AI---1AR

AI: Safety---1AR
AI: Totalitarian---1AR
K---Yellow Perill
Fairness---1AR
Framework---1AR
Fairness---AT: Aff Bias---1AR
Fairness---AT: Equality versus Equity---1AR
Fairness---AT: Ableism---1AR
Tab Solves---1AR
T-Its
Skep
 Baudy
The will to reality doesn’t cause implosive violence. Debate is effective at discerning
contingent truths---their framework is the style of argumentation that enables post-
truth by mooting the burden of rejoinder---voting against them has unique value as a
form of deontic scorekeeping that bolsters collective faith in debate’s process.
Quirk, 17—The New School, Information Technology Manager (Michael, “The Resuscitation of Truth,”
[Link] dml)

Being indignant about a “post-truth” world is entirely justifiable. But I

am not sure that grumbling about a widely
distributed oblivion toward the true, the factual, and the objective accomplishes anything other than
frustration and anxiety. Railing about facts rarely convinces anyone predisposed toward ignoring them,
and this is not exactly news. As Upton Sinclair put it: “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not
understanding it.” What goes for salaries goes double for worldviews and triple for satisfying pipedreams.

While there may seem to be something quixotic about persuading the stubborn, it is timid to avoid that
task, however fruitless it might turn out to be. Maybe, as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once quipped, the only thing that
works with persistent skeptics or relativists is to tell them “go away.” But that reply is understandable only as a last resort, because I think a
solid, pragmatic case can be made that objectivity, fact, and truth are live, forced, and momentous
options that can be given a successful defense. Because the defense is pragmatic, rather than
theoretical, it is an argument that works because it can be defended on the same grounds as the
nihilist’s, even if they are armed with “alternative facts” tailored to their worldview. Thus if this defense
fails to persuade them, it is no fault of yours. Rather, skeptics, relativists, and nihilists don’t and can’t
really believe what they say they believe, because what they do puts the lie to it. They fail to practice
what they preach, and they cannot but fail given the constraints of human discursive conduct.
Pragmatists are often caricatured as being indifferent toward objectivity and relativistic about truth, but unlike their postmodernist cousins they are supposedly “cheerful nihilists.” Most pragmatists are widely thought to affirm
Richard Rorty’s offhand (and incautious) remarks like “truth is what our peers will let us get away with saying”, or that we would do well to “reduce objectivity to solidarity.” Rorty seemed at times to place everything in the hands
of the local, cultural beliefs of a given epistemic community, which is the first and final court of appeal for what counts as “fact.” If this is what Rorty believes (I think there is ample textual evidence that it is not) then all facts are
“alternative facts,” indexed to the actual assertions of a given community. It is therefore inevitable that Trump’s base and his fiercest critics will simply talk past each other. Persuasion implies enough common ground to agree on
certain key premises of argument, and since this is precisely what is lacking, quibbling about truth and objectivity is pointless. Does this torpedo any conception of truth and objectivity that is not, in Swain’s words, “rhetorical or
rooted in perspective”?

Robert Brandom, is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, and was a student of Rorty’s at Princeton. He shares Rorty’s antifoundationalism and also self-identifies as a pragmatist. Nevertheless, he believes that
Rorty’s views do not support the sort of “post-truth” philosophy he is often accused of having, and which he unwittingly supports when he tries to shock rather than patiently construct persuasive arguments. Brandom’s
philosophical project, in his magnum opus Making It Explicit and other works, can be seen as an attempt to knock off the rough edges of Rorty’s pragmatism and to refashion it as a systematic philosophy of language that makes
sense of truth and objectivity, and not just an “edifying” philosophy that provides groundless epistemic hope without “metaphysical comfort.” Any post-truth regime would be over before it starts.

Making It Explicit contains over 700 pages of dense, complex prose written in an intensely technical analytic style. (If you can imagine the late
modal logician David Lewis rewriting Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, you might have some idea of how Making It Explicit reads.)
But there are two strands that can be teased out of Brandom’s reflections on language that are directly relevant to contemporary Trumpian
politics and its oblivion of truth and objectivity.

