physically write the document, that Benjamin Franklin did.
B: Okay, let us say there is evidence that— We are getting off the subject.
A: No, I want to know—
B: We are talking about God; we are not talking about Thomas Jefferson.
A: We are talking about evidence.
B: Okay, and there is no logical proof that your God, as you define him, exists. Even Thomas Aquinas—
A: Have you read the Bible?
B: I have read parts of the Bible, but the Bible can be—
A: Have you read the Dead Sea Scrolls?
B: I have not read the Dead Sea Scrolls.
A: Okay, have you read the historical writings? Have you read a book called The Incredible Christians?
B: No, I have not.
A: Have you read Antony Flew’s God and Philosophy?
B: No, I have not.
A: How about George Smith’s Atheism: The Case Against God?
B: No, but the point is, just because somebody wrote these books does not prove that your God exists. There was a philosopher, I forget his name, who said that if a tree falls in the woods and you are not there that the tree did not fall. But the tree did fall, and all you would have to do to prove it is go to that point and see the tree lying on the ground.
A: I’m not positive, but I think the same philosopher—no, it was Bishop Berkeley who said if God perceives the tree falling, then in fact it did fall.
B: I think we could go on for hours, and I think it’s about ten minutes right now.
A: It’s eight minutes and twenty-eight seconds. The thing is this—I have read Atheism: The Case Against God, I have read God and Philosophy, I have read John Galt’s speech against God, and I know all the arguments for atheism. Apparently you have not read the Bible; you have not read the Dead Sea Scrolls; you have not been inside a church; you have not examined the life of Jesus. I think I got a better case.
B: Well, I have done a few of those things, and I still have not found any logical proof that your so-called God exists.
This was obviously a brief snippet out of what would be a much longer argument, and it is very good for illustrating certain things. The pro-God side had a more forceful presentation. He knew exactly what analogies he wanted to use, what authorities he was going to quote, what type of experiences he was going to cite; he was ready, and he was obviously trained in argumentation. As soon as something was said, it was like a certain button was pressed and he gave us the response. So in that sense, the atheist was at a certain disadvantage, since he obviously did not have the experience that his opponent had.
The atheist did try to bring out that belief in God is an act of faith, a belief for which his opponent has no evidence. He tried that point several times, only he never really made it convincing. In other words, he was trying an epistemological tack; rather than directly attacking God, he was saying, “You have no way of knowing this.” But instead of his opponent saying, “I guess I have no proof, so I am refuted,” which the atheist had more or less hoped or expected, his opponent jumped in and said various things that were very realistic for a trained debater. It is very infrequent that a person will say, “Yes, my belief is absolutely arbitrary; I have got nothing to go on at all,” and then throw himself at your feet. In a real-life case, it is a mixture of faith and nonfaith. In other words, it is faith, and then when you say that faith is arbitrary, he will throw in an analogy or an alleged historical parallel or some experience he had, and say, “Is that not evidence?”
Attacking faith is an essential point in debating religion. In order to bring that strategy to fruition in an argument, in order to make it successful, you have to pin your opponent down by getting him to agree on the method he is going to use. One thing you can do is get him in advance to stake his argument on what he is calling “evidence.” In this case, the religious side was very adroit in moving from, “There is evidence,” to, “There is no evidence,” because part of the time he was giving evidence, and the other part of the time he was saying it is unknown—not “unknowable,” he said, but “unknown.” But if it is unknown, an obvious comeback is, “How do you know it then? On what basis?” Then, when he gives his historical data, like the parallel to Jefferson or the Dead Sea Scrolls or whatever, before you argue with that, the first thing you have to do is determine if he is going to rely on this, or on a hit-and-run approach. In other words, before even going into it, I would say: “Look, before we discuss the Thomas Jefferson parallel, I need to find out if you are really going to rest the case for God on that parallel. I need to know that you really think that the two are similar, and that if I can show you that there is an essential difference between those two, you will withdraw your argument for God and become an atheist. In other words, is this just a debating gimmick, and as soon as I hit it, you are going to vanish and show up somewhere else, or do you really believe this? Because then we will have to take it slowly and see.” That would give him pause, because then he realizes that he is sticking all of his eggs in one basket, whereas one of the things that this speaker was able to do—which is exactly what is done in real life—is to have an egg in each of twelve different baskets, and each time you break one, he just brings out another basket, and by the time you get to the twelfth one, he has got a whole new supply, and it just goes on forever.
