Abstract
Our meta-argumentative vocabulary supplies the conceptual tools used to reflectively analyse, regulate, and evaluate our argumentative performances. Yet, this vocabulary is susceptible to misunderstanding and abuse in ways that make possible new discursive mistakes and pathologies. Thus, our efforts to self-regulate our reason-transacting practices by articulating their norms makes possible new ways to violate and flout those very norms. Scott Aikin identifies the structural possibility of this vicious feedback loop as the Owl of Minerva Problem. In the spirit of a shared concern for the flourishing or our rational, argumentative practices, this paper approaches the Owl of Minerva Problem from a vantage point that, by comparison with Aikin’s, affords perspectives that are more pessimistic in some aspects and more optimistic in others. Pessimistically, the problem at the root of the weaponization of our meta-argumentative vocabulary is motivational, not structural. Its motivational nature explains its resistance to the normal repertoire of reparative (meta-)argumentative maneuvers, as well as revealing a profound and deeply entrenched misunderstanding of the connection between our reasons-transacting practices and the goods achievable within them. Optimistically, in the absence of this motivational problem, the misunderstandings and errors made possible by our meta-argumentative vocabularies are amenable to remedy by familiar techniques of discursive instruction and repair. More optimistically, even though our meta-argumentative vocabularies are generated only retrospectively, they can be used prospectively, thereby making possible an aspirational motivation resulting in a virtuous cycle of increasingly autonomous normative self-regulation. Properly harnessed, the Owl of Minerva releases the Lark of Arete.
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Notes
For a further discussion of these matters, and of adversariality in argumentation generally, see (Godden 2021).
Stevens here follows Susan Moller Okin (1989: 193) who introduces the notion of exit options in the context of relationships generally. Those who can best endure dissent or strife in a relationship, or the degradation or dissolution of the relationship, can leverage that power in shaping the relationship.
Importantly, it should be noted, as one reviewer astutely observed, that additional instruction and rule clarification cannot foreclose on the possibilities of misinterpretation, misunderstanding, misapplication, or incompetence. Rather, these possibilities remain perennial. Any efforts at remedial correction can themselves be misunderstood. As such the Owl of Minerva problem is recursive in nature—for any instance of the problem, x, a derivative instance of it, x, can recur at the level of instructional remediation of x. How is this possibility to be addressed?
The view advanced here builds on previous work of the author (Godden 2019), where a competence view of our reason-giving practices is presented. On this view, what any form of instruction depends upon for its success is some prior conceptual competency or pre-conceptual ability. That is, what must be presupposed, at some level, is a relatively primary and pre-existing conceptually-inflected agential competence or, at a minimum, a stable pattern of behavior in the agent that reliably discriminates among relevant phenomena. It is upon these that any conceptually-inflected competency we might hope to inculcate must be grafted and subsequently honed. As Larry Wright has put the point, albeit in a slightly different context:
For justification, if it is to be of any value at all, comes to an and. And the best place for it to end is in a competent judgment. (Wright 2001: 100; cf. 1995: 568; Campolo 2018; Wittgenstein PI: §217; OC: §110).
Our abilities in any rule-governed—which is to say conceptually articulated—activity, including reasoning, depend, at some level, on our competency to make reliable, unmediated judgments.
On such a view, effective remedies to misunderstanding or incompetence must reach down to those existing competencies or abilities and, building on those, inculcate the more sophisticated and articulated competencies necessary to master the skill or practice under instruction. In the event that those pre-existing, if latent, competencies or abilities are absent and unattainable, it could be the case that mastery of the technique under instruction will not be possible. In the context of this paper, the absence of such relatively basic, or primary, competencies or abilities might result in our coming to deem the subject untrainable, and thereby generally incompetent in a way that prompts us to subsequently classify, and treat them, as non-agential in the relevant area of practice. When rational competency (Godden 2019) is at issue, we might be brought to the point where we cease to recognize such subjects as having rational agency.
Compare Adam Leite’s (2004: 222f.) discussion of what he calls the spectatorial conception of the activity of justification.
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Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Association for Philosophy of Education session of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division, on February 28, 2020, in Chicago, Illinois, under the title “It’s always darkest before the dawn: The Lark of Arete and praiseworthiness in public discourse.” I am grateful to my colleague Matt Ferkany for organizing that session and inviting me to participate. The advertised topic of that session was “Argument and Critical Thinking in Democracy,” though it was really an author-meets-critics panel discussion in which Scott Aikin presented “The Owl of Minerva problem and public argument,” summarizing some of his recent work, whereupon John Casey, Matt Ferkany, and I separately delivered prepared commentaries to which Scott then replied. Participating in that panel gave me the occasion and impetus to give this topic the serious reflection and consideration it deserves, and my thinking on these matters has been clarified and corrected significantly through many conversations over the years with my co-panelists. Thanks are also due to the participants of that session, particularly Danielle Lee Clevenger, as well as the anonymous referees of this paper for their constructive criticisms.
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Godden, D. Getting Out in Front of the Owl of Minerva Problem. Argumentation 36, 35–60 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-021-09554-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-021-09554-2