Philosophy Club Meeting

Join us in Auerbach 320 or online this Wednesday, Oct. 2, from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m., for our next meeting of the University of Hartford Philosophy Club as Brian Skelly presents for discussion: Antinomy Syndrome and Paralysis in Political Discourse. 

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There is a disease affecting many of us that I call “antinomy syndrome”, which is the disposition to assume, without evidence and in the absence of any probable cause, that any proven claim, especially regarding a matter of contention, is stalemated by an equally compelling proof of its counterclaim, whether or not such proof is enunciated, leaving a void in which unreasoned subjective preference is empowered to be sole motivator of our conscience. This cognitive malady is behind the worst choices we make or even can ever make, since it unleashes the worst of our demons to run rampant over the socio-political landscape.

The impetus for this disease, or “syndrome”, is the denial of the existence of sound argument outside of purely axiomatic endeavors such as logic and mathematics. A sound argument is a valid argument all of whose premises are true; a valid argument is one whose conclusion cannot fail to be true provides that all its premises are true. By logical necessity, a sound argument proves its conclusion, as the study of logic itself,  which rarely is directly assaulted by those affected by this syndrome, clearly shows. Somehow, many people, without denying the validity of the study of logic itself, somehow find it quite easy to deny the main finding of logic: that sound arguments prove their conclusions. 

In logic, an antinomy simpliciter would be a case of two sound arguments that actually prove mutually contradictory conclusions. No one has ever discovered such a thing, and most of us are convinced of its logical impossibility on the grounds of the law of non-contradiction, that necessarily, two contradictory claims can be neither both true nor both false.

There are, of course, weaker senses of ‘antinomy’. For example, Kant seemed to accept the possibility of epistemic antinomies, which are cases in which human reason, because of its inherent limitations, is stuck with some pairs of apparent antinomies unresolvable by us. Thus, we seemingly can prove both that God exists and does not exist, both the principle of universal causation and rational freedom, both the analyzability  and unanalyzability of nature down to simple parts, and both the infiniteness and finiteness of time and space. Kant takes some time to present and discuss what he considers to be compelling arguments for each side of these four pairs of claims.

Less controversial than Kant’s application of the terms are the general acceptance of apparent antinomies that perhaps we can resolve, but only in the form of a perennial, ongoing process. It is not altogether clear that this is not, in fact, what Kant really intended.

The wiggle room for the ill-conceived, sleight-of-hand black magic set in motion in the minds of those afflicted by antinomy syndrome may come from at least two considerations: first, that although a sound argument proves its conclusion, in matters of controversy the proving process is not finite in duration but perennial, ever ongoing. The second is the confusion we make between dialectic argument and rhetorical argument, the former being truth-oriented and cooperative while latter is convenience-oriented and competitive. Rhetoric, in short, is about winning arguments, and for that reason is indifferent to truth, and so infinitely malleable in any direction the convenience of the moment requires. It is therefore, unlike dialectic argument, not productive, because by definition no reliable progress toward knowledge can be made by it practice; and it is also, unlike dialectic argument, non-progressive, since its aim is always short term and palpable: manipulation of the audience for a palpable short-term gain, and as such it creates no solid plateaus upon which subsequent argument can rely as a basis for further progress (complete document).