What, then, should be your answer once he says, for instance, that he is relying on the parallel to Thomas Jefferson? After all, the religious argument goes, you have not directly perceived Thomas Jefferson, and you have not directly perceived God. In both cases, then, you are accepting the existence of an entity on something other than firsthand evidence. In each case, you have a document written by the unperceived entity in question (the Declaration of Independence and the Bible, respectively), so what is the difference? Put more generally, the idea is that any inference to an unperceived entity is in the same category, and if we can do it with one, we can do it with all. The question, then, is: Is that true, or is there some essential difference between our present-day inference to Thomas Jefferson and the inference to God? The atheist tried to say he has never seen a picture of God. That would be relevant if it were pressed a little further. But he did not press it, because the answer was, “There are pictures”; there are symbolic representations of God on the Sistine ceiling and elsewhere. That in itself, then, was not an unanswerable statement.
The question to ask is whether there can be evidence for God. If you know clearly in advance the answer to that, then you can wipe out all attempts to base belief in God on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Thomas Jefferson parallels, subway experiences, or whatever. Evidence for God is, as such, an impossibility. If you know that, you do not have to argue ten different varieties of alleged evidence, because you know the whole thing is out—if you make a certain point at the outset. The atheist in this argument could have done one thing that would have laid the base to show that there is no evidence for God, that there can be no evidence for God. Suppose you heard this argument between two people:
A: There is a gloop in the lobby of this hotel.
B: No, there is not.
A: It is just like Thomas Jefferson.
B: No, it is not.
A: Have you read The Theory and Practice of Gloop by Professor Schmohawk?
B: No.
The obvious question that would be insistent in the forefront of your mind before you could resolve this is: What is a gloop? You would want a definition. Now, in some arguments a definition is not necessary. In the case of God, though, it is essential, because the essence of the argument revolves around the type of entity that the religious person is trying to establish.
The pro-God side here was very cagey about that, because he gave an abundance of definitions, which switched all the time, and none of which were God. The essential thing you would have to do is point that out. When he gives a definition, you should not think, “That is just a preliminary; now we are going to get on to how he proves it.” You have to stop right there and say, “What type of entity is this? Are we sure we know what we are talking about?” If you analyze what he said, in fact, you will see that part of the time he was talking about God, and part of the time he was not, and the plausibility he got is by the oscillation.
He began with, “God is a superior living entity,” without further definition. His atheist opponent did not ask for any elaboration of that. Per se, of course, a superior living entity is hardly an impossibility. “Superior” is undefined in that statement, so it could mean stronger, more intelligent, more cunning, or who knows what. There are many realistic possibilities under “superior living entity.” Therefore, if that is the definition of what God is, the appropriate comeback in such a case would be, “If that is all you mean, you are talking about a question of science. You are asking, in effect, whether Mars is populated by a living entity that has powers that we do not. I do not know; that is a scientific question, and we would not argue that philosophically. Is that what you worship when you go to church? Is that what you pray to?” You would have to ask him a few things like that, and immediately, if you pressed that definition, he would have to say, “No, I do not mean just like human beings but with more muscles, or with a higher IQ. When I say ‘superior,’ I mean…” Now, he will not tell you right away; if he did, the whole thing would be over—but he will say something like “responsible for the important things in the universe.”
You have to acquire the ability to take these things literally and then play them back to the person: “If that is what you mean, is it this?” Then he says, “No,” and you have to drive him until he finally admits what he is saying. Suppose a person says, “God is that which is responsible for the important things in the universe.” The first question is then, “What are the important things that he is responsible for? War? Sex? What?” Suppose he then says, “For existence as a whole.” Then, of course, you have got a definition that does capture the essence of God (“God is that which is responsible for existence as a whole”), so you have accomplished stage one. That is very different, however, from “a superior living being.” It is also much easier to argue about, because then you have said that God is outside the universe. Or put another way, then you have said, “God is outside nature; he is supernatural; he is part of a dimension that completely transcends perception, argument, logic, reason, science, law, and so on.” If you establish that, any claim for evidence for God is out.
The main thing you have to do in an argument of this type is to show the person that you cannot argue for God. God and argument are two opposites, because argument takes place within the universe on the basis of sensory experience, and can lead only to something that can be established on the basis of experience. God, however, by his nature, is a supernatural being. He is not just another thing in the universe; he is something in another dimension, a dimension completely opposite to the one in which we live. Therefore, as educated religious people themselves concede, he is something outside the capacity to argue. But if you go with “superior living entity,” that sounds like a thing in the universe that you can argue about. If you then simply jump from that to “responsible for all of existence,” but keep the connotation of “something in this world, natural and intelligible,” then you have your God and eat him, too. You can then win any argument, because you can make arbitrary claims on the basis of your supernatural definition, and as soon as the person says, “How do you prove that?” you switch back to your natural definition.
Here is another instance. This is common in the religious camp, and it is a good example of the role of definitions. The theist says, “Nothing can be created nor destroyed; therefore, something must always have existed, and I call ‘God’ that which always is and will be.” It is certainly true that nothing can be created or destroyed, and that all that can exist is change of form, and that there must therefore be something that always is and will be. That much is unquestionable (it was, in fact, Aquinas’s third argument for the existence for God), so the argument is certainly true up to that point.
