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| Jan 13, 2010 3:51 pm |
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re: The ART of ARGUMENT, or I love a good fight on networks? |
| abbeboulah
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Ken, your post offers a challenge to look at argument in a different way than we usually do -- which I paraphrase for myself and the kinds of arguments with which I have been preoccupied as means to arrive at plans and problem solutions acceptable to all concerned or affected by the problem. Though I vainly harbor some modest artistic ambitions as well, I tended to see a view such as the one you suggested as a distraction from that purpose, and therefore did not react to this at the time. Some reflection leads me to reconsider, but I’d like to explore and clarify some questions first:
The view of an argument refers less to the individual argument of the kind analyzed for validity orf reasoning scheme and truth of its premises etc. by logic, rhetoric and critical thinking textbooks than to the process of arguing, that is, of a sequence of exchanges, is this what you are saying? And then, the arrangement of that exchange can be viewed and evaluated somewhat like the way we are looking at art? If so, the message or insight or experience we get might be both a ‘deeper’, more essential understanding of the subject we are discussing, and/or a higher ‘meta’-message?
But such a process is different from a painting or other artist work in that it involves two or several people -- unless, of course we are imagining and concocting such discussions as individual writer-artists the way Plato did, but not Socrates who actually talked with people but never wrote up anything. So, in the case of Socrates-type argument: who is doing the artistic fine-tuning to which we then can apply your appreciation criteria? It would seem to be the responsibility of both or all participants, would it not? (Of course, I realize that ‘responsibility ‘is perhaps too crude and mechanistic a term for such a delicate process, quite apart from the need to be held accountable for mistakes and violations of basic netiquette and such.)
But what is it that enables participants in such processes to engage and ‘play’ in such exchanges to make them the kinds of experiences you then can enjoy? In thinking about such activities, trying to teach students the art of cooperative design and planning, and finding to my dismay that the vast majority of interaction processes we teach children from the earliest kindergarten games up to national league sports are competitive rather than cooperative) -- I realized that there are some essential agreements -- in the form of game ‘rules’ that must be shared by the participants. In the case of one of the few examples of such cooperative activities (in which we are not ‘winning’ by defeating the partner, but in which I play better, the better you are playing, and both derive more enjoyment), for exampe making music together, the ‘rules’ are the key in which we play, the basic beat, etc. Such rules are often or mostly ‘arbitrary’ -- in the sense that we can agree to play in a different key, but then agreeing to stick to one rule set is necessary for a good performance. Are the aspects you list the equivalent of such rules? Then, indeed, the entire phenomenon: of tacitly or explicitly agreeing to the set of rules by which we develop our argument, and the skill and grace and elegance with which we play, becomes a kind of piece of art in itself -- almost independently of the subject matter of the discussion itself, and a message about who we are. Or could be. We have a lot to learn. Private Reply to abbeboulah (new win) |
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