Archive for the ‘Argumentation’ Category

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Argumentation in public health policy

Published by peter on 2009-08-03 in Argumentation, Consumer Behaviour, Culture, Decision theory, Game theory, Intelligence and Espionage and Science. 0 Comments

While on the subject of public health policy making under conditions of ignorance, linguist Louise Cummings has recently published an interesting article about the logical fallacies used in the UK debate about possible human variants of mad-cow disease just over a decade ago (Cummings 2009).   Two fallacies were common in the scientific and public debates of the time (italics in orginal):
An Argument from Ignorance:

FROM: There is no evidence that BSE in cattle causes CJD in humans.
CONCLUDE:  BSE in cattle does not cause CJD in humans.

An Argument from Analogy:

FROM:  BSE is similar to scrapie in certain respects.
AND: Scrapie has not transmitted to humans.
CONCLUDE:   BSE will not transmit to humans.

Cummings argues that such arguments were justified for science policy, since the two presumptive conclusions adopted acted to guide the direction and prioritisation of subsequent scientific research efforts.  These presumptive conclusions did so despite both being defeasible, and despite, in fact, both being subsequently defeated by the scientific research they invoked.   This is a very interesting viewpoint, with much to commend it as a way to construe (and to reconstrue) the dynamics of scientific epistemology using argumentation.  It would be nice to combine such an approach with Marcello Pera’s 3-person model of scientific progress (Pera 1994), the persons being:  the Investigator, the Scientific Community, and Nature.
Some might be tempted to also believe that these arguments were justified in public health policy terms – for example,  in calming a nervous public over fears regarding possible BSE in humans.   However, because British public policy makers did in fact do just this and because the presumptive conclusions were subsequently defeated (ie, shown to be false), the long-term effect has been to make the great British public extremely suspicious of any similar official pronouncements.   The rise in parents refusing the triple MMR vaccine for their children is a direct consequence of the false assurances we were given by British health ministers about the safety of eating beef.   An argumentation-based  theory of dynamic epistemology in public policy would therefore need to include some game theory.   There’s also a close connection to be made to the analysis of the effects of propaganda and counter-propaganda (as in George 1959), and of intelligence and counter-intelligence.
References:
Louise Cummings [2009]: Emerging infectious diseases: coping with uncertainty.  Argumentation, 23 (2): 171-188.
Alexander L. George [1959]: Propaganda Analysis:  A Study of Inferences Made from Nazi Propaganda in World War II.  (Evanston, IL, USA: Row, Peterson and Company).
Marcello Pera [1994]: The Discourses of Science. (Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press).

Computers in conflict

Published by peter on 2009-08-03 in AI, Argumentation, Books, Computer technology, Decision theory and Rhetoric. 0 Comments

ArgAIBook
Academic publishers Springer have just released a new book on Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence.  From the blurb:

This volume is a systematic, expansive presentation of the major achievements in the intersection between two fields of inquiry: Argumentation Theory and Artificial Intelligence. Contributions from international researchers who have helped shape this dynamic area offer a progressive development of intuitions, ideas and techniques, from philosophical backgrounds, to abstract argument systems, to computing arguments, to the appearance of applications producing innovative results. Each chapter features extensive examples to ensure that readers develop the right intuitions before they move from one topic to another.
In particular, the book exhibits an overview of key concepts in Argumentation Theory and of formal models of Argumentation in AI. After laying a strong foundation by covering the fundamentals of argumentation and formal argument modeling, the book expands its focus to more specialized topics, such as algorithmic issues, argumentation in multi-agent systems, and strategic aspects of argumentation. Finally, as a coda, the book explores some practical applications of argumentation in AI and applications of AI in argumentation.”

References:
Previous posts on argumentation can be found here.
Iyad Rahwan and Guillermo R. Simari (Editors) [2009]:  Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence.  Berlin, Germa ny Springer.

On knowing

Published by peter on 2009-07-13 in Argumentation, Religion and Science. 0 Comments

