How Does Veritula Work?

@dennis-hackethal you have regularly pointed out to me that it’s a mistake to assign strengths or weaknesses to arguments—for example, in #1809 and #1927. I’d love to get to the bottom of that.

On one hand, I see what you mean. A criticism is a criticism: it can either be refuted or it has outstanding criticism. If it’s a bad criticism, you just refute it or deem it irrelevant and move on.

I also see why talking about a “gradient” or comparative strength between arguments is problematic: there’s no objective criterion to measure them against. We can only say one theory is better than another when both attempt to explain the same phenomenon—then we can evaluate them using properties such as hard-to-varyness and other criteria Deutsch describes. (We can get into that if you’d like, though I don’t think that’s our main disagreement.). But this comparison doesn’t apply when we’re dealing with very different criticisms of a single idea, because there’s no common standard to measure them against. Comparing their “strength” becomes arbitrary.

However, I still think there are good and bad criticisms, just as there are good and bad explanations (following Deutsch’s distinction: for instance, bad explanations are easy to vary or point to authorities to justify themselves rather than offering a hard-to-vary account of how and why something works). While I could simply refute bad criticisms and move on, there’s also the matter of efficiency and opportunity cost: I don’t want to waste time repeatedly refuting poor criticisms, or worse, get stuck in circular debates with people who don’t recognize that some arguments aren’t good criticisms at all. I’d rather focus my attention on good criticisms.

To clarify what I mean, here’s an excerpt from my book:

The most important principle to remember while criticizing is: Criticize, don’t defend or attack. Good explanations invite criticism of their intrinsic content—whether the explanation itself works, solves the problem, and avoids worse side effects. Bad explanations, by contrast, deflect criticism onto irrelevant, extrinsic properties such as authority or track record—e.g., “this is the method that successful company X uses,” “I believe strongly in this approach,” or “it’s coming from person Y, so it’s worthless.”

That kind of “criticism” isn’t real criticism at all. It’s just attacking or defending. And when we play that game, the explanation itself stays untouched and stagnant. The idea doesn’t get scrutinized or improved—it only gets shielded or dismissed for irrelevant reasons.

Tagging @bart-vanderhaegen because he and I have discussed this at length—in fact, I got the defending/attacking framing from him.