PARADOXES OF ARGUMENTATION and REFUTATION
1. Paradoxes of argumentation
1.1 Producing an argumentative question legitimates all the answers
Should there be a “scientific and public debate” about whether there were gas chambers in Nazi Germany? This is exactly what the revisionist Roger Garaudy has demanded: the organization of a debate would legitimize the different positions taken in this debate.
Roger Garaudy has persistent doubts about the existence of gas chambers
Later in the book, Roger Garaudy refers to Shoah, the film by Claude Lanzmann, which he considers a “stinker”. ‘You are talking about “Shoah business”, you say that this movie only brings testimonies without demonstrations. This is a way of saying that the gas chambers do not exist’, the President [of the Court] suggested. ‘Certainly not’ Roger Garaudy protests: As long as there is no scientific and public debate on the subject, doubts are allowed’. (Le Monde, January 11-12 1998, p. 7)
Here, Garaudy takes the position of the third party. He might even say that the president is arguing fallaciously from ignorance – to that P is not proven is not say that non-P is proven. The refutation must consider the contextual knowledge: here the claim is false, because the historical and scientific work has been done and published and libraries stay open late into the night. We are exactly in the situation of the Aristotelian indisputability, see conditions of Discussion.
1.2 Arguing for P weakens P
Arguing for P weakens P, first of all in virtue of the reasons that justify the discourse against the argumentative personalities, which is often the same as the discourse against the debate. This discourse unfolds as follows:
People don’t accept living in doubt, not to being committed to a cause, not knowing, not having an opinion on everything, not challenging the other’s opinion. They are ready to argue for or against all and anything and everything. They enjoy disputes, and are inherently incapable of arguing, as the Port-Royal philosophers show. Arguments are only substitutes for fights or playground games, they always produce more heat than light. Querulousness is a disease. The will to be right, to attack and to defend is the transparent mask of the will to power. Our most entrenched opinions are not based on argument, but on our reptilian brain mechanisms, we don’t argue, we just reformulate our opinions, etc.
Second, arguing for P weakens P because argument-based knowledge is inferential, i.e., indirect knowledge. Indirect knowledge is often considered inferior to direct knowledge is expressed in a simple, clear statement of fact, especially to direct, revelation-based religious knowledge, see self-evidence. Newman expressed this idea with particular force, first in the epigraph to his Grammar of Assent (1870), taken from St. Ambrose, « It did not please God to save his people by dialectic » (“Non in dialecticà complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum”), and further:
Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.
No one, I say, will die for his own calculations[1]: he dies for realities. (p. 73) [1]
To most men, argument makes the point in hand only more doubtful, and considerably less impressive. (Id., p. 74)
Along the same line, Thomas Aquinas, when discussing the question of “whether one should argue with unbelievers in public,” considers the following objection to a positive answer:
Objection 3: Disputations are conducted by means of arguments. But an argument is a reason in settlement of a dubious matter: whereas things that are of faith, being most certain, ought not to be a matter of doubt. Therefore, one ought not to dispute in public about matters of faith. (ST, Part 2, 2, Quest 10, Art 7)
Arguments develop from a question; they are mirrored in counter-arguments, attested or conceivable. This explains the existence of the paradoxes of argumentation: each position casts doubt on the other. This explains why the first step in the process of legitimizing a new position involves opening a debate about it and, to do this, one must first find some opponents.
2. Paradoxes of refutation
2.1 The absence of refutation strengthens the adverse position, even if this position is insignificant or absurd.
It is much better to be criticized than to be ignored. Being in the center of a polemic may be an ideal and comfortable position. Finding someone who make an argument that contradicts your own is an argumentative strategy that gives initial legitimacy to a point of view. The refutation creates a question where there was none, and that question, by feedback, legitimizes all the speeches that answer it. The proponent is weak because he or she bears the burden of proof, but strong because he or she creates a question.
The historian P. Vidal-Naquet describes this argumentative trap in the case of the negationist discourse, as follows,
I hesitated for a long time before writing these pages about the alleged revisionism, about a book whose editors tell us without laughing that, “Faurisson’s arguments are serious. They must be answered”. The reasons for not speaking were many, but of unequal value. […] In the end, was not the answer to recognize the idea that there was indeed a debate, and to publicize a man who is passionately hungry for it? […]
This last objection that is actually the most serious. […] It is also true that to attempt a debate would be to admit the inadmissible argument of the two “historical schools”, the “revisionist” and the “exterminationist”. There would be, as an October 1980 pamphlet put it, “advocates of the existence of homicidal gas chambers” and the others, just as there are advocates of a high chronology and of a low chronology for the tyrants of Corinth. […]
From the day that R. Faurisson, a duly qualified academic, a professor at a leading university, was first allowed to write for the first time in Le Monde1, even if it was immediately refuted, the question ceased to be marginal. This became central a central question, and those who had no direct knowledge of the events in question, especially young people, had the right to ask whether some people were trying to hide something from them. Hence the decision made by Les Temps modernes1 and by Esprit1 to reply.
