Category Archives: Critical Thinking

Provisionality markers: keeping the lines of discussion open

Provisionality markers are the words we use when communicating that signal we are being provisional rather than absolute. Using them well is a crucial part of the practice of provisionality. On the recent Objectivity Training course, I was planning to include some discussion of provisionality markers in one session, and then failed to do so in much detail because I ran out of time. One of the participants remarked that it would have been useful to give it higher priority, given the great practical importance of provisionality markers. Reflecting further, I agree, so I’ve decided to write a blog about it to help make up for my omission.

You will probably need to know a bit about provisionality, and how it differs from absolutisation, to follow this. If you haven’t come across the term before, I’d suggest watching this video.

Provisionality markers consist in words or phrases that try to directly communicate that a statement being made is provisional, usually by linking it to appearance rather than reality, opinion rather than claimed fact, or probability rather than certainty. Here are some examples:

Appearance rather than reality

It appears…Provisionality markers

It seems…

Apparently

Evidently

Opinion rather than claimed fact

In my opinion…

I’d suggest…

On the whole I think…

In my view…

I think…

One might conclude that…

I believe…

Arguably…

Probability rather than certainty

…may…

…might…

Probably

It’s likely that…

The use of these terms is, of course, no guarantee that a person is being provisional. What make them provisional is their state of mind when they are making a judgement, and whether they are able to consider alternatives, not just whether they use these words. You’ll always need to judge provisionality from the context, rather than just from the use of these words, and they may be used formalistically, merely to try to avoid the possibility of offence, or because they are believed to be expected in the group. That judgement is obviously trickier on the internet, where the words are separated from information about tone and context.

In some cases the use of these terms may also indicate hesitancy or indecisiveness rather than provisionality. Indecisiveness should not be confused with provisionality, the difference being that provisionality involves taking as much into account as the conditions allow and then making a balanced judgement, whilst indecisiveness means failing to make a judgement when one is required. Indecisiveness may even often be accompanied by a negative absolute belief, such as that I can’t be justified in making a decision, or that decisions can’t ever be justified.

Nevertheless, I think the use of these terms (and others like them) can be very helpful. There are two aspects to the practice of using provisionality markers, obviously: using them ourselves and noting when others use them.

Using provisionality markers

Using them ourselves adds to the probability that others will recognise that we are trying to be provisional rather than absolute. That makes it more likely that a helpful discussion will ensue, because, if we disagree with each other, that makes it much more likely that we will consider and try to understand and assess each other’s positions rather than being defensive and ending up in conflict. Provisionality markers should set up whatever I am claiming for a discussion where we are both concerned with finding the most helpful outcome, rather than for an adversarial argument in which ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ is our main concern.

However, for provisionality markers to potentially have this effect, other people have to notice that we are using them. Thus it may help to give them extra emphasis in one way or another, particularly when communicating with someone whom you think might not notice or might not have noticed the markers. We can do this through tone of voice, or in text by using asterisks or other emphasising features.

Which markers we choose to use may also have an effect on whether they are noticed. Longer phrases like “One might conclude that…” may seem clumsy and over-formal, but have the advantage of going to great lengths to draw attention to provisionality. “I believe…”, on the other hand, may sometimes be intended as provisional, but (particularly in a religious context) is easily interpreted as dogmatic nevertheless.

The provisionality of the marker also needs to be consistent with the rest of what you are saying, and if the rest of your statement is absolute in form, no quantity of provisionality markers will rescue it. For example, it’s contradictory to say “It may be inevitable that you’ll find the right partner”: if it may be the case (rather than being a certainty), it can’t be inevitable. If you say “In my view conservatives are always greedy”, the over-certainty of your sweeping generalisation about conservatives is undermining the apparent provisionality of “in my view” to such an extent that your provisionality marker is likely to be deservedly ignored. It’s thus impossible to separate the use of provisionality markers from the wider issue of avoiding absolutes, which in turn requires some understanding of the wide variety of forms that absolutes can take so that you can avoid them.

