Strawmen and Worldview Solipsism
How our concepts carve up the world informs our views more than explicit argumentation
Recently, I’ve been reading The Beginnings of Western Science by David Lindberg. Early on he discusses societies without writing, and says that many of our explanations would be simply unsatisfactory to those living within oral traditions. Our views of causality would be too impersonal and too general. People and animals are the animating forces in their world, and events have individual circumstances. The idea of explaining the weather in terms of ever-present impersonal forces just wouldn’t feel like an actual explanation.
Lindberg argues that the invention of writing made it possible to notice new kinds of patterns, and with them, develop more general and impersonal explanations. When Babylonians began systematically recording celestial observations, long-term regularities became visible. This led to the recognition of patterns that were extrapolated into predictions. Writing allowed for abstractions and comparisons that would otherwise be difficult, and these new patterns gradually made impersonal and general explanations feel more natural and satisfying.
It’s easy to imagine that, if you were to talk to someone from an entirely oral tradition and try to explain our modern understanding of some aspect of the world, there would be a lot of talking past each other. Saying that storms arise from interacting atmospheric pressures, temperature gradients, and moisture levels would strike them as too abstract to count as an explanation of this particular storm. Instead they prefer explanations that are personal and more specific—a storm spirit is angry right now, for example.
There’s a conceptual gulf that makes communication difficult. We don’t always appreciate the conceptual resources we are using that make things seem obvious.
From Oral History to Internet Arguments
If you spend any time in the weird corners of the internet obsessed with philosophy, you’ll see the same patterns again and again around some of the “big topics”.
People on each side think their side is obviously correct. They’ll marshall simple 3 or 4 premise arguments, seemingly deductively proving their conclusion. The other side has their similarly short arguments showing the truth of their position. No one is convinced of anything except that the other side is utterly irrational.
This dynamic plays out in debates around the existence of God, free-will, morality, and the nature of the mind.
I’m not going to rehash arguments here. Instead, I want to suggest that (at least much of the time) the two sides aren’t making contact because of differences in how people on each side conceptually break down the world. Just as it would be hard to overcome the gap between yourself and someone from an entirely oral tradition, people from the two sides can end up talking past each other due to conceptual mismatches.
I’ve talked about this before in the context of arguments about God. The philosopher Paul Thagard has suggested that the concept of God is entwined with our views of the mind to the point where it is difficult to separate the two.
If you take minds to be metaphysically simple, fundamental things, it’s not such a big leap to get to God. A “cosmic mind” would explain an awful lot! I see the typical arguments for God (there needing to be a first cause, or the seeming design of the universe) less as deductive proofs and more as attempts to make an inference to the best explanation. We know minds cause stuff, and we know they’re good at designing stuff, so a theory that says “All this was designed and caused by a mind” seems like a good inference.
On the other hand, if you don’t see minds as simple, fundamental things, this is going to be a hard sell. Lacking an explanation for how the universe started or its seeming design/fine-tuning isn’t a reason to jump to a very specific and complex explanation. The only minds we know of are highly structured and arose through a long process of evolution by natural selection to solve particular problems. A cosmic mind is going to seem an unlikely and unsatisfactory theory to someone who thinks about minds this way.
I’m not claiming this diagnoses every internet argument about God, and I’m not trying to take a side (though for the record, I’m an atheist). The point is these discussions often smuggle in deeper conceptual commitments that aren’t explicitly acknowledged. Like explaining impersonal causal mechanisms to someone from an oral tradition, theists and atheists may end up talking past each other because they lack a shared conceptual foundation.
I suspect similar subtle and hard-to-pinpoint mismatches underlie many of these types of debates.
Steelmen
It’s common in internet arguments to hear one side accused of constructing a “strawman” of the other side—a caricature of the view that’s easy to knock down, but doesn’t faithfully represent their views.
Strawmen happen all the time—they’re particularly obvious in political discourse, where emotionally charged attacks portray the “other side” as holding absurd views. Encouraged by their own side, people say incredibly uncharitable (and unlikely) things, and steadfastly refuse to consider how the other side thinks.
More interesting are the strawmen in philosophy. Galen Strawson (fitting name) famously caricatured rival philosopher Dennett as denying consciousness exists, saying:
If [Dennett] is right, no one has ever really suffered, in spite of agonizing diseases, mental illness, murder, rape, famine, slavery, bereavement, torture, and genocide. And no one has ever caused anyone else pain.
Dennett replied that he was not denying consciousness. The dispute is how we understand it. Is there some fundamental, essential nature to it, as Strawson thinks, or can it be explained through brain function, as Dennett thinks? Since Strawson sees consciousness as inseparable from his essentialist conception, Dennett’s rejection of that conception is interpreted as a rejection of consciousness itself.
