Transcendental Argumentation and the Epistemics of Discourse
Epistemic Status: Exploratory. This post attempts to formalize a pattern in discourse ethics and rational cooperation using the lens of transcendental argumentation.
Epistemic Effort: Several hours of writing and reflection on philosophical and rationalist frameworks of communication.
Motivation: To analyze how the logical structure of discourse itself constrains what can be coherently argued.
Introduction
This post explores the idea that certain logical structures — what might be called transcendental argumentation — are necessary for coherent and cooperative discourse. Violations of these structures lead to epistemic decoherence, performative contradictions, and moral implications for communication itself.
The Foundations of Transcendental Argumentation
Transcendental argumentation is one of the foundational logical tools for rational communication. The very nature and context of communication itself become foundational axioms for deduction.
If two agents decide to engage in discourse, the foremost logical deductions they can necessarily agree upon are the conditions of the exchange: that each agent is, in some way, ontologically dissimilar from the other, and that both act under the belief that engaging in discourse has some utility.
These priors automatically narrow the scope of language each agent can use, should they choose to continue the dialectic in good faith—aiming not to subvert the other agent through lying or otherwise manipulating their interlocutor. Violations of transcendental argumentation are some of the first indicators of deviation from a contract of mutually beneficial discourse.
Language as a Moral Medium
Language and argumentation—the compression and imprinting of world models across agents—naturally carry moral consequence, as the decompression and integration of any language into one’s world model have consequences.
There’s no free lunch, and no free words.
The implicit understanding in discourse, philosophy, and scientific inquiry requires cooperation around a normative framework—namely, that all participants must engage sincerely, truthfully, and cooperatively toward understanding.
Deviations from this lead to the epistemic decoherence of at least one party, slowly shifting the playing field from one of seeking truth to one that instills or reifies power asymmetries.
Performative Contradictions and Decoherence
One of the most insidious forms of language that causes decoherence is the performative contradiction: a set of propositions logically incoherent with the context from which they arise.
For example:
“No one should tell anyone else how to act, ever, under any circumstances.”
The act of declaring this statement publicly undermines its own normative suggestion.
Modern culture has several short-hands for agreed-upon priors which, over time and through omission, lend our language to become more easily embedded with such contradictions. Nihilism, as it is often understood, is one such attractor basin.
Transcendentally Null Argumentation
It is transcendentally null to argue for the belief that humans themselves are not dissimilar from other matter in any meaningful way. The very act of selecting that argument demonstrates that one finds humans much more important than other matter.
You’re not arguing with or screaming into a pile of dust.
It would be more appropriate to say:
“Humans are not dissimilar to any other matter we can observe through the tools of science, or that we might surmise would be observable within the value system of a non-human third-party observer.”
In almost all cases of transcendentally null argumentation, the world state contained within the argument or counterfactual is completely decohered from the context in which it was made.
This creates two different ‘worlds’ within logic:
The real world, where the context contains certain priors for language to be exchanged.
The logical model of the world, contained or suggested within the language itself.
An incoherent, bad, or duplicitous argument arises when these two universes of logic cannot cohere transcendentally for both parties.
The Case of Newcomb’s Problem
Most notably, I find that this decoherence erodes or confuses otherwise simple and easily understood problems when such transcendentally null priors sneak their way into counter factuals.
I personally don’t see how one can be a proponent of any line of reasoning concluding in two-boxing in Newcomb’s Problem without suffering from such decoherence.
Transcendentally, anyone who argues for applying such a theory will be caught by the predictor. There is no other universe where the logic of the argument can be applied in the absence of the argument’s very existence.
Such theories rely on decoherence and are therefore self-refuting or epistemically inert.
Closing Thoughts
Cohere the logic-verse, and such meaningless scenarios evaporate.
Rational discourse presupposes moral cooperation. Transcendental argumentation makes explicit what is often implicit: that coherence, sincerity, and shared priors are prerequisites for any pursuit of truth.
Paying attention to the context of the argument ultimately unclouds our biases and makes the detection of their utilization—in cases of intentional duplicity or subversion—easier to find.
I don’t have a great grasp of what is meant, in philosophy since Kant, by a transcendental argument. It seems to be an argument appealing to (supposedly) inescapable presuppositions. Does that mean, for example, that when Ayn Rand says that existence, consciousness, and identity are inescapably presupposed by all thought, she is making a transcendental argument when she criticizes someone else for denying them? (She just calls them axiomatic.) How about an attempt to justify the anthropic principle—e.g., when you examine the nature of the world in which you exist, it must turn out to be a world in which you can exist—would that be a transcendental argument?
In the present context, do you consider transcendental arguments to already be in use here, we just didn’t recognize them as such? Or are there several issues that could be resolved more effectively, if we recognized that transcendental arguments are exactly what is called for? Or is it just that the theory and practice of transcendental argument ought to be in the rationalist repertoire?
These are great questions!
I’m not deeply familiar with, nor a supporter of, Ayn Rand’s broader philosophical framework, but it does sound as though she employs transcendental argumentation. Consciousness and existence are classic examples —the very act of denying them (broadly) presupposes a witness to some event, which in general terms implies both existence and subjectivity.
I think your point on anthropic reasoning is apt, and there is absolutely an intuition there. The broader point may be that no “many-worlds” scenarios or counter-factual multiverses we consider when playing out decision strategies can violate the requirement that each scenario necessarily needs to co-exist with this world state now.
To argue that there could be a world where, for example, you decide to “two-box” on Newcombs problem without being the type of person who argues that very statement is meaningless. The possibility of such a world is eliminated by virtue of the justification.
Identifying cases of transcendentally null argumentation has probably been one of the strongest reasoning techniques for me to dialectically synthesize toward a first-principles model aligned with contemporary understanding. And so, if its not part of the toolkit under a different name, I wanted to share it for consideration. If it is deliberately not in the toolbox—I’d be fascinated to learn the reasons for why not.
As for examples of transcendentally null argumentation, I will add another blog post outlining some grittier examples—but here are a few quick ones:
“There are no objective truths — everything is just perspective.”—To assert that claim as true is already to step outside relativism. If everything is just perspective, then that very claim is also “just perspective”, which means it carries no binding force on anyone else reasoning.
“All moral claims are expressions of emotion, not truth-apt statements.”—If moral claims are never truth-apt, then this moral claim (“no moral claims are truth-apt”) is also not truth-apt—so why should anyone take it seriously?