[MD] Straw Men and the Primacy of Trust

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Ian,

Ian said:
As I said in the other thread, by agreeing with Arlo aparently against 
me, you were actually dis-agreeing with his straw man, not me, that 
somehow I was suggesting we need to be some unconditional 
love-in - nothing could be further from the truth. Trust and respect 
have to be earned, and that starts by giving a little, getting inside the 
other person (not just saying you're doing it).

Matt:
I think you inflated a little bit my meaning in saying, "I also think Arlo 
is right to think against Ian that love isn't the right thing to talk 
about."  I can grant your intention to have meant "love" in the poetic 
sense I called nice for utopic formulas, and that Arlo may have 
misperceived that intention (I have no sense one way or the 
other)--I can grant both of those things, yet I still think that the word 
"love" is the wrong word to use to name the object I'm concerned 
with in this context.  It seems your concerned with that same object, 
which makes us jointly concerned with the same set of 
consequences.  I know you never meant a "love-in," but I think "love" 
is the wrong way to formulate the issue, under which you also stick 
"trust and respect."  I wanted to say against that, that it does make 
a practical difference at times to distinguish trust and love, as you 
don't in this particular formula.  

I haven't articulated what practical differences and where they might 
occur, but it's a supposition I would maintain.  Perhaps you have no 
particular truck with dubbing the object of this discussion "love" or 
"trust," and think this is a nit upon which nothing hangs.  Even that 
being the case, rhetoric does matter, even if it isn't the rhetoric of 
covering insults with insincerities.  Rhetoric matters sometimes to 
be able to see the right conceptual distinctions to make.  Rhetoric 
matters for intellectual, as well as social, reasons.  And it's the 
intellectual matter I'm concerned with in dubbing it "trust" against 
"love," though this is to bring into better view our social 
responsibilities.

Might I also remind you of this passage from my post: "Straw men 
have nothing to do with sincerity.  The trouble is that accusing 
others of _deploying one as a trick_ implies that they are 
knowingly being malicious, are being insincere."  You have not 
done this.  However, I find the attribution of a straw man a little 
disarming in this context.  I would think a straw man is something 
built, and usually over time.  Can we not get somebody wrong 
without thereby building a straw man?  

Perhaps Arlo has been attributing this wrong intention to you for 
some time (I again plead ignorance), in which case it makes 
sense for you to call it a straw man (if, of course, you've also 
spent time trying to correct him on this count, corrections gone 
unheeded) and to say that I accidentally followed into its 
conceptually scope makes sense.  Granting all of that: I still can't 
help but think that attributions of the straw-man fallacy create 
more emotional hay than they do in helping clear the landscape of 
misapprehensions (excuse my mixed metaphors).  Too many fires 
are lit from the remains, which just adds to our heat problem and 
obscures our vision.

Matt