The process of reasoning from premises to conclusions, or argumentation, can be performed for any number of reasons. Perhaps it is done to perform a sort of diagnostic and identify any flaws or weaknesses in a view that could be improved. Perhaps it is done instead to organize information. Maybe it is to exonerate a conclusion, or to justify one’s position before others, or discover what a proposition logically implies.

Lately, it is becoming more commonplace to think of argumentation in positive, collaborative, constructive terms. And this has been a much needed shift in thinking from a lopsided view according to which arguments are for confrontation, conflict and disagreement.

But, it is not as if these darker sides to argumentation have disappeared.

After all, conflict. Confrontation. Disagreement. These things haven’t gone anywhere.

And so I’d like to discuss the more destructive side of argumentation and rhetoric here, especially from the perspective of a soldier and the analogy of war–something I rarely talk about in public.

As with all my writing, allow me to set the stage before releasing this one into the wild.

To begin, call to mind the popular idea in philosophy of “possible worlds.” Maybe you’ve heard the jargon, maybe you’re familiar with its accompanying logical apparatus.

Whatever the case, a possible world is thought of as a way of collecting or arranging all propositions in such a way that they are all co-jointly possibly true. That is to say, it is a total and complete description of everything that is possible. Likewise, an impossible world is an arrangement of propositions that cannot be true.

But what these notions are doing is adding a modality component to a substructure. They take as a given that there are collections or arrangements of all propositions, and then add to this the idea that these total and complete descriptions of things are either possible or they are not. So, analyze that concept in half, and strip the modality segment (sort of like peeling the endings off of a linguistic ‘base’).

We need the notion of ‘worlds’. A world is a complete and total description of everything. A way of collecting or arranging all propositions.

This, dear reader, is a worldview.

There are different, competing total and complete descriptions of everything.

For the most part, we don’t even know how all propositions get arranged or collected according to our worldviews: it’s way too much information for us to fathom. So, we develop ‘big pictures’, overarching narratives, and explore–discovering and refining in each new generation.

But what we are looking for, in every case, is consistency. There are some things that we take to be facts which then measure the plausibility of other claims. If some proposed claim is inconsistent with those measures, it is discarded or resisted. If it coheres, it is incorporated, absorbed, or at least not rejected.

These measures needn’t be pictured as ‘foundations’, and could even change depending on the context. What matters here is not the shape epistemic justification takes, but simply the fact that consistency with some propositions is how it tends to work.

I say all this to clarify the nature of disagreement. What we are doing in the act of disagreeing is asserting one worldview over another. We are declaring not just that a proposition is inconsistent, but that it is inconsistent with another that is being taken for granted.

Once you see this, you can’t unsee it.

Sometimes, one buckles under the pressure and concedes the presupposed proposition as well as the inconsistency with it. But, other times, one refuses this self-declared status and resists subordination. In this latter case, she reasserts her presupposed propositions, holding firmly to her convictions as the correct ones, and thus denies the alleged inconsistency–or at least that the inconsistency matters.

I can say that you’re having to bite a bullet. But if it doesn’t even look to you like a bullet, are you really? Truth may not be relative, but consistency is.

And so this is what disagreements amount to: asserting different visions of the same reality until one’s integrity begins to break down–or gets declared to have done so anyway.

One hopes that what binds all the propositions of her worldview together is logical implication or coherence–unless she cares instead about consistency with a different binding agent, like a feeling, or an aesthetic–but this is what gets tested through transparency of conscience, assumption exposure, logical exploration and disagreement.

Now, from the perspective of a soldier (rather than, say, a mercenary), my worldview (as I understand it) is something to defend.

Should one confront my views as being inconsistent with some fact or other, my intention is to preserve the integrity of those views. I can do so in various ways, such as by showing that there is no such inconsistency, or by showing that the purported facts are in fact no facts at all.

But however it is accomplished, what I want you to remember is that my action, from a soldier’s perspective, will be to keep reasserting my view as the dominant one, wherever that rule is forgotten.

It is only when someone does this that dialogue advances. It is only when a view truly has someone in its corner, willing to take those blows without surrendering, that a view is truly put to the test.

And sometimes what is discovered is that the assaulted view actually does form a logical, coherent whole, and that it was only thought laid to rest because its proponent ceased to uphold its integrity.

It is from the wellspring of this refusal to submit; this demand for space, that subsequent ‘violence of action’ can be determined by the dictates of reason.

I am not emotional in my assertion of my views over yours, and so the violence I am bringing to your worldview is not blind. It is cold, calculated and intentional, deliberate and necessary.

This violence could be the disarming of one’s inherited or unquestioned sense of security, superiority or correctness. The mere fact of one view surviving the assertion of another can sometimes do that. When something seems so obvious to you that you expect someone to just ‘come to their senses’ when they hear it, or realize their mistake like a light bulb, but they instead brush it off, it might be jarring and make you question whether it really is all that obvious.

In that latter case, the integrity of the initially asserted view begins to splinter, and one begins to have second thoughts. Confidence deflates pretty quickly when it is made to hold up to its claims.

On the other hand, this violence could also be the seizure of command of the facts. If one mistakenly asserts that another is out of compliance with, say, logic, she instantly loses her power base upon being called out. She retreats, and shelters in downplaying or trivializing the mistake–ironically weakening its initial significance in doing so.

But, whatever the means of violence end up being, it is conducted as one worldview going to war with another. The war of worldviews ends when the integrity of a worldview is broken or secured. Sometimes, this involves merely managing to be unbroken by an objection, so that a hitherto unrecognized consistency is spotted and reevaluations are forced to be made. Such wars as these rarely end, though.

Instead, what we see are battles in different theaters, arising in accord and proportion with the interests and discoveries of each generation and lead thinkers.

Indeed, such wars may never end. Views are only ever one brilliant thinker away from being rejuvenated, and this because the overwhelming majority of ‘worlds’ remain unobserved by us.

So we advance, progress, and learn, but we must never surrender. Giving up is failing to reassert your view until you are unable to consistently do so. We must keep getting back up (i.e. reasserting) until we can’t. And at that point, though our view may have been defeated, it will have been good for it to have, and we will have won by securing a better ‘world’.