The only problem with that as a definition or an argument for God is that that which always is and will be is the universe. You would then say to the theist, “Do you make a distinction between the sheer physical stuff and an alleged supernatural creator of it? When you simply say, ‘Something is and always will be,’ that leaves wide-open whether that something is a supernatural thing or not. You have not given any evidence. I say it is the stuff we see around us, physical matter in different forms. If you say it is something beyond that, transcendent and supernatural, then you have to tell me what.” In the argument here, the atheist let that pass by. The reason the audience had the net impression that the religious side won is that the theist kept giving definition after definition, and it seemed like he could give a radio program on God’s nature—he knew more about God than anybody for many years, and he just kept bringing it out each time, and the atheist let him get away with it. What you have to do is to decide when these characterizations come forth, “Is this God or not?” If it is something natural, finite, part of this physical world, then you cannot call it by the term “God.” Therefore, you can believe in it, but it is not relevant to establishing God. If it is relevant to establishing God, it is something supernatural, infinite, indefinable, beyond all argument—and then there is no use giving evidence for it.
In short, the essential strategy of the religious side is to use a natural definition to justify using evidence to come to a supernatural conclusion. If you are aware that that strategy is being employed, you can puncture it at the very outset by insisting on a definition, isolating its supernatural character, and then repudiating appeals to evidence as such. That, in essence, is the strategy that I would suggest in that type of argument.
More broadly, what the atheist did not do, in terms of method of argument, was similar to the problem with the pro-capitalist side in the previous debate. That is, the atheist had a tendency, in this argument, to let the other side come on strong; he just kind of reeled as each new attack hit him, and he gulped and picked up and started again from scratch. We thus have two examples from which to learn a general principle valuable in any topic: Establish your own fundamentals. Decide, “What are the essentials of my case, the hard-core foundation, without which I am lost?” If I am arguing in favor of capitalism, for example, I know I have to get in early that it is the system based on rights, and that I believe in selfishness and reason. That is my foundation, and from there I can go wherever the argument takes me. If I am trying to argue against religion, the first thing I know I have to do is to establish the difference between God and reason, to make it clear that I do not regard the claims of religion as natural, but as supernatural, and that reason and evidence are therefore out. That is a kind of insistent order from the beginning. Even if my opponent overwhelms me in the first couple of exchanges, the order will be constantly saying, “Say that God is supernatural and force him to grant that.” As long as you have that in your mind, at some point you will have a chance to come out with it. If you know the point, and if you have had enough experience, you will be able to say it forcefully enough and turn the argument against him.
In general, though, the advice I would give is: Do not try to answer the person on the terms that he puts forth. You cannot just evade what he says, obviously. But what you can do is say, “I cannot discuss it on those terms because”—and by the sheer fact of saying that, you disarm him, and then you try to get in your principle. That is the important point.
This would also apply to the point in this argument at which the religious side made a completely irrelevant speech that was very effective nonetheless: “Have you read the Bible? Have you read so-and-so? Did you study this, and this?” He gave a whole bunch of imposing titles, and it suggested that he has erudition, he has wisdom, he knows this inside out, and the poor atheist, in effect, is an ignoramus and has no business living if that is the state of his knowledge.
The theist was obviously trying to intimidate his opponent in a certain way, because he was not citing the alleged evidence from these particular books, but peppering the atheist with titles. He wanted to undercut his opponent by making him feel, “My God, I do not know what I am talking about.” You have to have an instinct in argument: If someone is doing that to you, you have to come on strong in return and show that you are not intimidated. Here, the atheist said, “I have read part of it,” implicitly suggesting, “It would be nice if I had read all that, but I never got around to it.” There is a more effective response. A good example of taking the offensive would be to say, “Now I see why you are so misguided, if you are filled with all that stuff.” That verges on ad hominem, but it is not inappropriate, because you are on the receiving side of an attempt at intimidation. If you have not read the works your opponent is citing, you might want to say, “Tell me what I missed,” which puts your opponent in the position of having to defend that this is relevant. You might also be tempted to recite your own barrage, to show that you are educated in your own literature. But that still concedes the point that in a philosophic argument on this kind of topic, the amount you have read is relevant. In fact, it is not relevant.
To discuss the existence of God, it is entirely irrelevant to know the Bible, the works of Antony Flew, sundry pamphlets, and so on. It is completely unnecessary and useless, because you are discussing a purely philosophic question. Therefore, in this argument, I would have said something like, “I have not read any of it,” even if I had. I might tell him later that I had, but my instinct would be to say: “I have never read any of it, proudly, because I do not read complete garbage. On this issue there is no need to do any reading. It is clear-cut. I do not spend my time studying werewolves and all the rest of it, and for the same reason I do not read all the maunderings on this subject. If you want to discuss the subject, let us hear what you know, not these alleged authorities.” Note, however, that if it is the type of subject on which you should have read and you did not, then that is not an appropriate response; then that becomes a counsel of desperation. Normally, though, in a philosophic issue, all of this type of reading is irrelevant.