I have long thought the many of the members of the cult of militant anti-religionists — people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens — have been assailing a straw-man.   Their target is religious belief of a particularly narrow, fundamentalist kind, and as Terry Eagleton among others have noted, this target is a gross caricature of most of the people who practice or believe religious ideas.   The main argument of the anti-God cult is usually that religious beliefs are held without evidence.
First, as the writer Karen Armstrong discusses today, for most people, religion is about doing, not about knowing.   It’s really only philosophers and their street-brawling imitators who obsess over beliefs.   Indeed, because doubt and scepticism are integral parts of most of the world’s religions, religious practice may not necessarily start with belief, but in fact end with it:  Belief can be what comes after you practice spiritual exercises long enough, not necessarily what causes you to practice them. People do zazen or yoga not because they are already enlightened, but to achieve enlightenment.
Second, the issue of evidence is problematic in these diatribes against religion.   It is simply not the case that there is no evidence for religious or spiritual ideas, or that such ideas are only supported by the irrational or the feeble-minded.   Most people who proclaim any adherence to religious or spiritual ideas will assert they have evidence for a realm beyond or outside the material world.   This evidence is usually of the form of direct personal contact with a spirit world or with spiritual entities, as for example, in the experience of Janet Soskice or the physicist Oliver Lodge.  Anyone who has spent any extended period in Africa or in East Asia will know people — sober, rational, and intelligent — who have had, and continue to have, what they experience as direct contact and interaction with spiritual entities.
Of course, such direct, personal evidence is usually not replicable at will, nor observable to others.  That makes it invalid as the basis of science, which is a shared undertaking, but does not make it invalid as evidence for personal beliefs or actions.   Knowledge of the existence of things unseen can be obtained by merely being in the presence of such entities, as the Sufi philosopher and founder of Illuminationism, Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi (1155-1191) argued in the 12th century. Knowledge-from-being-in-the-presence-of is a valid form of knowing, just as knowledge-from-tasting is.  Our subjective personal tastes in food and drink, say, or our subjective experience of being in love, are also not observable to others, but that does not invalidate them as evidence for our beliefs or as a rational basis for our actions.    When I say I prefer coffee to tea, this is an inference based (usually) on my personal, subjective reactions to the tastes of the two different liquids.  Only I know whether this inference is based on true reactions or not; if I am a sufficiently-clever actor, no one will ever be able to conclude anything about my reactions to the respective tastes other than what I claim.
It may be that experiences understood subjectively as contact with spiritual entities can be replicated in the laboratory by stimulating particular parts of the brain, as recent experiments appear to show.  But it does not follow from such research that all religious experiences are due to similar mental stimulation, just as using implanted electrodes to create the subjective experience of the taste of coffee would not thus imply the non-existence of coffee.
In closing then, I wonder which is more rational:  to commit to certain religious beliefs (or undertake a spiritual practice) based on one’s personal subjective experiences with the divine OR to devote one’s career to studying mathematical models of additional space-time dimensions, dimensions for which  there is as yet no evidence whatsoever, not even any subjective personal experience?  If Dawkings and Hitchens were really worried about irrational beliefs, they should be attacking the practitioners of String Theory and M-Theory.
References:
Mehdi Amin Razavi [1996]: Suhrawardi and the School of Illumination.  London, UK:  Routledge.
POSTSCRIPT (2017-06-04): In a New Yorker profile of business author Clayton Christensen, he is quoted regarding his daily reading of The Book of Mormon:

One evening in October, 1975, as I sat in the chair and opened the book following my prayer, I felt a marvelous spirit come into the room and envelop my body. I had never before felt such an intense feeling of peace and love. I started to cry, and did not want to stop. I knew then, from a source of understanding more powerful than anything I had ever felt in my life, that the book I was holding in my hands was true.” (Page 90)

Larissa MacFarquhar [2012]: When Giants Fail. The New Yorker. 14 May 2012, pp.84-95.

Art as Argument #3: commutative diagrams in Category Theory

Published by peter on 2009-07-09 in Argumentation, Art and Mathematics. 0 Comments

Following these posts on whether art could be understood as arguments, I turn attention to diagrams in pure mathematics.   I know of only two areas of mathematics where diagrams are used frequently as arguments in proofs, rather than simply as illustrations of arguments or proofs expressed in algebraic symbols. One area is Euclidean Geometry, which most of us learn in school. The other is category theory (CT). It is interesting that one of the oldest and one of the youngest branches of pure mathematics should be the only ones using diagrams in this way. Perhaps the rise of CT is another signal of the decline of the three-centuries-long dominance of the written word over western culture.
First, here is an example of a typical commutative diagram from category theory:
Commutative diagram square
This particular diagram expresses an equivalence:  that in traveling from P to S, it does not matter whether we travel via Q or we travel via R, the end-result will be the same.  (Category theory makes this notion of “same-ness” or equivalence quite precise; indeed, in some sense CT is a formal theory about different notions of equivalence and their relationship to one another.)  Thus, the diagram is making a claim about the (mathematical) world, a claim which may include its own proof:  that executing function (or action) w followed by function y is the same as executing function x followed by function z.
Let us see what CT textbooks say to justify the subject’s use of diagrams. The standard reference on CT for mathematicians is the book by Saunders Mac Lane. An easier introduction is the book by Lawvere and Schanuel. Both of these simply start using diagrams as proofs without any justification for the practice, although they both formally define the diagrams concerned. In the book by Barr & Wells, we find:

When the target graph of a diagram is the underlying graph of a category some new possibilities arise, in particular the concept of commutative diagram, which is the categorist’s way of expressing equations.” (page 93)

Later in the same chapter they say:

This point of view provides a pictorial proof that the composite of two graph homomorphisms is a graph homomorphism. . . . . . The verification process just described is called “chasing the diagram”. Of course, one can verify the required fact by writing the equations (4.14) and (4.15) down, but these equations hide the source and target information given in Diagram (4.13) and thus provide a possibility of writing an impossible composite down. For many people, Diagram (4.13) is much easier to remember than equations (4.14) and (4.15). However, diagrams are more than informal aids; they are formally-defined mathematical objects just like automata and categories.“ (page 96)

Mac Lane says (p. 29) that the use of arrows as a graphical representation of functions was introduced by Hurewicz in about 1940, and that he also probably first used commutative diagrams. Like many practices in mathematics, one learns about the use of diagrams as proofs in CT in the classroom. Despite the textual (ie, non-diagrammatic) nature of most pure mathematical writing, parts of applied mathematics and theoretical physics (e.g. Feynman diagrams) use diagrams although pure mathematicians may question whether these disciplines are actually doing “proving”.
References:
Michael Barr and Charkes Wells [1999]: Category Theory for Computing Science. Montreal: Les Publications CRM, 3rd edition.
W. Hurewicz [1941]: On duality theorems. Bulletin of the American Mathematics Society, 47: 562-563.
F. W. Lawvere and S. H. Schanuel [1997]: Conceptual Mathematics: A First Introduction to Categories. Cambridge: CUP.
Saunders Mac Lane [1998]: Categories for the Working Mathematician. Berlin: Springer, 2nd edition.

