Table of Contents
III. Principled-Negotiation-&-Participatory-Decision-Making
V. Meta-Kialo
V.1 A Critique of Kialo: Eight Worries
V.2 Meta-Kialo in the Narrower Sense: Critiques of Current Discussions on Kialo
V.3 Meta-Kialo in the Broader Sense: Some Lessons from Teaching Introductory Ethics
VI. Conclusion
This installment contains section V.1.
You can also read or download a .pdf of the complete version of this essay HERE.
V. Meta-Kialo
“Kialo” means “reason” in Esperanto.
Correspondingly, my neologism “meta-Kialo” means:
(i) reason as applied to reason, or more explicitly,
(ii) critical reasoning as applied to critical reasoning, and more specifically,
(iii) critical reasoning as applied to online public or restricted-access discussion platforms, including but not narrowly focused on Kialo itself—which would be “meta-Kialo” as opposed to “meta-Kialo” (see sub-sections V.3 and V.4)—and also including uses of social media for public or restricted-access discussions.
V.1 A Critique of Kialo: Eight Worries
In another early critical response to Kialo, Josh Steichmann blog-aired a slew of critical worries about the platform.[i]
Here are some selections from that.
Kialo is pitched as a debate forum, a way to explore contentious issues in an easily-comprehendible [sic] visual form—a map to argumentation, where the strongest arguments prevail, cutting through all the “noise” of online argle-bargle. But it’s better as an illustration of exactly the limits of technocratic, put-a-chip-in-it solutions.
This then rolls down to Wikipedia cites, topic sentences from academic papers, and other lazy high-school essay bibliographics. The blunt fact is that randos on the internet, no matter their good intentions, are probably unable to vote for the best solution to the contradictions of gender expression—they can’t even effectively decide on definitions, which is, like, step one to forming any sort of argument at all.
In theory, the premises also get hammered out — that this is a non-starvation situation, that eating artificial meat is still consistently vegetarian — but again, this suffers from the fact that it’s entirely divorced from any context. Without evidence, all you can say is that arguments are consistent, no that their conclusions are true. And without a canny appraisal of evidence, people believe bullshit and repeat bullshit.
But Kialo doesn’t just miss the first asymmetry between fact and bullshit — that of critical evaluation of evidence. It misses the second asymmetry of participation: the stakes matter. If the arguments against vegetarianism are eye-rollingly basic to me, I can only imagine how frustrating it would be for a trans person to wade into the gender construct argument and see a bunch of google scholars linking to the definition of epigenetics to support the idea that gender is inherently biological.
In general, Steichmann’s critique is much more interesting and substantive than the cynical “internet unicorn” post mentioned in section IV.
But, ironically, if not by way of an outright pragmatic contradiction, Steichmann’s critique could certainly use some Kialo-style regimentation of premises, support for premises, etc., itself.
Mostly, in fact, Steichmann just throws all the skeptical sticky mud he can think of at Kialo (as it were, a slew of critical worries that’s also a slough of them) in hopes that all or some of it will stick.
Moreover, only some of the criticisms are relevantly specific to Kialo, while others are general worries about online discussion platforms and the discussions that take place on them, and still others are even more general worries that apply to any kind of informal or formal argumentation.
But in any case, I think that at least eight significantly distinct worries can be extracted from the mud, so I’ve listed those below, and have also added critical responses.
1. The Garbage-In, Garbage-Out Worry: Kialo-style argumentation technology at best guarantees logical consistency and logical validity, but if the premises of an argument are false, there’s no logical guarantee that the conclusion(s) will be true.
Critical Response: It’s quite true that logically valid arguments don’t guarantee the truth of their conclusions unless the premises are also true, but that’s a general worry about valid argumentation as opposed to sound argumentation, and not specific to Kialo.
2. The Worry about Adequate Evidence: Kialo-style argumentation technology, in and of itself, provides no way to distinguish adequate evidence from false evidence, misleading evidence, lies, or bullshit.
Critical Response: Again this is quite true, but the problem of how to distinguish adequate evidence from inadequate evidence is a general problem for epistemology,[ii] and again not specific to Kialo.