In conclusion, let me say something about the etiquette or morality of allowing somebody to interrupt you, yell over you, and so on. It is virtually impossible to avoid that in an argument, because there is no structure and no organization; passions run high, neither side knows the other’s view, and therefore neither side listens to the other. Each is preparing his next statement as the other is talking, and as soon as you stop for breath, he rushes in because he is afraid too many points are going to come out. So it is almost impossible to have a decorous, polite, “After you, Alfonse” argument. However, if someone is interrupting as intimidation, to prevent you from speaking, to swamp you in sheer sound and brazenness, then you have to say, “I am sorry, you are not giving me a chance to speak; I will not talk under these conditions.” I do not think that either did that in this debate. The religious side was coming on a bit strong, but not beyond the bounds of what would be normal in an argument. He was trying to overwhelm his atheist opponent with so much verbiage that the atheist would not have a chance to figure out what to say, which is partly what came about. In that case, you have to then draw a line. If you find you are being rushed to the point where you simply cannot get your wits, and you are losing point after point, and you know you have answers but it is all going by too fast, you have to say, “Stop; I cannot argue this way. We either have to slow down and do it one point at a time, or I am out.”
Mock Argument: Objectivity
This is one final sample argument to conclude our discussion of arguing. The subject of this one is objectivity—is objective knowledge possible or not? A volunteer is taking the pro-objectivity side (“PO”), and I am taking the other side. But as I told her, it would not be right to do this in an attempt to overwhelm her with a whole bunch of jargon or anything, and I am not going to do that. I am going to be, I think, much more polite than the opponents of objectivity would normally be, but actually I have made a list of what I think are the main kinds of arguments you would get against the possibility of objectivity, and at one point or another I am just going to deliver them quietly, I hope, and see how our volunteer does with regard to them.
PO: Not only is objective knowledge possible, but it is the only type of knowledge possible. If something is to be called knowledge, it must by necessity be objective. That is, it must be based on the facts of reality, or it must be in accordance with the facts of reality.
LP: You say there has to be objectivity if there’s to be knowledge. Well, maybe that’s true, but then is there knowledge? The thing that strikes me is there’s so much disagreement among people. If you say something, you think it’s obvious, and other people disagree with it, so how can you say when you know?
PO: The fact that you ask is there knowledge is a contradiction. The question “Is there knowledge?” is a contradiction, because for you to ask that question, you must have acquired knowledge before.
LP: What knowledge would I have to have acquired?
PO: Knowledge of the concept “knowledge,” to begin with.
LP: Well, I have to know the word; that’s true. I mean, I grant this much—I have to know certain words in order to speak. Or to be more exact, I have to have learned how people use the words. Would you call that knowledge? That’s a linguistic skill I’d have to acquire.
PO: Are all words then empty, no meaning?
LP: Well, people use words, so I guess they mean something, sure.
PO: Don’t they have a referent in reality?
LP: Well, I don’t know where the referents are. I mean, they stand for something, but they stand in effect for what people mean by them, whatever people say they mean. Something like “book” could mean anything; people just arbitrarily decide what it’s going to be used for.
PO: The sound, yes, the sound of the concept may be arbitrarily chosen. But the concept “book” is not arbitrary.
LP: What distinction do you make between the word and the concept?
PO: Well, the word stands for the concept.
LP: What is the concept as apart from the book?
PO: The concept is an abstraction that stands for things in reality.
LP: Like “gremlin”?
PO: “Gremlin” is not a concept. I do not know what it is.
LP: It’s a little green—
PO: A little green what?
LP: Why do I have to acquire knowledge, objective knowledge, to have these concepts again? Tell me that. I do not see that.
PO: There is no such thing as nonobjective knowledge. “Nonobjective knowledge” is a contradiction in terms. Because when you say that you have knowledge, you have to be conscious of something.
LP: Okay. But what if people are conscious of different things, though? You know, so I, for instance, think that—
PO: You have different knowledge.
LP: But then, how can we say it’s objective if everybody disagrees? That’s where I start.
PO: Because, precisely, it has to be based on reality to be an objective concept or to have objective knowledge.
LP: So if people disagree, then one of them is not based on reality?
PO: Yes, if there is a disagreement, not both can be true at the same time.
LP: So for instance, I like cherry pie and Mr. X does not, so we disagree and therefore, one of us is wrong?
PO: Those matters are matters of taste.
LP: So is that subjective, just that one part?
PO: Yes, I think so.
LP: So then whether we like cherry pie or not, I win on that point then.
PO: Yes, but that’s your evaluation.