Art as Argument #2

Published by peter on 2009-07-04 in Anthropology, Argumentation, Art and Culture. 0 Comments

Following my earlier post about the possibility of a work of art being an argument, I want to give another example.  This example is also drawn from Australian aboriginal society, and involves a 1997 claim for legal title to land by the Ngurrara people over land in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia.  Frustrated by their inability to convince the Native Title Tribunal of their right to the land, the Ngurrara community decided to create a collaborative painting (photographed below) which would demonstrate their traditional rights. The painting was presented, and accepted, as evidence before the Tribunal and is therefore a work of argument, as well as a work of art.
Ngurrara II Canvas 1997
(The Ngurrara Canvas. Painted by Ngurrara artists and claimants, coordinated by Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency, May 1997. 10 metres x 8 metres. Photo: Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency.)
The case is mentioned in a 2003 New Yorker magazine article about aboriginal art by Geraldine Brooks, who says:

“In 1992, the Australian government first recognized the right of Aborigines to claim legal ownership of their ancestral lands – provided they could show evidence of having an enduring connection with them. Before proceeding to court, Aboriginal groups had to make their case before a Native Title Tribunal. Frustrated by their inability to articulate their arguments in courtroom English, the people of Fitzroy Crossing decided to paint their “evidence”. They would set down, on canvas, a document that would show how each person related to a particular area of the Great Sandy Desert – and to the long stories that had been passed down for generations.
“Ngurrara I”, the first attempt, was a canvas that measured sixteen feet by twenty-six feet and was worked on by nineteen artists. It was completed in 1996. But Skipper and Chuguna [two of the artists involved], in particular, didn’t feel that it properly reflected all the important places and stories, so more than forty additional artists were invited to produce a more definitive version. In 1997, “Ngurrara II”, which was twenty-six feet by thirty-two feet, was rolled out before a plenary session of the Native Title Tribunal. It was, one tribunal member said, the most eloquent and overwhelming evidence that had ever been produced there. The Aborigines could proceed to court.” (page 65).

 
References:
Geraldine Brooks [2003]: “The Painted Desert“, New Yorker, 28 July 2003, pp. 60-67.
Australian National Native Title Tribunal [2002]: Native Title Determination Summary – Marty and Ngurrara.  27 September 2002.  Background press release here.
Also, here is a transcript of a radio story (broadcast 1997-07-15) on Australian ABC radio about the submission of the painting as evidence to the Native Title Tribunal.
More on different forms of geographic knowledge here.

Art as argument

Published by peter on 2009-07-01 in Anthropology, Argumentation, Art and Culture. 0 Comments

Can a work of visual art be an argument?  I believe the answer to this question is yes.  In this and in some future posts, I will give examples, drawn from Australian Aboriginal art and from pure mathematics.
In August 1963, the Yolgnu people of Yirrkala  (eastern Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory) petitioned the Australian Government for legal rights to traditional land.  The petition was in the form of two painted bark panels.  The argument for land rights was made in three ways — in English text, in Gumatj text, and in the surrounding art, which depicted the traditional relations between the Yolgnu people and their land.   It is important to note that the visual images are not mere decoration of the text, but a presentation of the same argument in a different language, a visual language.
Yirrkala Bark Petitions 1963-1
Yirrkala Bark Petition 1963-2
 
 
 
 
 
 
The artwork of the Yolngu Bark Petition (copied above) is a form of argument, for a claim asserting traditional rights to particular land.  The reason that the artwork is an argument derives from the general nature of traditional Australian Aboriginal art, which presents a diagrammatic or iconic description of a particular geographic region, identifying the landscape features of that region (eg, rivers, hills, etc) along with the dreamtime entities (animals, trees, spirits) who are believed to have created the region and may still inhabit it. (The “dreamtime” is the period of the earth’s creation.)    The art derives from stories of creation for the region, which are believed to have been handed down (orally and via artwork) to the current inhabitants from the original dreamtime spirits through all the intermediate generations of inhabitants.
Accordingly, the only people who have the necessary knowledge, and the necessary moral right, to create an artistic depiction of a region are those who have been the recipients of that region’s creation story.   In other words, the fact that the Yolngu people were able to draw this depiction of their region is itself evidence of their long-standing relationship to the specific land in question.   The existence of the art-work depicting the local landscape is thus an argument for their claim to ownership rights to that land.  (Note that the art work’s role as argument arises primarily from the special nature of the claim it supports;  the art is not, and could not easily be, an argument for any other kind of claim.)
In support of this position, I present some quotations, the first several as explanation for people unfamiliar with Australian aboriginal mythology and art.
Judith Ryan (1993, p. 50):

 The term “Dreaming” is difficult for us to comprehend because of its use as noun and adjective in imprecise and ungrammatical ways to refer to the creation period, conception site, totem, Ancestral being, ground of existence, and the notions of supernatural, eternal or uncreated.”

Jean-Hubert Martin (1993, p. 32):

One can more or less imagine what “Dreaming” is:  that link between the individual and his land, between the clan and its territory.   The paintings [of Aboriginal artists] show figured spaces representing spaces both physical and mental, but it is difficult to go much further than that.
Following Aboriginal explanations one can recognise and name the various elements in these paintings.  The thought structure, the references and the signifance of these words and fragments of speech – which reach us distorted by translation – still remain an enigma despite the valiant attempt to explain them in the ensuing texts.  A not inconsiderable difficulty is posed by the mystery surrounding certain rituals and their formal depiction.  And, one has to remember that what we see today of Aboriginal art is only that which we have been allowed to see.”

