G. THOMAS GOODNIGHTANNENBERG SCHOOL OF

COMMUNICATIONUNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Blind Spots, Moral Hazards, Wounded Narratives, Tweets

Barak ObamaRutger’s UniversityCommencementMay 15, 2016

“So, Class of 2016, let me be as clear as I can be. In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue.  It's not cool to not know what you're talking about.  That's not keeping it real, or telling it like it is. That's not challenging political correctness.  That's just not knowing what you're talking about. And yet, we've become confused about this.”

Agnotology

Robert Proctor (2008) builds on the work of the philosopher James Farrier to develop Agnotology—the study of systemic problems generated through common cognitive blocking. The causes of such culturally produced ignorance are found to be “media neglect, corporate or governmental secrecy and suppression, document destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical selectivity, inattention, and forgetfulness.” As the stakes grow, manufactured scientific controversies expand and deploy the value of double-sided debate to construct ignorance traps for journalists (Ceccarelli 2011).

Emancipation & Dissensus

Genres of ignorance initiate, grow, spread. Traps.Third-way thinking invites habits of active dissensus

—the discovery and establishment of alternative postures, positions, and points of view.

Willard (1987) identifies dissensus as a relativist, post-modern resource. How does one disagree w/o being disagreeable? North/South. Patriots/Cowboys.

Acts of dissensus generate alternatives, arcs of emancipatory release from the genre traps that consign one to participation in being agreeable (a dupe) or disagreeable (untrustworthy).

Typology & Genre

The shaping of argument ad igorantiam into its generic forms may be taken as the cultivation of a thought style. Ludwik Fleck (1979) argued that scientific fact can be “thought-stylized conceptual relation” that can be investigated from the point of view of history and from that of psychology, both individual and collective.” Just as the naming, classification and argument over facts by a knowledge collective can be addressed as a thought style, so, too, the range of ad ignorantiam as a thought style can be studied as rhetorically constructive, institutional embedded, psychology activated genre characterizing argument communities (Kraus and Zarefsky, 2011).

Typologies of Ignorance

Nicholas Rescher’s (2009) divides ignorance into 3 categories: one necessary and two contingent. Ignorance of necessity is grounded in the details of one’s own misleading preferences and mental circuits of expectation; epistemically ignorance is subject to the contingencies manifest “in the inadequacy of our information securing resources”; and ontologically its contingencies are “rooted in nature’s [inexhaustible] modus operandi.” (Rescher 2004, 141). To this I add bursts of expressive belligerence, the inversion of sententiae.

Genres of Ignorance

Following Rescher, I work out four thought styles of argument ad ignorantiam: acting without knowing, acquiescing without testing, building from unstable grounds, and aggressive assertion. These genres of practice include an affective continuum of thought-styles. Stylistic energies range across aggressive, active, passive, and recessive conjunctures of ignorance and argument in action.

(1) Active blind spots that provoke personal self-encounters with biases and boundaries,

(2) Passive moral hazards that are experienced when institutions raise the costs of expressed disagreement, and

(3) Recessive wounded narratives that emerge from upheavals in ontological grounding.

(4) Belligerent sententiae (tweets) that belligerently assert a technė which winds up, proliferates, and spreads “appeals to” “arguments from” ignorance.

System I & II Thinking

“System I operate automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operation of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice and concentration.” (Kahneman 2011, 21-22). Psychologists studying moral theory find that the brain activates different judgment structures. “Whereas deontological judgments are driven by affective processes which are fast and automatic, utilitarian judgments are driven by cognitive process which are slow and effortful, requiring motivation and cognitive resources (Wojciszke, Parzuchowski and Cogain, 2015, 650). Of course group, national and social identities being what they are, one imagines that deontological commitments are generally parochial rather than universal. Further, in practice ends and means are iteratively blended.

I. The Associative Machine

System 1 “infers and invents causes and intentions,” “is biased to believe and confirm”, exaggerates emotional consistency,” ignores absent evidence, and “sometimes substitutes an easier question for a difficult one (heuristics)” (Kahneman,105). Quick thinking defines the habituated mental territory that renders the brain vulnerable to fallacies. The description falls into Whately’s identification of quick response, poor habits, and complicity to convenient emthymematic offers.