LP: So could we say then that evaluations are subjective, whereas facts are objective?
PO: On matters of taste, like eating cake or not, yes.
LP: But what about basic moral principles, like you should tell the truth?
PO: That’s objective.
LP: So in other words, there are values that are objective and values that are subjective?
PO: No, matters of taste, like liking cake or pie—
LP: Well, what is the difference between them and the others?
PO: Because when you evaluate a moral action, there is an objective standard, but if you happen to like cake, there is no objective standard.
LP: Okay, then, according to you, we need an objective standard to have objective knowledge, and the objective standard, if I understand you, has to be reality, right? Well, what is reality?
PO: I cannot define that. Reality is the same as existence—
LP: So then objective knowledge has to be knowledge based on—
PO: —on existence.
LP: Well, what is existence?
PO: I cannot define that.
LP: Do you have any contact with it?
PO: Yes.
LP: In what way?
PO: When you ask me to define “existence,” I’d like to quote Ayn Rand. She says, “To define ‘existence,’ one would have to sweep one’s arms around and say, ‘I mean this.’” There is only an ostensive type of definition.
LP: And by “ostensive,” you mean you’d point to it; you’d say, “Everything out there”?
PO: Correct.
LP: All right, let us say I do not challenge that much. There’s something out there. But now, according to you, knowledge is based on what’s out there. But how do we get this objective knowledge, since people disagree about so many things? We all are in contact with what’s out there, aren’t we? Or not?
PO: Yes, but you are not guaranteed to know; you cannot guarantee a correct knowledge of reality.
LP: Does that mean that any given piece of knowledge might be wrong?
PO: Correct, yes.
LP: Well, then, we can never say about any claim, “This is the objective truth,” because it might be wrong.
PO: No, because there are methods to validate your knowledge.
LP: What are the methods?
PO: Logic is the method.
LP: Then any logical argument, the conclusion is accepted?
PO: Any logical argument, if you check the premises also and they are true.
LP: And how do you establish that?
PO: You compare it to reality; you see if it—
LP: That’s how we started originally, and you said I could only compare by the use of logic.
LP: Are reason and logic the same thing?
PO: No, they are not. Reason is your faculty of perceiving reality, and logic’s the method you use—
LP: All right, let us be specific. The Mideast is reality.
PO: Correct.
LP: Now, some people say that the Shah should have been given haven in the United States, and other people say he should not.
PO: Uh-huh.
LP: Now, they both perceive the Shah, or pictures of him on TV, and they perceive the newscasts and so on. How would you resolve this? If knowledge is objective, presumably there is a right and a wrong here?
PO: Uh-huh.
LP: How would you go about resolving it? Or is that like cherry pie?
PO: No, it’s not.
LP: All right. So how would you decide?
PO: Well, you would have to first of all check all the facts why the people believe that he should not have come here.
LP: Some of them say he should not have come here because you risk the chance of reprisal against the United States. Well, that was true; there were reprisals—there were hostages taken. So does that make their viewpoint objective?
PO: No. You have to first of all check the reasons why they let the Shah in.
LP: According to what I read in the Times, it’s because Kissinger and a few other people phoned the White House.
PO: But what is correct?
LP: You ask me was it correct, but that’s the whole question. I’m trying to say that people who question objectivity would say they could study all the facts, and one thinks one thing and one thinks the opposite, and there’s no way to resolve it. So how can we say there’s an objective answer?
PO: But there is an objective answer.
LP: What’s the objective answer?
PO: I cannot tell you; I’d have to check all the facts.
LP: But you do not yourself know what it is?
PO: No.
LP: Well, give me an objective fact that you yourself actually know.
PO: This table exists.
LP: How do you know?
PO: Because I perceive it; I see it; I can touch it; I can feel it.
LP: But you know that people’s sensory experience varies enormously, right? I mean, some people see one color; some see another; some people are color-blind; some people are completely blind. You know the thing about if you put your hand in water when it’s hot, and it feels cool, and when it’s cold it feels warm, and the same thing feels different to different people, and dogs and cats see in black and white, et cetera, et cetera, and therefore, how do you know any of these if the senses are our basic tie to reality?
PO: But your senses cannot go wrong; they have no choice.
LP: But maybe my senses have no choice but to tell me fact A and yours have no choice but to tell you fact non-A, so we have a contradiction.
PO: No, because your senses perceive that which exists, and existence is absolute.
LP: Well, okay, if I look at this tablecloth and see it’s yellow, and a color-blind person looks and sees it’s gray, are we disagreeing? He says it’s gray and I say it’s yellow.
PO: Yes, both are correct in that case. Because the color-blind person, it’s true that he sees this tablecloth as gray, but—
LP: But what is it really?
PO: It’s really yellow, but the guy, the guy—
LP: If his senses can give it to him wrong—
PO: Okay, but his senses are not normal to begin with.