Ulrich Krempel (1993, p. 38) quotes  C. Anderson/F. Dussart (1988, p. 18), as follows:

When asked about their paintings, [Australian Aboriginal] artists usually respond that the painting “means” or is “my country”, that is, it is a depiction of the painter’s territory.  When queried further about the “Dreaming” story, the artist will often identify the main Ancestor depicted and perhaps the primary site at which the Ancestor undertook the actions portrayed in the painting.   It is possible for an outsider, especially if working in the local language, to gain further insight into the narrative of events described in the painting, but even then access to the different levels of meaning may be restricted.”

Three quotations from Horward Morphy [1991]:

From a Yolngu perspective, paintings are not so much a means of representing the ancestral past as one dimension of the ancestral past . . .” (page 292)
Yolngu art also provides a framework for ordering the relations between people, ancestors, and land.” (page 293)
Paintings [in Yolngu society] gain value and power through their incorporation in such a process [of cultural definition], through being integral to the way a system (of clan-based gerontocracy) is reproduced, and through being part of its ideological support.  Paintings gain power because they are controlled by powerful individuals, because they are used to discriminate between different areas of owned land, because they are used to mark status, to separate the initiated from the uninitiated and men from women.  Their use in sociopolitical contexts creates part of their value. However, their value is also conceptualized in other terms, in terms of their intrinsic properties.” (page 293)

Janien Schwarz (1999, pp. 56-57):

In the first section, I argue that an understanding of the Bark Petitions is inseparable from an understanding of Yolngu relations to land.  In Yolngu culture, the painting of designs is regarded as constructing an interface between the ground, its spiritual essence, and specific groups of people.  The designs on the Petition are inseparable from these associations, in particular from the geographic locations at which they originated during Creation or wangarr.  Putting the Petitions’ clan designs in a Yolngu cultural context reveals their strong artistic and political links to the Yolngu people and their land.  With mounting pressures on land use from outsiders, Yolngu people have disclosed their designs (and inferred connections to land) through the context of art and art exhibitions as a political means of laying claim to their country which is under threat by bauxite mining.  I present the Petitions as part of a larger history of Aboriginal people negotiating for land rights and cultural recognition through the production and presentation of painted barks and other objects of spiritual significance.  . . .  I contend that the painted motifs on the Bark Petitions merit interpretation as land claims and that, by extension, the paintings are a form of petition.”

References:
C. Anderson/F. Dussart: “Dreamings in Acrylic: Western Desert Art”.  Catalog for Exhibition:  Dreamings:  The Art of Aboriginal Australia. P. Sutton, Editor. Ringwood, Melbourne, 1988. p. 118.
Ulrich Krempel [1993]: “How does one read “Different” Pictures?  Our encounter with the aesthetic product of other cultures”, in Luthi and Lee, pp. 37-40.
Bernhard Luthi and Gary Lee (Editors) [1993]:   Aratjara:  Art of the First Australians. Exhibition Catalog. Dusseldorf, Germany: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.
Jean-Hubert Martin [1993]:  “A Delayed Communication”, in Luthi and Lee, pp. 32-35.
Horward Morphy [1991]:  Ancestral Connections:  Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge.  Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press.
Judith Ryan [1993]:  “Australian Aboriginal Art:  Otherness or Affinity?”, in Luthi and Lee, pp. 49-63.
Janien Schwarz [1999]: Beyond Familiar Territory: Dissertation: Decentering the Centre. An analysis of visual strategies in the art of Robert Smithson, Alfredo Jaar and the Bark Petitions of Yirrkala; and Studio Report: A Sculptural Response to Mapping, Mining, and Consumption.  PhD Thesis, Canberra School of Art, Australian National University, Canberra,  Australia.    Available from here.

Here we go again! Secret decisions about Iraq

Published by peter on 2009-06-18 in Argumentation, Decision theory, History, Intelligence and Espionage, Politics and Terrorism. 0 Comments

The British Government has this week announced a secret inquiry into the invasion of Iraq in 2003.   [UPDATE: The Government subsequently announced that the enquiry would not be held  in secret.]  How appropriate that a decision made in secret, with only scarce, belated and begrudging justification presented to the citizenry, should now be re-evaluated in secret.   Even though today Gordon Brown says that the decision about secrecy is not his preference, he has delegated the decision about openness to the Chairman of the Inquiry.  For this cowardice, Gordon Brown deserves the widespread contempt in which he is held.
On 14 February 2003, annoyed that the major public policy decision to invade Iraq had apparently already been made, and made in secret without due public consultation, I asked myself if such secrecy could ever be justified.  The text below is what I wrote then. The existential wackawacka hunakuna about weapons of mass destruction since the invasion alters my arguments below not a jot.
In order to avoid re-appearance of comments I received in 2003, let me repeat that I make below no case about the worth of the invasion itself, neither for nor against the invasion.  My case, is as the title says, a case for a justification for a claim, to be presented in public and subject to contestation and debate.  If we’d had such a debate BEFORE the decision to invade had been made (ie, before July 2002) we would have either ended up with no invasion of Iraq at all, or one which many more citizens could have supported.