First, Brandom follows C.S. Peirce and Donald Davidson in drawing a sharp distinction between truth and
justification. This distinction is rooted in our practices of making claims, defending them with reasons,
and withdrawing those claims when evidence or argument shows them to be baseless. To use the most
common example: I would be justified, if I were an 11th century cloistered monk, in believing that the earth was at the center of the universe. I
could cite many reasons for this belief that could support this belief and command assent: the best available astronomical science of the day,
scriptural testimony, and the ordinary experience of watching the sun, stars, and planets rise in the east and set in the west. The belief is held
to be true, and the monk is justified in believing it true, but as a matter of fact, it is false. The
relationship between justification
and truth is a complicated and important one, but neither concept can be reduced to the other. I could
be justified in believing X which turns out not to be true, and for that matter I can believe Y, which is
true, without being justified in believing it — my facts could be wrong, my reasoning could be off . What
Brandom is drawing our attention to is the sound linguistic practice involved in the giving and assessing
of reasons. What we call “rational discourse” will involve weighing and evaluating our own reasons and
that of others, responding to challenges and revising or even dropping our own convictions. There is no
foggy metaphysical speculation or transcendental deduction behind Brandom’s truth/justification
distinction. It is simply an unavoidable part of human sapience as expressed in our discursive practices.

Second, sapient human discourseinvariably involves norms, elements of discursive practice that distinguish
valid from invalid “moves”, and that enable participants in the practice to both track and evaluate
those moves as better or worse. “Moves” in discursive practices are usually inferences: I draw
conclusions from premises to which I am committed, and therefore are committed to the conclusions as
well; I track the claims and inferences of other participants in the dialogue, and gauge whether (or to
what extent) they too are entitled to their own commitments. So rational discourse centers around the
inferences we draw, inferences that emerge from the sapient social practice of making claims and engaging in
what Brandom calls “deontic scorekeeping”, employing shared practical norms to assess entitlements and
commitments of fellow participants, and ourselves.

Meaningful human discourse, then, is a) constrained by shared norms that b) guide inferences
articulating one’s commitments that c) one may or may not be entitled to hold. Our judgment of how well we,
and our conversation partners, avoid error or get things right is what Brandom calls a “normative status” — a judgment that someone is
entitled to believe or assert something. Those beliefs to which one is committed one takes to be true (what sense does it make to say “I believe
X but it’s false”?), but I am entitled to those beliefs only to the extent that I can justify them. In
discursive practices, we hold
ourselves and others responsible for the commitments we hold by determining whether we are
entitled to them, whether the inferential moves made in the linguistic social practice pass muster with
the norms that make the social practice what it is.
There is, of course, something going on in discourse besides inference: there are also what Brandom dubs “discursive entry” and “discursive departure” moves. We are causally affected by non-linguistic beings, which cause not just
sensations but perceptions, which give non-inferential access to the world but are possible only for sapient beings that are capable of drawing inferences from them and engaging in deontic scorekeeping. “Discursive
entry/departure” moves anchor us to a world external to language, but it is the normative activity of holding ourselves responsible to the inferences drawn from these moves that constitutes “objectivity.”

Brandom was deeply influenced by many other philosophers in developing this “social practice” conception of objectivity: Wittgenstein’s “meaning-as-use” trope, Heidegger’s notion of Dasein as “Being-in-the-world,” Sellars’s
rejection of “the Myth of the Given” and his epistemology of “the logical space of reasons.” Brandom leverages this account of the primacy of social practice into a comprehensive theory of meaning, where pragmatic ideas like
“inference”, “commitment” and “entitlement” are primary, and semantic notions like “truth” and “reference” are derived from them, rather than the other way around, where meaning depends on a general theory of
representation. For Brandom, we do not start out with a distinction between “subjectivity” and “objectivity” and then proceed to show how the objective world is correctly (and incorrectly) represented in subjective knowers, a
path that has generated all manner of aporiae since Descartes and Locke. Rather, we establish the ebb and flow of human, sapient social practices, of assertion and reason-giving, and articulate “objectivity”, “fact”, and “truth”
from there.