Noting others’ use of provisionality markers

Just as important, however, as using provisionality markers oneself, is noticing when other people use them, and giving due weight to their intention to be provisional. This is related to the problem of people taking offence – something that they are responsible for as well as you. Even if you’re not inclined to enter into discussion of a claim that someone has made, if you recognise that they’re trying to do so provisionally, you can at least pass on without taking offence, recognising that a statement you disagreed with was probably part of someone else’s progression from a relatively ignorant position to a wiser one.

The crucial part of noting others’ provisionality markers is  usually interpretation. Was the provisionality marker intended? Was the whole statement intended as provisional even despite the lack of provisionality markers? This is where I think the principle of charity is really helpful: this is the presumption, when in doubt, that a person had a more helpful rather than a less helpful intention. If you presume wrongly, after all, the outcome is much more likely to be helpful if you do so in a positive direction, and it’s likely to be become clearer in subsequent discussion whether or not the person was being genuinely provisional. The video below shows a variety of ambiguous situations where the principle of charity needs to be exercised!

One of my own bugbears online is having provisionality markers ignored, often by people who feel strongly about a particular view, and are eager to pigeonhole me either in the ‘for’ or ‘against’ camp in relation to that view, even when I want to suggest a third alternative. It’s easy to walk away from such heated debates (for example, about the EU in the current UK political climate) on the grounds that joining in may just lead to people taking offence and to unfruitful polarised discussion. At the same time, though, it is exactly such debates where provisionality and a critical perspective on over-simplifications are most needed. Making strong use of provisionality markers, recognising those of others, and also pointing them out robustly when others ignore them, may be important steps in making such discussions more productive.

Overall, then, the importance of provisionality markers, and of using them carefully, cannot be underestimated. In the end, however, their use cannot be separated from other Middle Way practices: provisionality, agnosticism, incrementality and integration.

Objectivity Training Course

I’ve produced this new video to help publicise the Objectivity Training Course which I’m running May 31st-Jun 3rd in Malvern, UK. That’s only 6 weeks away at the time of posting this, so if you’re planning to come, please book without delay! This 4 day intensive course should allow you to understand the inter-relationship between a range of different kinds of assumptions that interfere with our judgement, and develop some practical strategies for avoiding them. The web address given at the end of the video, for more information about the course, is also linked here.

Critical Thinking 17: Appeal to moderation

This particular fallacy is well worth considering here, because it can so easily be confused with the Middle Way. An appeal to moderation (or argument from moderation, or false compromise) consists in the assumption that a belief must necessarily be correct because it falls midway between two extremes. If used in an argument, this is fallacious, because the midway point is not necessarily true or good. To assume this is the case is, indeed, an absolutisation of the middle – of the kind I have sometimes been falsely accused of myself.

A classic example can be found in the biblical story of the judgement of Solomon. The story goes that two women came to Solomon as he sat in judgement, arguing over the possession of a baby. Each of them claimed that the baby was really hers. Solomon then offered to resolve the dispute by cutting the baby in half. Now, that of course neglects a key condition – that the baby needed to remain alive to be helpful to anyone. The (rather incredible) story then goes on that one woman agreed to this solution, whilst the other (the true mother) who really loved the baby was so distressed that she immediately offered to give it up so as to save its life. Of course, one then has to ask why a woman who wanted a baby at all (whether or not she was the true mother) would consent to it being killed: which suggests that she rather represents a very narrow left-hemisphere view of the matter in which an obsession with one outcome blinds one to all other conditions.Judgement of Solomon Boucicaut Master

This story also shows the problem with any kind of assumption that compromise is necessarily right. It does not tell you what the compromise is of or between, nor what the surrounding conditions are. Another example illustrating this is the  philosopher’s ‘paradox of the gentle murder’.  If person A wanted to violently murder C, but B did not, a compromise between A and B might be to only murder C gently. This illustrates how you can distort a compromise just by setting the boundaries of the ‘extremes’ to be negotiated closer to your desired outcome: a technique known to salesmen and known in psychology as anchoring. If a salesman wants to get £100 for an item that in market terms would only be worth £50, he just has to start the negotiations at £150, so that by the time you have beaten him down to a ‘compromise’ £100 you feel you are getting a bargain.