LP: But how do we decide what’s normal?
PO: Because he’s color-blind; you are already calling him blind, not normal.
LP: That’s right, he definitely has a different form of experience in that area, but is there anything against him besides the fact that he’s in the minority?
PO: That he’s not normal, that’s it.
LP: Well, if we can do that, why cannot we do the same thing on the level of abstract ideas? For instance, say, well, most people believe so and so about the Shah, so if you do not, you are not normal.
PO: Not normal, no, but wrong, yes.
LP: Well, why do we make that distinction with regard to the senses, and not with regard to ideas?
PO: You see, in the case of the color-blind person, he is not actually seeing; he is not—
LP: Are his senses actually wrong in that way?
PO: Yeah, his senses are not normal; they are incapable of perceiving the tablecloth as yellow.
LP: Okay. (I will just indicate on the side here that if you take that line, you are going to be in hard shape to defend objectivity, but we will elaborate that further.) Let us just go on to one other point here. What do you say about this point, which I commonly hear. You say we have to go by the facts of reality to get objective knowledge. But after all, reality is enormously complicated; there’s millions of facts, so we cannot possibly go through everything. Therefore, we have to select what facts we are going to take as the decisive facts in any given situation. For instance, we could just write a biography of the Shah and it could go on a hundred pages, a thousand pages, so we have to decide what are the essentials and what aren’t. And since everybody selects differently, and you have to have some means of selection, and it cannot be a fact that tells you how to select, because that’s what’s helping you to figure out what the facts are, therefore you have to choose subjectively. And therefore, all knowledge is subjective, because the facts that you use are chosen by a subjective process. I hear that all the time.
PO: No, they are not. When you arrive at a conclusion, you have to check all the facts relevant to that conclusion, all the facts that you know, and if you have checked all the facts that you know and it leads you to that conclusion, then it’s objective.
LP: But you have to decide which facts are essential, right? How do you do that? Isn’t that subjective?
PO: No. Why do you say that?
LP: Well, I mean, if all the facts are all just there, and yet we are saying this particular fact is really crucial and this one is not so important, why do we discriminate?
PO: You discriminate in relation to the other facts. You cannot just take one fact and say that this is the most fundamental fact and forget about the others.
LP: How? Explain to me how in relation to the other facts.
PO: For example, you say, “Okay, I will take man’s most fundamental characteristic.” And let us say he walks on two legs, he has two eyes, he has a nose, and he’s rational. And he builds skyscrapers and he speaks—
LP: All right, so we have a whole catalog, right, yes.
PO: Correct. So you select the fact that is most fundamental, that implies the most of the rest, that makes the other ones possible, and that is rationality.
LP: So you are saying that the same pattern that would be used with regard to choosing essentials in a definition would be applicable more broadly in any type of discussion?
PO: Yeah, I think so.
LP: So let me see if I can summarize this. You say that objective knowledge is possible based on facts, that we have access to the facts by the senses, but that in some cases the senses are wrong but that’s a minority that is abnormal, but the rest is okay, and that you would get to the level of concepts, we can be objective if we use reason or logic—
PO: Both, because logic is the method of reason.
LP: All right, so whenever you are using logic, you are using reason. But we have to do it in terms of essentials. And if we do, we will find that all the conclusions that we come to, except certain things, which are a matter of taste—
PO: Yes.
LP: Okay. All right, I will let you go. Thank you.
My main concern in this argument, which the volunteer helped very much to illustrate, was simply to demonstrate that if you want to defend such a thing as the objectivity of knowledge, you ultimately have to be able to cover the essentials of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. It is an enormously philosophical topic. The reason Objectivism is called “Objectivism” is that that concept—objectivity—is central in every branch of philosophy. In metaphysics, it stands for the idea that there is a reality that exists independent of us. In epistemology, it stands for the fact that we can acquire knowledge of things as they are, not influenced by our arbitrary feelings. And in ethics, it stands for the idea that objective value judgments are possible. Since the concept has roots in all these areas of philosophy, as soon as you defend the objectivity of knowledge, you open up everything—the means of knowledge (which are the senses, and logic, and reason, and concepts), the object of knowledge (which is reality), and the various applications of knowledge (including value judgments and political and even gastronomic examples). Consequently, I chose it deliberately to show a completely non-self-contained issue. God is much easier to argue, because that is one specific thing; even capitalism is much easier. But here you are in a highly proliferating question that pervades everything. You therefore have to be up on everything, because the subject will change at any moment—and they are essentials; they are not just arbitrary.