3. The Backfire Effect Worry: It’s an empirically well-documented fact that presenting ideologically-blinkered and mind-manacled people (true-believers, trolls, yahoos, zealots, etc.) with adequate evidence or cogent counterarguments to their claims only hardens their commitment to their false beliefs, increases their cognitive resistance to rational correction, and makes them angry (or even angrier) to boot.[iii]
Critical Response: It’s yet again quite true that there’s lots of recent work in social psychology that demostrates this unfortunate effect of rational conversation and/or philosophical dialogue, but yet again that’s not specific to Kialo—on the contrary, it’s a problem for anyone who’s trying to engage anyone else in rational conversation or philosophical dialogue on controversial or otherwise hot-button issues, especially including higher education (see sub-section V.4 below).
4. The Sophistry Worry: Kialo-style argumentation technology can be used by sophists in order to make bad (and especially formally or informally fallacious) arguments look like good ones, for their own self-interested or venal purposes.
Critical Response: Yes, but identifying and criticizing sophists and their sophistry, including how to tell the difference between rhetorical tricks and rational arguments, as well as identifying and criticizing formal or informal fallacies, is a problem for anyone who engages in logically-guided reasoning, not only in philosophical discussion but also in any sort of rational discussion, hence it’s also not specific to Kialo.
5. The Abstractness-and-Detachment Worry: Kialo-style argumentation technology is relentlessly abstract, and detached from real-world decisions and real-world consequences, hence nothing but mind-games.
Critical Response: Finally, a worry that’s at least specific to Kialo!
To be sure, Kialo’s technology isn’t specifically designed for online, widely-distributed, principled-negotiation-&-participatory-decision-making, aka collective decision-making, as I spelled it out in section IV.
But that’s only to say that Kialo isn’t, e.g., Loomio, which is indeed specifically designed for online, widely-distributed, collective decision-making.
Not surprisingly, as per their “business model,” Kialo isn’t trying to compete with Loomio and other similar platforms that are already doing a good job of making online, widely-distributed, collective decision-making really possible
But there’s no incompatibility between Kialo and Loomio: on the contrary, they’re perfectly complementary, and could easily be used either concurrently or in succession.
So, more generally, in order to connect Kialo-style argumentation technology directly to the real-world decisions and real-world consequencess, then philosophers conducting phildialogues on Kialo can and should also use Loomio-style collective decision-making technology as a complement and supplement.
6. The Worry about Post-Truth and Post-Facts: Kialo-style argumentation technology does nothing to combat widespread contemporary relativism about truth and real facts, or outright skepticism about the very idea of truth (as opposed to mere opinion, falsity, fiction, lies, bullshit, alt-facts, etc., etc.).
Critical Response: Well yes, it’s true that Kialo doesn’t either rebut or refute relativists, truth-skeptics, or anti-realists, or provide a positive theory of truth and objective reality.
But that’s only to say that Kialo isn’t itself a platform for original, substantive philosophy, and therefore, more specifically, Kialo isn’t itself doing what, say, Susan Haack does in her excellent recent essay, “Post ‘Post-Truth’: Are We There Yet?”[iv]
7. The Violence-Beats-Justification-and-Truth Worry: Coercive authoritarians, would-be-tyrants, and real tyrants from Thrasymachus (who first articulated the doctrine that might makes right) and Pontius Pilate (who mockingly said “what is truth?” as he hauled off Christians to be crucified), to Trump, have insisted that coercive authoritarian power, as per Orwell’s 1984, “justifies” any act and turns any assertion into “truth,” but Kialo does nothing to prevent this.
Critical Response: The conflict between radically enlightened rationality, especially real philosophy, on the one hand, and coercive authoritarianism on the other, is indeed a huge problem, but it’s far from being Kialo’s specific remit or responsibility to solve it.
8. The Techie-Big-Brother-is-Watching-You Worry: Kialo, like all public or social media platforms (not to mention the rest of the global corporate internet), is in large part a thinly-disguised and highly-sophisticated way for rich technocrats to spy on people and control them, without using overt coercive authoritarian techniques.