 

 

The Case for the Case for War

14 February 2003

The strange public debate we in the West have been having these last few months about whether and how to undertake military action against Iraq has led me to reflect on the role of argument in public life, especially as it concerns the making of major public policy decisions. While I have strong views on the substantive issues involved here, I am trying not to let them be apparent in my discussion this month of the decision-making processes involved. In particular, in this column, I am not putting the case for military action against Iraq at this time, and nor am I putting the case against such action. This column has no view on the matter. My argument is about the use of argument in decision-making in this domain.
1. The debate has been strange because of the refusal, until recently, of the main proponents of military action against Iraq (which action I’ll call simply “war”) to defend their claim publicly. Only last week, 6 months or so after public debate on this issue began, did the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, meet and debate the issue with ordinary people. Only last week, did the US Government present its intelligence evidence publicly to the UN. Only the week before did the UK Government release a document outlining its case (a document, it turned out, that was mostly plagiarised from public sources). As far as I’m aware, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, has still not provided reasons publicly for his Government’s policy of uncritical support for the US position, a refusal which led to him being censured by a majority vote of No Confidence in the Australian Senate, the first such in its history. In Britain, the authorities which operate the House of Commons have recently refused to permit a debate in the House on the question.
2. Why is this? Why have the main protagonists been unable and/or unwilling to defend their position, on an issue of such manifest importance? After all, every bar and every cafe the length of Britain (and elsewhere, if TV news reports here are any guide) is filled with ordinary people discussing the proposed war, so it is not as if people are uninterested in the question.
3. So, I asked myself: What would be good reasons for a Government not to give public justification for its desired action of war against Iraq? I thought of the following possible reasons for not giving reasons (in each case, as perceived by the proponents):

3.1 Revealing the case for war would endanger national security.
3.2 Revealing the case for war would place at peril the lives of, or in other ways compromise, intelligence sources.
3.3 The case for war is weak. For example, this would be the situation if the evidence for Iraq having weapons of mass destruction is only circumstantial.
3.4 The case for war dishonours the proponents. This would be the situation, for example, if the reasons for war were: “To capture Iraq’s oil”, or “To avenge the attempted assassination of George Bush senior.”
3.5 There is no need to put a case for war. In Britain, for example, it seems, as the Defence Secretary reminded us all last week, that the Government can engage in foreign wars simply by convincing the Queen to sign the relevant order; there are no legal or constitutional requirements to convince the House of Commons, or Parliament, or the public at large. I imagine the US War Powers Act, which requires the support of Congress before the President can declare war, may limit the US administration’s freedom somewhat more.
3.6 The case for war is so complex that the public would not understand it.
3.7 The proponents do not respect the other parties in the debate (those opposed to the war, and those still undecided), and so are not bothered to put the case to those others. Many Australians appear to believe that this is the attitude of the Australian Prime Minister on this issue.

To me, speaking personally, reasons 3.1 and 3.2 would be a compelling justification for not revealing the case for war, but I don’t recall any of the proponents giving these as their reasons. None of the other reasons would be compelling to me as reasons for not engaging in public argument on this issue.
4. So, I then asked myself: How would I persuade the proponents of war to give us, the citizenry, their reasons for their proposed actions. Again, I thought of several reasons for giving reasons for war:

4.1 Failure to put any case at all leads people to suspect that the real case is weak or dishonourable. One might call this the Baskerville Argument for giving reasons: If the dogs don’t bark, then why are they silent?
4.2 Engagement in argument enables each side to strengthen their case: to learn of the possible attacks against it, to identify defences and counter-attacks for these, and so to bolster the arguments. The outcome of any comprehensive public debate should be a stronger case for war.
4.3 For complex public policy decisions, such as this one, there are usually many alternative action-options, and many and diverse implications and consequences of those options. In fact, the complexity may be such that no one person, or even no single team of people, could adequately hope to assess and comprehend all these. (This is especially the case for teams of politicians and bureaucrats, out of touch with ordinary reality, as the group think of the CIA in the Bay Of Pigs incident showed.) Only by allowing a full public debate before a decision is made can society be certain that all the relevant issues have been raised and have informed the decision, and thus that the best action-option has been chosen.
4.4 Military action is an example of a public policy decision where ultimate success or failure may depend greatly on the quality of execution, as much as on the particular action-option selected. This in turn may depend on the morale of the military personnel undertaking the action, which in turn may depend on the extent of public support those military personnel have. Without public support for a particular military action, it is much less likely to be successful, at least in a democracy. (I believe this argument is part of the so-called Powell Doctrine, formulated by the US Secretary of State when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of the Defense Forces Staff under US Presidents Bush snr. and Clinton.)
But public support depends crucially on public acceptance of the final decision made, and this in turn depends on the public believing that they have played a part in the decision process. Public debate is necessary, therefore, to establish and sustain public involvement in the decision-making process. People may support a decision outcome even when they disagree with it, if they believe they played an appropriate part in the decision-making process. (I believe this is is real lesson of the experience of the US and Australia in Vietnam: not that the decision to wage war in Vietnam was inherently wrong — it may or may not have been wrong — but rather that the public did not feel they had been sufficiently consulted before it was made, or sufficiently consulted as the military involvement increased. Thus, they did not support it.) Prior and ongoing public debate, rather than being a hindrance to execution quality, may therefore increase execution quality, and may in fact be essential to the ultimate success of the military action itself.
4.5 In a democracy, failure to justify and persuade the citizenry of the wisdom of some major policy is ultimately a mistaken strategy, electorally.
4.6 On important public policy issues in a democracy, consensus is unlikely if not impossible. It is therefore crucial to channel disagreement into public argument and debate, in order to prevent recourse to other forms of expression of opinion, such as mass protests and acts of violence. Public argument thus acts as a “safety valve”.
4.7 In a democracy, politicians have a duty to explain their proposed actions to the citizenry who pay their salaries.