II. The Lazy Controller

Vulnerability is not all there is to it, of course. System 1 can be “programmed by System 2 to mobilize attention when a particular pattern is detected (search).” Recognition releases “skilled responses and generates skilled intuitions, after adequate training,” Type II thinking occurs when the brain pauses to put into play analytic equipment triggered by reads of the occasion and necessitated as needed at the time. System II resembles Watts reasons that are taken, drawn, built, fetched, and borrowed from one’s own experience and the opinions of others. Energy!

Genre 1. Blind Spots

William James (1879) asks “Are We All Automata?” He concludes: “the most perfected parts of the brain are those whose action are least determinate.  It is this very vagueness which constitutes their advantage.  They allow their possessor to adapt his conduct to the minutest alterations in the environing circumstances, any one of which may be for him a sign, suggesting distant motives more powerful than any present solicitations of sense.” Brain studies suggest complex patterns crossing various brain assemblies are at work when moral reasoning and ethical dilemmas are in play. There is a price for complexity, however. Humans are believing machines. All carry blind spots. places where inconsistencies are yet to be connected up, gaps filled, or accountings taken.

Why is the Great Orator so rare?

Vico (1996) conjectured that human cognitive resources to be limited and the stresses of expression exacting. To work out one shortcoming is to develop another, Vico reminds us, such are human blindspots. The pragamatist William James realized the limits to his own communication affordances and marked his failure to take into accounts the manifold ways in which reasonable work takes shape in distinctly in different forms of life. Type I bypasses. Type II organizes. The efficient brain routinizes no notice of difference.

Genre 2. MORAL HAZARD

Moral hazard occurs when the incentives to accept or remain silent argument fallacy prevail over rewards to pursue accurate, correct or truthful argument. Ignorance is encouraged, specifically, when incentives for expressing genuine opinion are minimized and disagreement subject to an array of formal or informal penalties. In such cases, argumentation becomes routinized into ritual display for purposes of legitimation. Ad ignorantium makes its appearance passively in this genre. Things that should be tested go without saying. Things that should be tested, remain uncontested.

Genre 3. Wounded Narratives

The wounded narrative is the false attribution of assumption that differences can be freely and openly expressed, or even articulated, in a common experience of disagreement. I borrow the term from Deborah Silverman (2011) who studied of material culture, art deco, and craft artefacts from the Belgium Congo. She sought to “show stylistic forms of modernism expressed a displaced encounter with a distant but encroaching imperial violence.” The beauty of the objects took attention away from the heinous narrative of depravity engineered by King Leopold. Then she shows how the Congo museum “highlights new research on expressive forms of violence, past and present, within Belgium and outside it” thus, opening and suturing the wound in its retelling.

Ontological Ruptures Ontological Stresses

Wounded Narratives

Argumentation among the Ruins

Genre 4. BELLIGERENT SENTENTIAE

The Tweet is disgusting, but I think it must beexamined as a thought style encouraged bydefeasible presence of simulated exchange.

Emancipatory Argument

Argument ad ignorantiam poses two questions to communication: Why do certain beliefs, actions, narratives, or designations of others go without saying? Why are other beliefs, actions, narratives or populations stand to be taken (implicitly or explicitly) as either not worthy of notice or beyond the boundaries of meaningful exchange? Logically, the fallacy as a reductive form remains commonly explained as a dialectical disruption: Proposition A is not known to be true; therefore, A is false. Proposition A is not known to be false; therefore, A is true” (Walton 1989, 44). Emancipatory argument challenges taken-for-granted blind spots, moral hazards, wounded narratives, and aggressive ignorance by inventing alternative positions that question blind spots, discover different ways of weighting the costs of not raising objection or violating norms as an exercise of power, draining and suturing wounded narratives, and blocking encouragements to indulge in automated or stimulated aggressive denunciations. A thought style cannot so much be refuted directly as its energies need to be drained by turning to alternative figures, animation of tropes, and emotional registers.

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