I brought up an argument used very commonly by newspeople: that objectivity is impossible because there are so many facts, and you have to choose which ones you choose. The answer, of course, has to be that you choose in terms of essentials—but then you have to be able to say what essentials are. It is not a full answer simply to say what essentials are in terms of definitions. That would be the beginning; then you would have to show how that applies to selecting essentials in the context of news gathering, passing value judgments, and so on. I obviously did not pursue that, because that would be a whole evening’s discussion. But what my opponent did would be a good beginning. Normally, it is a very abstract and lengthy discussion to present what an essential is, since, for example, the other person will interrupt to say, “What is rationality, and why is that more important than building a building?” and you have to go off on that tangent. I let her go on that, but she did have the general idea. Whereas if you did not know the Objectivist theory of definition, you would be completely stopped on that point.
It would have made a big difference if my opponent had said a bit more about repudiating disagreement as a criterion. If you see that your opponent is very hot on one point on which you disagree, it is always helpful to state openly, “This is a big point of dispute between us, and I reject it.” That is better than just answering, because sometimes your opponent does not grasp from your answer that you actually reject this whole approach, so he keeps pressing and pressing. The main thing that unphilosophical people say is, “If everybody agreed, there would be no problem, but since people disagree, how can you say this person has the truth and that one does not?” When I repeated this idea several times, my opponent said, “If people disagree, one is wrong.” It would have been better to say, “Look, agreement and disagreement are an entirely different question. That may be relevant to taking public polls, but we are not taking polls; we are talking about knowledge. Even if everybody agreed, I would not accept that as evidence that the idea in question is objective, because maybe they agree on a falsehood. So let us throw out the question of whether people agree or disagree, and talk instead about the question of whether they are attuned to the facts or not. I regard it as irrelevant that they disagree.” If you make a point of repudiating that firmly, even more briefly than that, then it stops your opponent; he loses that string to his bow, so to speak, and he cannot keep coming back. The way my opponent in this argument did it, though, was to say, “If people disagree, one is wrong,” but without stressing enough that she completely repudiates that approach. She did repudiate it, but not emphatically enough to scare me off from coming back to it over and again. It is an issue just of a little more emphasis. It is also another example of the importance of asserting your own terms in an argument, of feeling free to get your terms in and not just going directly on the defensive.
The issue of the validity of the senses came up. My opponent said, or implied, that a color-blind person sensing a yellow tablecloth as gray would be committing an error, that this is abnormal. It is, of course, abnormal, but she implied that that would make it mistaken. As soon as you accept that, you are in very bad shape, because you are then establishing the principle that it is possible for sensory data to be wrong under certain conditions. If the data that you get from the senses can be wrong, you are wide-open to the objection, “Who is to say when the senses are telling the truth and when they are not? We have no choice about them, and yet in certain cases they can go wrong and deceive us.” It is not sufficient to say that it is abnormal for the senses to err, because then the issue becomes the criterion of abnormality, which cannot be simply numerical. Suppose another species is discovered on another planet or somewhere, and its members all see shades of gray where we see yellow, and there are many more of them than us; is their perception then “normal”? It cannot be a quantitative issue.
You have to draw a sharp line, in defending cognitive questions, between what the senses contribute and what the conceptual level does. You have to hold out firmly for the idea that the senses per se cannot be wrong, not even the color-blind man’s perceptions. In a word, it is not wrong to see a yellow tablecloth as dark gray, say, because all that is changing is the form of the perception. The basic Objectivist point—and on this point we actually disagree with Aristotle—is that all sensation has to be in some form, and the nature of that form depends in part on your sensory apparatus. Thus, if your apparatus (in this case, the rods and the cones in the eye) changes in some way, your sensory experience will change. But that does not disqualify any experience. You always perceive somehow, but that experience is the raw data that we then conceptualize. In this case, if we do not see color differences, we simply do not directly get certain kinds of distinctions that we have to reach by inference from the senses that we do have. Color-blind people still end up with the same physics, the same understanding of reality, that ordinarily sighted people have; it is simply a difference in the amount of information that they are given directly by the eyes, and in the form of that information. You therefore want to avoid ever suggesting that the senses can go wrong, even in cases of so-called abnormal perception. If it is actually perception, that is it—that is it as perceived by human consciousness, by the consciousness possessed of those particular organs. The question then becomes how to interpret perception, how to explain it, and so on, and then it becomes a conceptual question.
Another point at which my opponent could have tightened up her argument was in discussing options. Most people arguing for subjectivity take the idea that if any two people have any difference between them, and everything is objective, then one of them must be wrong. That entirely ignores the legitimate role of options, a distinction that it would be important for you to master and be able to explain. There are areas where there are many different legitimate choices within the same objective principle. For instance, a productive career is an objective need of human life, and you can prove that. But it is optional whether you become a pharmacist or a doctor or a lawyer or an architect, or whatever particular form your career takes. You could not say that any one of those is objectively superior to any other. Nor does the fact that there is no reason to prefer one to the other mean that the choice is subjective. You would say that it is a legitimate optional choice within the framework of an objective principle, and therefore that the choice is objective, whichever one of the various possibilities it is. It becomes subjective when you include bank robbery as one of your options, because that violates the actual principle that man needs a productive career.