5. Reasons 4.1 – 4.6 are instrumental: they are attempts to show that providing public reasons for war will behoove the proponents of war, and/or improve the quality of decision-making and decision-execution. Reason 4.7 is a moral claim.
6. Some of the arguments listed in Section 4 are not new. For example, argument 4.3 about deliberative processes improving the quality of decision outcomes was made by D. J. Fiorini in 1989, and, in a different form, by Bill Rehg in 2001:

D. J. Fiorino [1989]: “Environmental risk and democratic process: a critical review.” Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, 14: 501-547.
W. Rehg [2001]: “The argumentation theorist in deliberative democracy.” Keynote address to the Conference of the International Debate Education Association (IDEA), Prague, October 2001. Revised version published in Controversia, 1(1): 18-42 (2002).

Similarly, James McBurney and Glen Mills, briefly argued a case similar to my argument 4.6, in:

James H. McBurney and Glen Mills [1964]: Argumentation and Debate: Techniques of a Free Society. New York, USA: Macmillan, Second edition.

Moreover, my argument 4.4 may be a valid inference from the Powell doctrine, as I suggest above.
7. However, these works are all primarily concerned with other issues, and do not aim to present an argument for public argument over matters of importance.  Does anyone know of papers or books which do put such a case?

Postscript 1 (added 17 February 2003): The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has just presented a detailed case for taking military action against Iraq, in a speech to the British Labour Party in Glasgow two days ago. I believe this was his first extended public presentation of his arguments for military action; the speech was given on the same day that a million people marched in central London against any war in Iraq. The British House of Commons has still not been permitted to debate the matter.
Postscript 2 (added 17 February 2003): British political commentator, Andrew Rawnsley, wrote in his weekly column in The Observer yesterday:

“There are powerful arguments and there are dreadful arguments in favour of definitively dealing with the Iraqi tyrant, and it has been one of the failures of the British and American governments not to advance the better ones.” (Andrew Rawnsley: “It’s do or die, Prime Minister”, The Observer, 16 February 2003.)

Postscript 3 (added 17 February 2003): From an editorial today in The Guardian, a British daily newspaper:

“In fact, the public is wary of the power of argument because it is attenuated, circumscribed and distorted by political calculations. This may explain why many suspected the government of trying to scare people into war when tanks were placed near airports. The temper of these times is to distrust more than trust.” (“The march of history: A moment of truth for British politics”, The Guardian, 17 February 2003.)

Postscript 4 (added 26 February 2003): Finally, the British House of Commons is permitted to debate this issue. Here is Tony Blair’s statement to the House yesterday.
Postscript 5 (added 12 April 2003): Playwright David Hare is unable still – after three weeks of fighting and the capture of Baghdad – to determine the reasons for the war.
Postscript 6 (added 8 May 2003): At last, an argument I can understand decision-makers in the US and British Governments may have found was compelling: that, although the probability that the Iraqi regime had links with Islamic fundamentalist terrorists may not be large, the consequences of such links may be catastrophic. See the article by Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Unknown: The C.I.A. and the Pentagon take another look at Al Qaeda and Iraq” in The New Yorker magazine, published 10 February 2003. Why did the decision-makers not trust us citizens enough to share such analyses?
Postscript 7 (added 21 June 2003): Author and publisher Jason Epstein, writing in The New York Review of Books, May 1, 2003, in an article entitled “Leviathan” (pp. 13-14), said this about the Second Iraq War:

Meanwhile, Americans are sharply divided over a preemptive assualt whose urgency has not been adequately explained and for which no satisfactory explanation, beyond the zealotry of its sponsors, may exist. (page 13)

Postscript 8 (added 14 September 2003): The Observer’s superb political journalist, Andrew Rawnsley, argues in his column today that Tony Blair “didn’t trust the British people to follow the moral argument for dealing with Saddam. This mistrust in them they now reciprocate back to him. For that, Tony Blair has only himself to blame.”
Postscript 9 (added 28 November 2003): Thomas Powers, in an article entitled “The Vanishing Case for War”, in The New York Review of Books, 50(19): 12-17, 4 December 2003, says this (p. 12):

“The invasion and conquest of Iraq by the United States last spring was the result of what is probably the least ambiguous case of the misreading of secret intelligence information in American history. Whether it is even possible that a misreading so profound could yet be in some sense “a mistake” is a question to which I shall return. Going to war was not something we were forced to do and it certainly was not something we were asked to do. It was something we elected to do for reasons that have still not been fully explained.The official argument for war, pressed in numerous speeches by President Bush and others, failed to convince most of the world that war against Iraq was necessary and just; it failed to soften the opposition to war by longtime allies like France and Germany; and it failed to persuade even a simple majority of the Security Council to vote for war despite immense pressure from Washington. The President’s argument was accepted only by the United States Congress, which voted to give him blanket authority to attack Iraq, and then kept silent during the worldwide debate that followed. The entire process – from the moment it became unmistakably clear that the President had decided to go to war in August 2002, until his announcement on May 1 that “major combat” was over – took about nine months, and it will stand for decades to come as an object lesson in secrecy and its hazards.”