But how to answer, since the discussion is impossible? We must answer [Fausrisson] like a sophist, that is to say, with a man who resembles the one who speaks the truth, and whose arguments must be dismantled, piece by piece, in order to expose the pretense.
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, [A Paper Eichmann], 1987.[2]
2.2. Weak or inconclusive refutations strengthen the position they attack
According to the law of weakness, a weak argument for a conclusion is an argument for the opposite conclusion. Symmetrically, a weak refutation of a thesis strengthens this thesis.
Gérard Chauvy is on trial for slandering Raymond and Lucie Aubrac, two leaders of the French Resistance against the Nazis.
He quoted a letter written by Klaus Barbie thin which he described them as members of the resistance turned into double agents.
Gérard Chauvy, who claims to have discovered Klaus Barbie’s memoirs in 1991, was the first to publish these sixty pages, which, until then, had been “circulating under cover”, by reproducing them in extenso in the appendices of his work. Does he share this thesis, as the civil party claims? Are his apparent reservations about this memoir just another maneuver to accredit it? In any case, this document is at the center of the debate. (Le Monde, February 7, 1998, p. 10; my emphasis).
An inconclusive refutation by a known good arguer strengthens the position under attack. Since the given refutation is taken as the best possible (according to Grice’s maxims), and since it remains inconclusive, the reader will conclude that, “since even such an arguer finds nothing else to say, then, the criticized position must actually be correct”, even if this conclusion is ad ignorantiam, see counter-argumentation.
A very special case: argumentation by ironic refutation.
Hence the possibility of a strategic use of weak and inconclusive refutation to support a position that one cannot openly support. This may be necessary in times of tyranny.
The refutation contains obvious errors that alert the careful reader; there is a contrast between the quality and care of the exposition and the meager character of the refutation. Moreover, the refutation is not presented in the author’s usual argumentative style. For example, a good theologian develops in a dialectical and detailed manner, a position condemned by the official authorities of his religion, and refutes it only with arguments drawn from various authorities (which the reader may know are considered questionable), so that the careful reader is led to think that this oddity is strategic. The speech is apparently refuted, only to be better affirmed in reality, the negation then serving to cover the author. This case of indirectness was theorized by Strauss (1953). When a discourse is forbidden under certain historical, social, or religious circumstances, it is still possible to give voice to it, under the guise of its refutation, the negation then serving to protect the speaker from tyrannical authorities.
This ironic argumentation can be dangerous. The authorities are not necessarily naive or uninformed, and they may be well aware of the intended purpose of the pseudo-rebuttal, which will rightly be interpreted as a denial of a belief which is actually held by the speaker: “How can you so be such an expert on heterodox positions and such a fool when it comes to orthodoxy?”.
Such a strategy, based on the opacity of the writer’s intentions, presupposes a double argumentative address, the real intentions of which can be grasped only by a careful reader, while they remain unknown to the hasty reader, who appreciates the weak refutation because it can be easily understood, absorbed and repeated.
2.3 A strong refutation can strengthen the attacked position
In 2001, Elisabeth Tessier, a renowned astrologer, successfully defended her doctoral thesis in sociology entitled “Epistemological Situation of Astrology” at the Sorbonne University. This thesis was received with great indignation by a large number of academics. Four Nobel laureates and leading academics intervened to deny that it had any scientific value, dismissing it as supporting irrationality and pseudoscience.
As a result of this intervention, the debate was reframed as follows: on the one hand, the authorities, renowned professors and scientists, pitted against a woman. Now, a quick peripheral reasoning, supported by the argument of proportionality, is enough to conclude that the former are deeply disturbed by this thesis; and the trap of the strong refutation closes on its own initiators: the very prestige of the opponents reinforces the refuted thesis, at least in the eyes of the adepts of peripheral reasoning, and they are many.
[1] This may be an allusion to Galileo who accepted to publicly recant heliocentrism and the movement of the earth, while privately maintaining the truth: “E pur si muove” (And yet it moves)
[2] Pierre Vical-Naquet, Un Eichmann de papier [An Eichman of paper]. In Les Assassins de la mémoire. [« The Assassins of Memory »] Paris: La Découverte, 1987, p. 11-13. Le Monde, a major French newspaper; Les Temps Modernes, a journal of philosophy, founded by Jean-Paul Sartre; Esprit, a journal of philosophy founded by Emmanuel Mounier.