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kurige comments on How to Not Lose an Argument - Less Wrong
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This post goes hand in hand with Crisis of Faith. Eliezer's post is all about creating an internal crisis and your post is all about applying that to a real world debate. Like peanut-butter and jelly.
If you want to correct and not just refute then you cannot bring to the table evidence that can only be seen as evidence from your perspective. Ie. you cannot directly use evolution as evidence when the opposing party has no working knowledge of evolution. Likewise, a christian cannot convince an atheist of the existence of God by talking about the wonders of His creation. If you picture you and your opponent's belief systems as vin-diagrams then the discussion must start where they overlap, no matter how small that sliver of common knowledge might be. Hopefully, if you and your opponent employ crisis-of-faith properly, those two circles will slowly converge.
For our European readers, I would like to note that what kurige meant by 'Like peanut-butter and jelly' was something like 'they go really well together, and in fact one would probably not put one on a sandwich without the other'.
Just try not to picture it; you'll be fine.
Probably most people know this, but if you find yourself needing to mention this again it's vital to add that "jelly" here refers to what we call "jam", because to us, "jelly" is what you call "Jell-O". You can imagine why we're not thrilled by the thought of a peanut-butter and "Jell-O" sandwich!
[insert discussion about the difference between jam and marmalade here]
This is a critical point.
One of the reasons arguments seem to exist at all - from what I can understand - is that when people look at the same things in different ways, effectively seeing two different things. A christian might look at the world and see the wonder of God's creation, but a physicist might see nothing but billions and billions of tiny particles interacting. Someone pro-life might see an abortion as a murder, while someone pro-choice might see it as part of a woman's right to her own body.
You need to frame the argument so both parties are looking at the same thing for any progress to be made. Otherwise, people just become more and more entrenched in their position, while getting more and more frustrated that the other person doesn't see it their way.
When Wittgenstein wrote his Tractatus, this was basically his only point. If you clearly define your terms, thereby unambiguously fixing the referents for your propositions, then all disagreement will disappear.
In later works, he realized that there are a lot of things we do with language other than relating propositions, that you use language before you get definitions, and that things are generally a bit more complicated than he used to think.
Of course, in practice this process of definition is more like iterative refining than fixing for all time, but the result is the same: the point is to ensure that your discussion is actually about the world. This is what making beliefs pay rent and tabooing words are all about.
(Hmm, we're developing a vocabulary drawn from EY posts - are there more standard terms for these things we could be using?)
that you use language before you get definitions
Ah, but that's simply untrue. We use language before we get explicit definitions. The implicit definitions are a necessary precursor for language use.
Maybe. But the point is that implicit definitions are never clearly defined. Indeed, they are hardly definitions- more like an incomplete sense of in what circumstances the use of the word is appropriate.