Postscript 10 (added 5 April 2004): Richard A. Clarke in his book, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), lists (page 265) five rationales which have been attributed to senior Bush II Administration officials (GW Bush, D Cheney, D Rumsfeld and P Wolfowitz) for seeking a war against Iraq. I paraphrase these here:

To finish the Gulf War of 1991
To remove a hostile enemy of Israel
To create an Arab democracy as a model for other regional states, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia
To remove a potentially hostile enemy of Saudi Arabia (and hence enable the withdrawal of US troops stationed there)
To create another friendly source of oil for the US, and so reduce dependency on Saudi oil.

Postscript 11 (added 15 August 2005): George Packer, in an article entitled “The Home Front: A soldier’s father wrestles with the ambiguities of Iraq” (The New Yorker, 4 July 2005, pp. 48-59) says this:

“In the fall of 2002, it still might have been possible for President Bush to construct an Iraq policy that united both parties and America’s democratic allies in defeating tyranny in Iraq. Such a policy, however, would have required the Administration to operate with flexibility and openness. The evidence on unconventional weapons would have had to be laid out without exaggeration or deception. The work of U.N. inspectors in Iraq would have had to be supported rather than undermined. Testimony to Congress would have had to be candid, not slippery. Administration officials who offered dissenting views or pessimistic forecasts would have had to be heard rather than silenced or fired. American citizens would have had to be treated as grownups, and not, as Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, once suggested, as ten-year-olds.” (page 54).

Achilles and the Tortoise

Published by peter on 2009-06-07 in Argumentation, Mathematics and Matherati. 0 Comments

An amusing account (at least to a mathematician) by Harvey Friedman of an encounter with eccentric Russian mathematician and dissident Alexander Yessenin-Volpin. Friedman supervised the Stanford PhD of John E. Hutchinson, who taught me calculus.  (Hat tip: AB)

Let me give an example. I have seen some ultrafinitists go so far as to challenge the existence of 2^100 as a natural number, in the sense of there being a series of ‘points’ of that length. There is the obvious ‘draw the line’ objection, asking where in , . . . , 2^100 do we stop having ‘Platonistic reality’? Here this . . . is totally innocent, in that it can be easily be replaced by 100 items (names) separated by commas. I raised just this objection with the (extreme) ultrafinitist [mathematician Alexander] Yessenin Volpin during a lecture of his.  He asked me to be more specific.  I then proceeded to start with 2^1 and asked him whether this is ‘real’ or something to that effect.  He virtually immediately said yes.  Then I asked about 2^2, and he again said yes, but with perceptible delay. Then 2^3, and yes, but with more delay.  This continued for a couple of more times, till it was obvious how he was handling this objection.  Sure, he was prepared to always answer yes, but he was going to take 2^100 times as long to answer yes to 2^100 than he would to answering 2^1.  There is no way that I could get very far with this. (pp. 4-5).

Note: Of course, Friedman is wrong about the . . . being replaced by 100 items. We would expect it to be replaced with just 96 items, since 4 items in the list of 100 are already listed explicitly.

Reference:

Harvey M. Friedman [2002]: Lecture Notes on Philosophical Problems in Logic. Princeton University.

Commuting in the age of email

Published by peter on 2009-05-26 in Argumentation, Corporate culture, Decision theory, Joint-Action Society, Planning, Post-Industrial Nomads, Project Management and Team working. 0 Comments

If you believe, as the prevailing social metaphor would have it, that this is the Age of Information, then you could easily imagine that the main purpose of human interactions is to request and provide information.  That seems to be the implicit assumption underlying Lane Wallace’s discussion of commuting and working-from-home here.   Wallace is surprised that anyone still travels to work, when information can be transferred so much more readily by phone, email and the web.
But the primary purpose of most workplace interactions is not information transfer, or this is so only incidentally.  Rather, workplace interactions are about the co-ordination of actions — identifying and assessing alternatives for future action, planning and co-ordinating future actions, and reporting on past actions undertaken or current actions being executed.    To engage in such interactions about action of course involves requests for and transfers of information.    To the extent that this is the case, such interactions can be and indeed are undertaken with participants separated in space and time.   But co-ordination of actions requires very different speech acts to those (relatively simple) locutions seeking and providing information:  speech acts such as proposals, promises, requests, entreaties, and commands.  These speech acts have two distinct and characteristic features — they usually require uptake (the intended hearer or actor must agree to the action before the action is undertaken), and the person with the power of retraction or revocation is not necessarily the initial speaker.   An accepted promise can only be revoked by the person to whom the promise is made, for instance, not by the person who made the promise. So, by their very nature these locutions are dialogical acts, not monolectical.   You can’t meaningfully give commands to yourself, for example, and what value is a promise made in a forest?  Neither of these two features apply to speech acts involving requests for information or responses to requests for information.
In addition, inherent in speech acts over actions is the notion of intentionality.    If I promise to you to do action X, then I am expressing an intention to do X.  If your goals requires that action X be commenced or done, then you need to assess how sincere and how feasible my promise is.  Part of your assessment may be based on your past experience with me, and/or the word of others you trust about me (my reputation).   Thus it is perfectly possible for you to assess my capability and my sincerity without ever meeting me.  International transactions across all sorts of industries have taken place for centuries between parties who never met; the need to assess sincerity and capability is surely a key reason for the dominance of families (eg, the Rothschilds in the 18th and 19th centuries) and close-knit ethnic groups (eg, the Chinese diaspora) in international trade networks.  But, if you don’t know me already, it is generally much easier and more reliable for you to assess my sincerity and capability by looking me in the eye as I make my promise to you.
Bloggers and writers and professors, who rarely need to co-ordinate actions with anyone to achieve their work goals, seem not to understand these issues very well.  But these are issues are known to anyone who actually does anything in the world, whether in politics, in public administration or in business.   One defining feature of modern North American corporate culture, in my experience, is that most people find it preferable to make promises of actions even when they do not yet have, and when they know that they do not yet have, the capabilities or resources required to undertake the actions promised.  They do this rather than not make the promise or rather than making the promise conditional on obtaining the necessary resources, in order to appear “positive” to their bosses.   This is the famous “Can Do” attitude at work, and I have discussed it tangentially before in connection with the failure of the Bay of Pigs;  its contribution to the failures of modern American business needs a separate post.

