A taxonomy of projected ideas

[skyecaptain]

From Paul Krugman's blog:

One thing Chait doesn’t mention, though, is that the willingness of right-wingers to believe this particular myth has a lot to do with projection. On the right, people are for smaller government as a matter of principle - smaller government for its own sake. And so they naturally imagine that their opponents must be their

Comments

[dubdobdee]

This thread interested me, I think because of the way the politcis of it shifts between the substantive and the meta-level: is it an argument about the content of the law the legality of certain actions, or about argument about the proper way to approach such an argument? It's a clash between Salon columnist and constitutional activist Glenn Greenwald and law professor Orin Kerr of the rightwing/libertarian law blog The Volokh Conspiracy. The original poster was arguing that a different mode of argumentative engagement would serve the issues -- the conversation -- better; Greenwald and his supporters are arguing that this demand in fact shuts out the main substantive point that Greenwald is making. (That's my description of the meta-level: I'm dodging what Kerr or Greenwald are actually arguing because i. I suspect it requires very close and careful and extensive reading to be exact on either side; ii. I get the sense -- possibly wrongly -- that both sides are sliding around a little, though in rather different ways; iii. At lkeast

[dubdobdee]

boiling this down maybe:

Law is better understood if we consider its discussion an arm of academic debate (pure "schoolroom"?)
vs
Law is better understood if we consider its discussion an arm of political struggle (pure "hallway"?)

[dubdobdee]

here's edenbaum's first gloss; and here's his second

[dubdobdee]

(to echo frank's long-ago fantasy about richards meltzer and rorty, i'd like to lock him and edenbaum in a room at gunpoint till they each got the other to understand what they were talking about: sometimes i think they'd reach accord straight away -- ie that they're talking about the same thing -- and come out and deal with me; and sometimes i think the opposite, and i'd end up being arrested for their mysterious permanent disappearance)

[koganbot]

Quoting here from what I said near the start of the Thomas Kuhn thread:

People mistakenly believe that Kuhn has something significant and unsettling to say about The Nature Of Truth, and want to assimilate his ideas to "Nothing is true; everything is permitted" and then get all upset or excited by this and use it in battles for and against "relativism" and "diversity."

But the situation is more complex than simple "mirror imaging" here. Think of people in the room, two of whom are in an argument and a bunch of other people are conversing as well, saying various things. It would be as if the two people assumed that anything anyone else said was part of the argument they were having, was aligned with either one side or the other, when in actuality the other people are mostly carrying on altogether different conversations, except a few of these people tangentially address themselves to the arguers by saying, "Not only aren't the two positions you two are taking the only possible ones, both positions are based on a premise that we

[koganbot]

A variant on mirror imaging is projecting in the Freudian sense: that is, not just projecting an idea onto someone that that person doesn't hold, but projecting unacknowledged aspects of yourself onto others

[koganbot]

**I don't suggest that we ourselves never project or misread on the basis of our own fears or whatever. What really goes wrong is when the overall conversation can't correct for it, the correcting voices being overwhelmed or overlooked, as in conversations surrounding "relativism."

[koganbot]

And the next two taxonomic categories of bad argument

--Saying your opponents don't mean what they say
--Discussing your opponents' motives as a substitute for mastering their ideas

Scads needs to be said about these, but I think I made a good beginning in " They put the world off at a distance."

(This doesn't mean that we shouldn't ever concern ourselves with motives or with whether people mean what they say. It does mean we have to master what they're saying, and usually we have to do this first.)