The first argument is valid in principle but liable to mislead in practice. That is: yes, “here is a historical example where you could have followed this approach, and we can see that the result would have been bad” is indeed an argument against the thing under consideration; but in historical examples it’s very often true that the people we’re talking about were (from today’s perspective) terribly underinformed or misinformed about many things, and in that situation it’s perfectly possible for good things to lead to bad results.
For instance, it is arguable that the heliocentric models of Galileo’s time were not initially much better than the geocentric ones (if indeed they were better at all) and that a reasonable person then would not necessarily have been on Galileo’s side. Richard Dawkins has famously said that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, and that before Darwin design arguments made theism hard to avoid. For those of us who are heliocentrists and atheists, does this mean that there’s something wrong with rationality, since it would have led to wrong answers in those cases? No, it means that there was something wrong with the information available in those historical situations.
These are great points. I think the strategy is particularly useful against one sided arguments. In the case of my example it was someone suggesting that high IQ is the sole measure of value and I can thus use the strategy with confidence to point to the existence of other parameters.
But you are making another point that I am very interested in and have touched upon in the past:
For those of us who are heliocentrists and atheists, does this mean that there’s something wrong with rationality, since it would have led to wrong answers in those cases? No, it means that there was something wrong with the information available in those historical situations.
Since rationality is dependant on available information it can be said there was something wrong with that ‘rational assesment’ though not with rationality itself. But we should then attend to the fact that our information is still incomplete (to say the least). I touched on a related point in my post Too Much Effort | Too Little Evidence.
I have been attempting to compose a more formal exploration of this issue for some time, but it is quite difficult to formulate properly (and also a bit intimidating to present it, from all places, to the rationalist community, haha).
The first argument is valid in principle but liable to mislead in practice. That is: yes, “here is a historical example where you could have followed this approach, and we can see that the result would have been bad” is indeed an argument against the thing under consideration; but in historical examples it’s very often true that the people we’re talking about were (from today’s perspective) terribly underinformed or misinformed about many things, and in that situation it’s perfectly possible for good things to lead to bad results.
For instance, it is arguable that the heliocentric models of Galileo’s time were not initially much better than the geocentric ones (if indeed they were better at all) and that a reasonable person then would not necessarily have been on Galileo’s side. Richard Dawkins has famously said that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, and that before Darwin design arguments made theism hard to avoid. For those of us who are heliocentrists and atheists, does this mean that there’s something wrong with rationality, since it would have led to wrong answers in those cases? No, it means that there was something wrong with the information available in those historical situations.
These are great points. I think the strategy is particularly useful against one sided arguments. In the case of my example it was someone suggesting that high IQ is the sole measure of value and I can thus use the strategy with confidence to point to the existence of other parameters.
But you are making another point that I am very interested in and have touched upon in the past:
Since rationality is dependant on available information it can be said there was something wrong with that ‘rational assesment’ though not with rationality itself. But we should then attend to the fact that our information is still incomplete (to say the least). I touched on a related point in my post Too Much Effort | Too Little Evidence.
I have been attempting to compose a more formal exploration of this issue for some time, but it is quite difficult to formulate properly (and also a bit intimidating to present it, from all places, to the rationalist community, haha).