Over at Abiola’s blog there has been a recent spate of posts about the deleterious impact the rise of Christianity had on the intellectual life of the West. My own opinions on the topic are ambiguous and ambivalent, but that issue is not what this post is about in any case.

How exactly can Abiola and Andrew resolve their mild disagreement on this topic? Andrew asks what sort of data Abiola would find compelling, eliciting a response that a robust numerical analysis of the literate output would be convincing. Easier said than done.

When it comes to math, there are theorems. When it comes to science there are large controlled (relatively) data sets that can falsify parsimosiously formulated hypotheses. But what about an argument about points of history?

A & B might come to the dialogue with sharply different tools. For example:

1 - A maybe well versed in the topic at hand, as is B.
2 - A maybe well versed while B is not, or the reverse.
3 - Neither A or B are well versed on the topic that they are discussing.

Situation 3 is very difficult. You might have two individuals who are citing references and extracting supporting data points galore, without any context or understanding of the overall picture. Neither are in a position to exclude or nullify out-dated or inaccurate data points, neither can see the forest from the trees. Because the literature in many specialized fields is extremely large, a quantitative comparison of data points collected by the adversaries might not be able to put the baby to sleep, seeing as how both positions might have enormous literatures that neither would be able to digest and recapitulate so that the ceiling would be the ability to collect a certain amount of citations and references within a given time period.

Situation 2 is often amusing. In this case, the well versed individual can often run circles around an individual who is less well versed. The well versed individual can even take a position they know to be false according to scholarly consensus and argue for it because they have a good enough grasp of the data points that they can manipulate it to look coherent and plausible, mimicking verisimilitude of erudition to those who aren’t of the “elect” within that field. But, there might be problems if the less well versed individual does not comprehend what the more well versed person is really trying to say, unable to cross-reference multiple data sets accumulated over the years, sifting through it for intuitive plausibilites and probabilities. The less well versed individual might not have the mental database to understand that the data points they are presenting from recent research simply do not cohere well as a whole. How can the well versed individual communicate this? After all, they can not transfer the sum of their knowledge within a short period, and the less well versed individual might not be amenable to arguement from authority (“Hey, I just know more than you and I don’t want to be tutoring you for the next few weeks!”).

Case 3 is the most satisfactory, but one of the least straightforward, situations. Both individuals share a large database and can “cut through the crap.” One can’t hoodwink the other, and both are able to discern a “good” and a “bad” data point when they see it. They can get an intuitive feel for the general coherency of the opponent’s argument. There may still be miscommunication, if they come out of different intellectual “traditions” they might need to do verbal transformations between their disparate lexicons. Beyond lexicon there are whole “theories” that might work as background assumptions that need to be explicated for full fidelity of information transmission (ie; one individual assumes a chain of inferences from the opponent based on a conception of what the “correct” theoretical framework is).

In situation 3 there is a lot more going on “under the hood” than the argument that a third person might be able to observe. Let me clarify:

Here is a debate between two people who aren’t well versed.

1) A asserts x.
2) B checks x factually (referring to the internet or a text) and rebuts in the context of the argument of A.

Here is a debate between two people who are well versed.

1) A asserts x.
2) B checks x factually (mentally from prior learning and internalization) and this point triggers facts/theories/mental constructs a, b, c ….
3) B responds to A’s x, but might present new insights triggered by A's x but orthogonal to the "main point", offering for example fact y .
4) A checks y factually (mentally from prior learning and internalization) and this point triggers facts/theories/mental constructs d, e, f ….
5) Iterate.

What I’m trying to say is that the discourse between two specialists is soaked with unspoken arguments and facts bubbling under the surface. Though there is the exterior interface between the two individuals, often both A and B are running their own internal dialogues and mental models, using the new factual inputs and perspectives to reorient their own worldviews. Often, both A and B can come to the table with the same facts in a slightly different conformation, and this novel “interpretation” changes the general “shape” of the mental construct in one or other individual, even though the opposing individual did not mean to induce that particular change (and frankly, was unaware of the general “shape” of the opponent’s mental construct).

Let me offer a personal perspective: many times I have been offered a new fact by someone else, and it has triggered a host of “unrelated” facts in a mental cascade, and I come out of the process with a whole new viewpoint. Arguments in this model are not won by a point-by-point scorecard like in a formalized debate, rather, the group consensus of one set of neurons is stimulating and manipulating the group consensus of another set of neurons (sometimes, oftentimes, it is an unintended manipulation). I’m philosophically a reductionist, but hell if I know how to communicate exactly why I changed my mind about this topic or that many times (the more seamlessly complex, the more difficult to justify an opinion in simple terms).

When speaking of a scientific topic I am pretty well aware of the internals of the shape of the mental construct that I bring to the table. Facts are contingent, interlocking, and the base is precise and regular. Scientific topographies are “brittle,” pull one factual support from the superstructure and the mountain can come crashing down (falsification). On the other hand, many non-scientific intellectual constructs are like putty, and pushing into it in one direction may have rather unpredictable consequences.

One reason I harp on “canon” so much is that I really get frustrated having to slog through lexical transformations to get to the real meat of what someone is saying. Historical assertions of differences of degree are quantitatively imprecise, making understanding hard enough as it is. A belief was “widespread,” not adhered to by 80.45% of the population. I don’t know if some of these issues are ever going to be soluble, but having two individuals who are very knowledgeable and working in intelligible paradigms really helps.