So how is this different from the Middle Way? The extremes to be avoided in the Middle Way are not conventional or manipulable, but consist in positive and negative absolutes. Such absolutes are focused on conquering their opposites, and tend to exclude all third alternatives to their opposite. By considering alternatives, and addressing the conditions as widely as possible, we may end up with a position that superficially looks like one of the extremes, or one that looks like a compromise: but it will not be the fact of it being a compromise that made the difference and justified the judgement. For example, if you’re trying to give up an addiction, the ultimate desirable outcome is obviously not to partake of the addictive substance at all (which looks like one extreme) – but the absolutes you encounter are likely to be the lure of the addictive substance versus the belief that you should give it up. The Middle Way requires you to find ways round this obsessive polarity, but the further solution is not a compromise at all.

To return to the earlier example, in the judgement of Solomon the absolutes might be those of justice (in the sense of fairness between the women) versus those of truth. Solomon employed what Buddhists would call a ‘skilful means’ to find a solution that only on the surface appears to be a fallacious appeal to moderation. His deeper purpose seems to have been to find out how the two women would react to his proposal. In doing so he recognised that he couldn’t reach the absolute ‘truth’ of the matter without doubt, and nor could he reach an absolutely just solution without a means of sharing the indivisible baby. The Middle Way here is widely recognised as a good way of resolving the situation, even though it does not ultimately either find out the ‘truth’, nor is it ultimately ‘just’ to all concerned. Instead, the questioning of the two absolutised extremes leads us to recognise third, alternative values: those of the value of the baby being cared for, even if the carer turns out not to be the genetic mother and even if the disappointed party turns out to indeed be the genetic mother.

In the paradox of the gentle murder, the Middle Way does not involve the acceptance of the positions of A and B as ‘extremes’. Instead, the extremes need to be absolute beliefs. These might be the value of whatever motivates the murder, versus the absolute wrongness of murder. Since a murder of any kind is most unlikely (in most cases) to fulfil the desires that motivated it once they were integrated beyond a certain very limited state of obsession, murder does not have to be absolutely wrong to justify a conclusion that it is wrong in this, and the vast majority of other cases. People who seriously contemplate murder are usually just not aware of all the horrendous short and long-term effects murder has – on the victim, the murderer and others. Such effects would not be greatly reduced by doing the murder gently. So, again, the ‘compromise’ solution is very likely to be wrong, and the Middle Way points towards an approach that looks very close to one of the extremes. Even if the solution looks like just following the rule against murder, however, the motive of a Middle Way approach is more far-reaching and, by allowing the absoluteness of the rule against murder to be questioned, actually offers much stronger experiential reasons for refraining from murder.

Finally, in the example of the salesman who exploits our anchoring vulnerabilities, the Middle Way requires us to become aware of anchoring and compensate for it. Of course, if this proves impossible this will just remain as a condition we have to put up with, and we will continue to be taken in by the ‘compromises’ of salespeople. But psychological evidence suggests that people can make progress with anticipating anchoring in the contexts where it is more likely to have an effect. If we are sufficiently aware of anchoring, we can insist on more acceptable parameters for ‘compromise’ at the beginning of the negotiations.

In practice, moderation often has a lot going for it as a rule of thumb. For example, my own approach to alcohol is based on moderation. Some people might not find this practicable, and prefer to abstain altogether, but for me, moderation generally works. However, it is quite possible to absolutise moderation – and the Middle Way should on no account be confused with a tendency to do this.

Exercise

Do these examples show an appeal to moderation? If they do, how does it differ from the Middle Way?

  1. John and David are arguing over a cake. John wants to divide the cake in half, but David wants all of it. “OK,” says David, “Let’s compromise. I have three-quarters of the cake, and you have a quarter of it.”
  2. Lena and Olga are sisters engaged in a lengthy lawsuit contesting their sadistically patriarchal father’s will. The most recent will states that Lena should receive the whole estate, but only on condition that she is married. If Lena is not married, Olga inherits the whole estate (whether Olga is married or not). At the time of her father’s death, Lena was not married, but she has since married. Lena is contesting the award of the estate to Olga, but Olga proposes an out-of-court settlement whereby she gives Lena one quarter of the estate.
  3. In the recent Climate Change talks in Paris, the world’s nations agreed to pursue efforts to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C compared to pre-industrial levels. However, no detailed programme was agreed to actualise this aspiration, only further ongoing reviews. Critics complained of the inadequacy of the non-binding target, but defenders insisted that more progress had been made than might have been expected, and that the agreement was the best compromise available.