This is obviously just a thumbnail sketch of a few main ideas in Making It Explicit. It is a book of many virtues: clarity and ease of expression is
not one of them, however. Brandom is a philosopher’s philosopher: his work is crammed with philosophical “shop talk”, and it is difficult to
show how this might be relevant to what another pragmatist, John Dewey, called “the problems of men” [sic] that philosophy must address if it
is to remain a worthwhile endeavor. But I do not think the connection between Brandom’s musings and constructing an escape-route past
“post-truth politics” is farfetched, and I do think there are several political lessons to be teased out of Brandom’s “inferentialism.” One
of
Brandom’s obsessive points about inference is the inescapable normativity of human discourse, and that
such norms, like “holding oneself and others responsible for commitments made” are built-into
discourse and shared in common. Put in the vernacular: if you want to talk politics and make sense, you have
to recognize and honor these shared norms. You can’t just do or say whatever you want. You can’t just
make shit up.

The first political lesson to learn is: don’t let them gaslight you. By “them” I mean Trump and his base,
their right-wing media enablers, and those critics like Barton Swain who give the former far too much credit
for ushering in a supposedly postmodern “post-truth” regime. This is no time to get all wobbly about
“truth”, “fact”, and “objectivity.” They are still meaningful, because discourse does not get off the
ground without them. The post-truth regime is a mirage. The emperor has no clothes, so do not give
him more power by fearing that the concept of truth has lost its resonance.
The second lesson is to view
objectivity not as something given, as something obvious, but as something one
must achieve in social practices that involve the giving and taking of reasons. One of the many shortcomings of
Hillary Clinton’s hapless campaign was her assumption that facts speak for themselves and that truth follows on their heels. This would be fine
if this were a campaign like any other, where everybody is on the same page when it comes to holding both others in the dialogue and oneself
responsible for commitments by appealing to shared norms. There has to be an attunement to the context of discussion. No attunement, no
background norms, and no compelling appeals to facts. Dropping facts as if they were truth-bombs will not work if your adversaries are
unwilling to recognize their force. Decontextualized facts convince no one, certainly not anyone spoon-fed by Fox and Breitbart and the right-
wing echo chamber. Little truths are no match for “the big lie”.

Third, what needs to be cultivated is not appeal to “the obvious”, but the disposition to take normative
scorekeeping seriously — to hold every foot to the fire of showing one is entitled to the beliefs one
claims to be true — and to make this manifest to others who might have lost their way. I think this is the most
important lesson to be learned from Brandom’s magnum opus: that ultimately discourse is guided by a kind of ethical
constraint, the need for both inferential consistency and inferential relevance, and a sort of guilt or
shame when one deliberately fails to honor that constraint.
So when Trump claims that he would have won the vote had there not been “millions of cases of voter fraud” in California, he needs to be able
to back that commitment up in order to be entitled to it, and not just any reason will suffice given the nature of the norms guiding that kind of
public discourse. Appealing to “alternative facts” as if they were givens, or insinuating “Lots of people said they witnessed voter
fraud,” without saying who or citing sources, don’t cut the mustard, not so much because they “fly in the face of the
facts” as that they betray a mammoth irresponsibility toward the norm-governed practice of justifying
whatever one claims to be true in a manner consistent with shared standards of evidence and
inference. There is something worthy of guilt and shame to fail to follow these norms. If Trump has no shame,
which I think clearly is the case, one cannot assume that everyone in his base lacks it as well.

It is thus wrong and counterproductive to accuse avid Trump supporters of stupidity. Partly because “Trump supporters” are a heterogeneous
lot, and no one should assume that they all have the same axe to grind or the same sociopolitical agenda, and therefore can be dismissed in the
manner of, say, a Bill Maher as a collection of Yahoos. But stupidity is not what is at stake here. A kind of irresponsibility is, though. For to talk
of “alternative facts,” as Kellyanne Conway did, or to unthinkingly accept them as gospel, without
acknowledging the social requirement of putting up good public reasons or shutting up, is to admit that
either one does not mean what one says, or does not care one way or the other. It is not to play the
game of political discourse by different rules. It is to refuse to play it at all. Some Trumpians fall into that category, I
think. And that is a kind of ethical failure.