Are There Bad Arguments?

If there are no absolute standards of truth, there can never be such a thing as a "bad" argument. The normative nature of epistemological investigation is utterly undermined. What justification could you provide for arguing that any method of reasoning or coming to conclusions is poor or invalid, if there is no absolute, grounded basis for any truth or reason?

The post "Is Wittgen Justified?" asked whether a justification can exist for the intrinsic rule expressed by Wittgen, which was called the Association Intrinsic Rule. No answer was given and implications of both the possibility that it can be justified and the possibility that it cannot, were briefly explored. However, for the purposes of this post, only the position that there is no way to justify an intrinsic rule will be discussed.

A relativist epistemology faces the objection that there can be no basis for anything normative. By what standards can any argument be called "bad"? If there are no absolute facts or valid methods of inference, how could any argument fail to live up to some absolute standards? If epistemology is just a branch of psychology, a descriptive enterprise discovering how human subjects respond to visual stimuli by creating belief systems, then there is no room for judging belief-forming practices.

A relativist might respond by replacing categorical imperatives by hypothetical imperatives. Instead of "you should deduce B from ...", this should replaced by "if you wish to conform to theory T, you should deduce B from ...". All justification is relative to some theory T, says the relativist. The absolutist might object that such statements are still absolute in form, and that the relativist is self-defeating. The relativist can counter that objection by showing that theory T is not just a premise but also an intrinsic rule together with explicit procedures expressed in terms of that implicit rule. 

The implicit rule may not be justifiable, but within its system, it is possible to say "B is generated by  these explicit procedures and not C". Thus within theory T, a set of statements specified using an intrinsic rule (say, Wittgen), you can say that an argument producing C is bad and another producing B is good. Hypothetical normativity is retained, even though it is not really of the form "if you want to follow T then you should ...", but rather "within T you should ...". 

The conclusion is that there is a way of specifying some relative normativity. However, it would seem that the conclusion that normally gives relativity its name still holds. If there is no justification for any theory T, then there are lots of equally valid points of view. Everybody has their own narrative. One can reach two possible conclusions. Equal validity states that there are any number of equally valid points of view. Universal equal validity claims that all points of view are equally valid. 

One can imagine someone attempting to reject universal equal validity by saying that while there are any number of theories T1, T2, ... Tn,  that does not mean that any argument is valid. A claim that "within T1, C is generated", when within T1, B is generated, is not valid. This argument claims that, without justifying theory T, accepting T means that a specific intrinsic rule is in place, specific generative procedures execute and specific outputs (B) are the result. 

However, a different attempt can be made that reduces accepting T, to simply accepting an Association Inference Rule (AIR) such as Wittgen. The point here is that accepting AIR is simply asserting that to accept that label "A" is assigned to, say, the string "table", is just asserting that "A" is assigned to "table" and not "chair". T becomes so basic that one cannot imagine any meaning to reasoning where T is not accepted. Another way of saying it is that everybody, or almost everybody, accepts AIR. 

What does normative mean in this context? It is a form of persuasion. It appeals to the person who accepts AIR and is incapable of imagining any form of reasoning within AIR. It does not say "you should accept that AIR together with the premises L, should generate B and not C" but rather "you cannot help but accept that with premises L you generate B and not C". That the interlocutor may not accept L but rather L', is beside the point. What is pertinent is that a re-imagined form of normativity exists which is based on a descriptive premise (namely, that almost everybody cannot help but accept AIR). 

The fact that the meaning of normative has changed does not make a difference to the continuation of the epistemological project. Once the most basic intrinsic rule is accepted, the task is to go forward from that point, showing the advantages of L1 rather than L2. Also, it paves the way for an epistemology that can accept the equal validity framework but that can still build tools for rejecting the universal equal validity framework.