E57: re:joinder - The New Science of Arguing about Argument Theory
It’s common to see tech journalists make proclamations about how the internet has fundamentally changed the ways that we think, interact, and most importantly, argue with one another. It’s also common to see them herald the arrival of a “new science” that promises to provide technical answers to all questions and solve all problems that come with the “disruptive” technologies that have “revolutionized” our world.
But has the internet really caused such a drastic divergence from how we operate offline? And do we really need a “new science” for studying things like argument and disagreement, especially when already-established disciplines like rhetoric, philosophy, and the conspicuously named argumentation theory have been studying these topics for millenia?
On today’s episode, we offer a re:joinder to an infamous 2019 article in The Atlantic by Jesse Singal, entitled “The New Science of How to Argue--Constructively.” In the article, Singal profiles a man who claims to have invented a “new science of disagreement” - the Swedish blogger John Nerst, a self-proclaimed polymath who cut his teeth in the “Intellectual Dark Web”-adjacent, hyper-rationalist online blogosphere. Nerst’s “new discipline,” which he calls “Erisology,” claims to have invented a series of tools to help people better navigate arguments and disagreements online. In reality, as we point out, Nerst has merely stumbled into concepts and theories that have been debated by theorists of logic and argumentation for centuries, such as stasis theory, ideographs, and “bracketing” social difference in public deliberations. The distinction, we find, is that Nerst’s and Singal’s vision of a new culture of disagreement is reliant on rationalist rules that belie an authoritarian social and political agenda. We also discuss how privileged men react when their ideas are challenged for the first time, Jesse Singal’s beleaguered Twitter mentions, and what this article truly reveals about the nature of the internet: its power to elevate bloggers to the status of credentialed, peer-reviewed academics, as long as their ideas are laundered through online op-ed columnists.
In the spirit of generosity, here is Nerst’s follow-up blog explaining & defending his ideas: “A Defense of Erisology”
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:
Fahnestock, J., & Secor, M. (1988). The stases in scientific and literary argument. Written communication, 5(4), 427-443.
Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social text, (25/26), 56-80.
Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT press.
Hohmann, H. (2001). Stasis. In T. O. Sloane (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (741-745). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Hemington, G. (2019, 9 April). A guide for (the) perplexed philosophers: Jesse Singal and the rationalist subculture. Irrationally Speaking. https://irrationallyspeaking.home.blog/2019/04/09/a-guide-for-the-perplexed-philosophers-jesse-singal-and-the-rationalist-subculture/
Mack, P. (2016). Ramus and Ramism: rhetoric and dialectic. In Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts (pp. 23-40). Routledge.