Critical Thinking 16: Appeal to Ignorance

It’s over a year ago now since I let the ‘Critical Thinking’ series of blogs lapse (the last one being no. 15, the ‘Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy’). However, that wasn’t at all because I’d run out of interesting material to talk about. Inspired by work I’m doing at the moment on Critical Thinking issues and the David McRaney podcast, I thought it might be time to revive and continue this series. A full list of the previous instalments can be found here.

The Appeal to Ignorance is the claim that you can justify a belief as completely true or false just by pointing out a lack of information. It’s assumed that because we are ignorant about the evidence for or against a particular claim, it must therefore be true or false. An easy classic type of example would be the ‘Nessie Argument’:

Nobody has yet disproved the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. So the Loch Ness Monster must exist.Loch_Ness_Monster

This kind of example might be reasonably obvious to many people as fallacious. However, I am often astonished at how widespread and, indeed, institutionalised appeals to ignorance often are. The most common arguments for atheism, and for philosophical idealism, are usually based on an appeal to ignorance. Here’s an example of each:

The existence of God cannot be proved. All the supposed proofs of God’s existence, for example based on religious experience or design, are based on doubtful assumptions. So we must conclude that God does not exist.

The ultimate existence of material objects can never be proved, because all we have access to is our experience of those objects. Thus there can be no material objects out there, only minds and mental constructions.

These are also examples of what I have sometimes called ‘sceptical slippage’. People begin with a justifiable doubt about something, but then they turn that doubt into a negative claim, in many cases apparently not noticing that they have gone from one to the other. But the distinction between uncertainty and  negative claims is a large and important one with lots of practical implications. For example, those who go around stating that belief in God is ‘false’ cause a lot of unnecessary conflict that would probably not be created by those who merely point out that we don’t know whether or not God exists (especially when religions themselves often offer mystical perspectives that underline this point).

These sorts of examples show how important avoiding the appeal to ignorance is in Middle Way Philosophy. If we are to apply the Middle Way carefully and reflectively, we need to be willing to take a critical stance towards traditions that may be trying to avoid positive absolutes, but have failed to avoid negative absolutes after falling into an appeal to ignorance. That’s the thing that seems to divide Middle Way Philosophy from naturalism, which on most interpretations rejects the ‘supernatural’ as false because it is uncertain.

Like most such unjustified assumptions, the appeal to ignorance also potentially has an equally erroneous opposite: that is the assumption that due to ignorance we cannot make even provisional assertions. not only can we not justify absolute assertions based on ignorance (whether positive or negative), but we also cannot justify the avoidance of assertions. A degree of ignorance is our embodied state, but it’s only a degree of ignorance, not an absolute ignorance. We can always assert that based on our experience so far, subject to amendment from further experience, such-and-such is the case. For example, I can assert that the sun will rise tomorrow. I am not prepared for the rapidly plunging temperatures and planetary ruin that would occur if it didn’t, even though I can’t be absolutely certain. Practically speaking, I am justified in relying on that very high probability.

Exercise

Are these arguments guilty of an appeal to ignorance , or are they just taking our ignorance reasonably into account?

1. We don’t know when civilisation is going to fall apart, so we should all stockpile food and weapons to be ready for that eventuality.

2. We don’t know when the next outbreak of ebola will occur, and a worldwide pandemic has only been marginally headed off for now. Every child in the world should thus be given a vaccination against ebola.

3. You never know when a disabling virus is going to strike your computer. Back up all your files in at least two different places.

4. We don’t know for sure that the tooth fairy does not exist, so it’s quite OK to tell your children stories about the tooth fairy.

Appeals to Groups

Another video about groups! The timing of it coming out just after the previous one is just a coincidence. However, the approach in this one is a bit different, it being made as part of the ‘Mistakes we make in thinking’ series. The intended audience is wider, so it’s not framed in terms of Middle Way Philosophy but in terms of avoiding cognitive errors, drawing on psychology and critical thinking.