At the hot gates: a salute to Nate Fick

Published by peter on 2009-04-05 in Argumentation, Decision theory, Film, Heroes, History, Joint-Action Society, Planning and Team working. 0 Comments

After viewing The Wire, certainly the best television series I have ever seen (and perhaps the best ever made), I naturally sought out Generation Kill, from the same writing team – David Simons and Ed Burns.  Also gripping and intelligent viewing, although (unlike The Wire), we only see one side’s view of the conflict.   The series follows a US Marine platoon, Second Platoon of Bravo Company of the 1st  Reconnaissance  Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, as they invade Iraq in March-April 2003.   Like Band of Brothers, we come to know the platoon and its members very well, feeling joy at their wins, and sorrow at their losses.  The TV series is based on an eponymous 2004 book by a journalist, Evan Wright, who was embedded with the platoon in this campaign.
The TV series led me, however,  to read another book about this platoon, written by its commanding officer Lt. Nathaniel Fick (played in the series by actor Stark Sands).    The book is superb!    Fick writes extremely well, intelligently and evocatively, of his training and his battle experiences.  His prose style is direct and uncluttered, without being a parody of itself (as is, say, Hemingway’s).  His writing is remarkably smooth, gliding along, and this aspect reminded me of Doris Lessing, on one of her good days.   Fick clearly has a firm moral centre (perhaps an outcome of his Jesuit high school education), evident from his initial decision to apply to the military while still an undergraduate classics major at Dartmouth.     Having felt a similarly-strong desire as an undergraduate to experience life at the hot gates, I empathized immensely with his description of himself at that time.   Fick’s moral grounding is shown throughout the book, not only in the decisions he takes in battle, and his reflections on these decisions, but also in the way he refrains from naming those of his commanding officers whom he does not respect.    He also shows enormous loyalty to the men he commanded.
And Fick’s experiences demonstrate again that no organization, not even military forces,  can succeed for very long when commands are only obeyed mindlessly.   Successfully execution of commands requires intelligent dialogue between commanders and recipients, in a process of argumentation, to ensure that uttered commands are actionable, appropriate, feasible, effective, consistent, ethical and advisable.  Consequently, the most interesting features of the book for me were the descriptions of decision-making, descriptions often implicit.   Officers and non-officers, it seems, are drilled, through hours of rote learning, in the checklists and guiding principles necessary for low-level, tactical decision-making, so that these decisions can be automatic.  Only after these mindless drills are second nature are trainee officers led to reflect on the wider (strategic and ethical) aspects of decisions,  of decision-making and of actions.   I wonder to what extent such an approach would work in business, where most decision-making, even the most ordinary and tactical, is acquired through direct experience and not usually taught as drills.  Mainly this is because we lack codification of low-level decision-making, although strong fmcg companies such as Mars or Unilever come closest to codification of tactical decision-making.
Fick’s frequent frustrations with the commands issued to him seem to arise because these commands often ignore basic tactical constraints (such as the area of impact of weapons or the direction of firing of weapons), and because they often seem to be driven by a concern for appearances over substantive outcomes.   In contrast to this frustration, one of Fick’s commanding heroes is Major Richard Whitmer, whose unorthodox managerial style and keen intelligence is well described.  A military force able to accommodate such a style is to be admired, so I hope it is not a reflection on the USMC that Whitmer appears to have spent the years since the Iraq invasion running a marine recruitment office.  Next time that I’m CEO of a Fortune 500 company, I’ll actively try to recruit Whitmer and Fick, since they are both clearly superb managers.
I was also struck by how little the troops on the ground in Iraq knew of the larger, strategic picture.  Fick’s team relied on broadcasts from the BBC World Service on a personal, non-military-issue transister radio to learn what was happening as they invaded Iraq.   We who were not involved in the war also relied on the BBC, particularly Mark Urban’s fascinating daily strategic analyses on BBC TV’s Newsnight.  Were we remote viewers better informed than those in the ground in Iraq?  Quite possibly.
Nathaniel Fick now works for a defence think tank, the Center for a New American Security.  A 2006 speech he gave at the Pritzer Military Library in Chicago can be seen here.   A seminar talk to Johns Hopkins University’s series on Rethinking the Future Nature of Competition and Conflict can be found here (scroll down to 2006-01-25).  And here is Fick’s take on recent war poetry.
References:
K. Atkinson et al. [2008]: Command dialogues. In: I. Rahwan and P. Moraitis (Editors): Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems (ArgMAS 2008), AAMAS 2008, Lisbon, Portugal.
Nathaniel Fick [2005]:  One Bullet Away:  The Making of a Marine Officer.  London, UK:  Phoenix.
Evan Wright [2004]:  Generation Kill. Putnam.