In a debate, you would have to be able to cover this type of point and know what you would take as optional and what not. Otherwise, the advocate of subjectivity will typically seize on some optional preference, like cherry pie or whatever, which is not a philosophic issue and does not prove anything; he will then force you into, “Well, if that is the case, then you are saying that only some things are objective, and where do you draw the line?”
To establish objectivity, then, you have to show your opponent that the senses are reliable, and you have to be prepared to separate out what is optional from what you really want to defend. But the whole debate is really about the conceptual level. The real problem is that people do not grasp the objectivity of concepts; they do not even grasp the terms of that problem. They just think, “Oh, well, it is all semantics,” or “It is all just words,” and therefore, the whole issue just floats. At the very beginning, when my opponent was trying to tell me that there cannot be knowledge if it is not objective, I said, “Well, that is simply our use of words.” The issue that I was trying to get at there is the issue on which the objectivity of knowledge depends. People feel in advance that it is hopeless: “However much we analyze,” they think, “we are all going to disagree anyway, and therefore it is all just a matter of opinion.” The actual idea, which most people likely could not articulate, the view they have absorbed that makes them feel that it is hopeless and all a matter of opinion, is the issue of concepts—whether concepts are objective. But the way most people would experience it, it is not concepts, but words that are the problem.
The main thing you have to do, if you are discussing objectivity, is to get across to your opponent that how you use words is not arbitrary. You take the view that every word has to be formed by a definite method; it has to be based on a certain definite kind of fact; it has to be used and defined a certain way—and therefore, before you can discuss any other questions, you have to agree on how you are going to use words, which means concepts. If you know that area and how to argue that point, and if the person is at all decent, he will get a glimmer that there is something more basic than all these superficial disagreements. He will see that he is simply assuming that anybody can put words together and use them in any way he wants, and therefore anybody can say anything. In actuality, however, the debate is much more fundamental: Are there some rules by which language has to be formed and used, or not?
If you are defending objectivity, you have to ask the person, in effect: “Do you or do you not recognize some terms that have to be adhered to in the use of language?” Ultimately, he is going to say yes or no. If he says, “No, there is no method of using language, period, and anybody can say anything,” then that obviously wipes out any discussion. You can just say, “Ish da triddle de gloop,” and he says, “What is that?” and you say, “That is the definitive refutation of your position, and that is the way I am using words.” You just cannot go any further. But if he is an honest person, he may be intrigued enough, especially if he does not know philosophy, to say, “Well, what would be a rule for using words? I do not have any idea.” Then you have to tell him, “Words are concepts, and you should read this book,” and go from there. It really comes down to an issue of concepts, and if you can get the person to grasp that much, that will be the revelation that will, in time, enable you to get somewhere with him. I do not hold out a great hope for that in a drawing room discussion. But if you are serious about trying to convince someone of the possibility of objectivity, nothing less will do.
At one point my opponent said, “What is a gremlin?” and I said, “A little green—” and stopped, and she did not make me continue. In a sense, I contradicted myself, because I said the use of words did not imply any knowledge, and then I said what I knew. If she had pressed that point further (which she started to do, but I derailed her), she could have come to the idea that words involve knowledge, and therefore certain methods of usage. Therefore, as soon as I said “gremlin,” that would be the point at which to say, “Look, that is exactly what the whole issue relies on. You think you can just take a word and utter it without any basis at all, and that is exactly what our whole debate is over.” If she had done that to me, as an advocate of subjectivity, I would have begun to feel uncomfortable; I would have felt, “I am doing something arbitrary and she will not let me do it.” Of course, there would still be a lot of stuff to cover; this is a long, long argument, because it involves a whole philosophy. But that would have been one way to get into it, and I wriggled out of it. (One of the techniques of argument is to know when not to let the other person wriggle out.)
Most people who argue against objectivity are skeptics on principle; they simply want to force you to admit that nobody can really know anything and anybody can say anything he wants. If you get into an argument with that type, there is really no use going on past a certain point, because it quickly degenerates into “Says you” and “Says me.” But if a person is doing it for other than nihilistic reasons—that is, a desire just to tear down the possibility of knowledge—then you could say, “What makes you think objective knowledge is impossible? After all, we have a civilization; it seems that we know something. So what makes you doubt it?” That would put the skeptic more on the defensive. He might then say something like, “People disagree,” and then you would immediately say, “That is irrelevant.” Then you would use the word “reality,” and he would say, “What is that?” and you would sweep your hand around and say, “It is all this.” By that point he is already trying to remember, “What did I learn in philosophy class as to why objectivity is impossible?” And if you can get your opponent to that point, you are in business.