Critical Response: To be sure, The Techie-Big-Brother-is-Watching-You Worry is real and urgent.
But on the contrary, Kialo has been explicitly created as, in some measure, a technological counter-force to Techie Big-Brotherism.
If Kialo fails to undermine Techie Big Brotherism on its own, then that’s only because the problem is so deeply ingrained in the infrastructure of contemporary neoliberal States and so globally widespread, that only a general revolt against the whole infernal system—against the mega-machine—would make a serious dent in the military-industrial-university-digital complex.
***
By way of wrapping up this sub-section, I also want to look briefly at another one of Steichmann’s critical remarks.
With the claim that it can address political decisions as well, and notions of being a civic platform, Kialo fails to understand what makes actual democracy works: it’s not because it comes up with the best answers, it’s that everyone nominally has buy in to the decision, so it’s legitimate. Without that legitimacy underpinning the debates, there’s no incentive to work toward a solution in any meaningful way and no reason to come away convinced.
Here Steichmann is badly confused.
Just because everyone agrees on a claim or opinion, it doesn’t follow that it’s true; correspondingly, just because everyone agrees on a choice or decision, it doesn’t follow that it’s thereby rationally sound, morally right, or even individually or collectively beneficial.
On the contrary, remember the washroom-wall slogan:
Eat shit!, billions of flies can’t be wrong.
Less vividly expressed, the critical point is that mere agreement means little or nothing, rationally or morally speaking, and in that sense, merely chanting “democracy yay!” is rationally unjustified and/or (in cases when everyone, or at least the majority of those qualified to vote, agrees on some immoral claim or opinion) immoral.
Furthermore, and to its credit, Kialo is specifically intended to be an online discussion platform for rational discussion (”empowering reason”), not a democracy.
In any case, there ‘s another sense of political legitimacy that’s even more problematic than democracy per se, namely what I’ll call pseudo-legitimacy.
Claims, opinions, and arguments are pseudo-legitimated if and only if they’re widely disseminated, no matter what their content, no matter how they’re received, and/or no matter what their practical impact is, even if they’re demonstrably false or unsound, fallacious, misleading, lies, bullshit, or otherwise have a bad or even downright malign impact on people.
E.g., claims, opinions, and arguments that derive from the “alt-right,” or neo-fascists, are pseudo-legitimized merely because they’re minimally tolerated under morally adequate principles of free speech, and widely disseminated over social media and on (more-or-less) wide-open platforms like Reddit, etc.
The correct response to this genuine worry, however, is not to engage in coercive moralism by censoring, curtailing, or punishing free speech, but instead to provide rationally cogent criticism and counterarguments, and also to disseminate that criticism and those counterarguments every bit as widely as the pseudo-legitimized claims, opinions, and arguments.
NOTES
[i] J. Steichmann, “Rome and Why Kialo Won’t Work,” available online at URL = <https://steichmann.com/wp/rome-and-why-kialo-wont-work/>.
[ii] See, e.g., S. Haack, Evidence and Inquiry: A Pragmatist Reconstruction of Epistemology (2nd edn., New York: Prometheus, 2009), also available online at URL = <https://www.academia.edu/40630919/FULL_TEXT_EVIDENCE_INQUIRY_2ND_EDITION_2009_>; and R. Hanna, Cognition, Content, and the A Priori: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind and Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015) (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 5), also available online in preview, HERE.
[iii] See, e.g., B. Nyhan and J. Reifler, “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions,” Journal of Political Behavior 32 (2010): 303-330, available online at URL = <https://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/articles/PolBehavior-2010-Nyhan.pdf>; and S. Lewandowsky et al., “Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 13 (2012): 106-131, at p. 122; available online at URL = <https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/780/docs/12_pspi_lewandowsky_et_al_misinformation.pdf>.
[iv] In Theoria 85 (2019): 258-275, also available online at URL = <https://www.academia.edu/40156581/Post_Post-Truth_Are_We_There_Yet_2019_>.
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