Treating wrongness as a quantity is at best a poor proxy for refusing to engage with people arguing in bad faith.
It does seem right to refuse to engage with people who don’t seem like they’re trying to process your argument, since that can mislead onlookers into thinking there’s a serious deliberative process going on (so they might try to triangulate from participants’ points of view rather than considering arguments). If someone’s trying to get the right answer, that’s not really a problem, since they should presumably move pretty quickly towards your point of view if you are in fact right (and vice versa).
To give a somewhat more concrete/colorful example, offering a “defense” at a show trial with a predetermined verdict creates the impression that there’s a court trying to figure out what the right answer is, when there isn’t. (Related: it’s quite important that three people were found not guilty at Nuremberg, since is implies can.)
People who are not trying to get the right answer are going to be wronger than average, so these things will be positively correlated.
There’s another thing that is quite different from a process perspective, but can look superficially similar: people in power often try to arrange things so that the powerless can’t be heard. Thus, “X is not worth engaging with” isn’t in itself a good or bad sign about someone’s epistemic virtue; one has to look into what’s going on and assess which side (if any) is proceeding in good faith.
Treating wrongness as a quantity is at best a poor proxy for refusing to engage with people arguing in bad faith.
It does seem right to refuse to engage with people who don’t seem like they’re trying to process your argument, since that can mislead onlookers into thinking there’s a serious deliberative process going on (so they might try to triangulate from participants’ points of view rather than considering arguments). If someone’s trying to get the right answer, that’s not really a problem, since they should presumably move pretty quickly towards your point of view if you are in fact right (and vice versa).
To give a somewhat more concrete/colorful example, offering a “defense” at a show trial with a predetermined verdict creates the impression that there’s a court trying to figure out what the right answer is, when there isn’t. (Related: it’s quite important that three people were found not guilty at Nuremberg, since is implies can.)
People who are not trying to get the right answer are going to be wronger than average, so these things will be positively correlated.
(Cross-posted from Katja’s blog)
There’s another thing that is quite different from a process perspective, but can look superficially similar: people in power often try to arrange things so that the powerless can’t be heard. Thus, “X is not worth engaging with” isn’t in itself a good or bad sign about someone’s epistemic virtue; one has to look into what’s going on and assess which side (if any) is proceeding in good faith.