Similarly, in a recent interview, philosopher Matthew David Segall claimed that materialism (the view that stuff is all made out of physical matter, not the consumerist kind of materialism) entails a loss of meaning:
Without a celestial sense or intimate relation to the whole we become as nothing, nihil. [...] No glut of pleasure or scramble for status can fill the hole left by being severed from the whole. Materialism is dangerous because it confuses us into believing that personhood and freedom are fables.
According to Segall, meaning and freedom cannot be properly grounded in a materialist worldview. No matter that many people who would count as “materialists” in this sense live rich, meaningful lives that go well beyond “scrambling for status” or a “glut of pleasure,” or that the majority of philosophers working within a physicalist framework also endorse a compatibilist notion of free will.
Why would the celestial sense or intimate relation to the whole matter for how much I love my family or the meaning I get out of building something? It isn’t clear to me, but I have the self-awareness to recognize this is just a difference in how Matthew conceptualizes these concepts. I wouldn’t claim his view doesn’t have real meaning just because he grounds it in a way different than mine.
What’s interesting about these types of strawmen is they involve a sort of worldview solipsism. If a concept isn’t grounded the same way in your view as it is in mine, it must not exist.
Of course there are plenty of examples of strawmen from all sorts of views—internet atheists claiming all Christians deny science, or physicalists about the mind claiming dualists believe it’s just a coincidence that brain damage impairs the mind. It’s the same sort of thing—imagining that if the conceptual connections in my view aren’t present, there can’t be any conceptual connections at all.
The opposite of a strawman is a steelman—putting forward the best possible version of your opponent’s view, and arguing against it. Articulating the view in such a way that the appeal of it is clear, and your opponent would gladly accept that as what their view is.
Steelmanning isn’t just polite. If you’re able to put yourself in the shoes of someone who holds an opposing view, you’re showing you can conceptualize the world the same way they do—you just think your view is a better theory. It’s a better way to show that your inference really is to the best explanation—or at least a better explanation than your opponent—if you clearly understand them and can articulate them in a way they would accept. You need to show you see the value of the alternative on offer to claim your view is better.
When people aren’t able to do this, and regard opposing views as ridiculous or obviously stupid (Strawson calls Dennett’s view “the silliest claim ever made”), it tells me they don’t “get” it. There’s some kind of conceptual breakdown. That doesn’t give me any confidence they’re right, because they don’t understand the explanatory landscape of the other side.
I don’t want to fight tonight
I think there’s value in explicit arguments. Being forced to articulate your position is often a clarifying (and humbling) process. Responding to challenges can help you see gaps in your understanding of your own view, and help mature it. Arguments are also useful for learning what motivates other positions. And, of course, sometimes arguments do change minds.
That said, I’m not particularly fond of getting into direct arguments. It’s not (just) because they can be uncomfortable and adversarial, but especially as I’ve gotten older and my views on typical contentious topics have matured, I rarely find they’re constructive.
If I think of significant things that have changed my worldview over the years, I can’t think of any that came from an explicit argument that my position was wrong. They instead came from encountering a new idea or framework that made sense of some part of the world.
Reading a bunch of economics books gave me a new way of seeing economic systems and changed my views on a bunch of political policy issues. Learning statistics and machine learning allowed me to think about the world in distributions rather than binaries. Learning about evolution by natural selection as a teen completely flipped my world upside down. These ideas enriched how I see the world, sharpened some of my views, and outright changed others.
In the end I care less about convincing people than about improving my understanding of the world and providing other people with bits that I found helpful in that goal. I suspect when understanding deepens, naive views often don’t need to be outright rebutted, they’re simply outgrown. Just as written records opened the eyes of the ancient Babylonians to new patterns, and that led to new conceptual frames for understanding the world, I hope new knowledge will lead to similar revolutions in my own thinking.
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Thank you for this piece. The concept of "Worldview Solipsism" is a really clear way to frame it, So many debates, or even conversations, feel like facts often bounce off your partner - not because they are stubborn, but because those facts don't have a conceptual "hook" to land on in their reality. I think Haidt and Kahneman have some very interesting points on that topic in terms of how we actually reason.
Your point about steelmanning was great. I totally agree that if you can't express the strongest form of what someone else believes, it's probably because you don't understand it. Though I would add that people hold beliefs for a complex mosaic of reasons. Often, the explicit argument they present is just one tile in that mosaic. As such, in any conversation, even if you manage to perfectly represent one tile it might not make sense without the rest of the structure. To truly steelman someone, you have to understand their whole mosaic, not just the one argument they are presenting at that moment.
Given your mention of the classic atheist/theist chasm, I can speak as someone who has lived on both sides of the divide. I grew up as a Dawkinsesque Atheist and spent decades in that conceptual framework. My conversion to Christianity wasn't the result of losing a single logical argument, but rather a paradigm shift which resulted in all the the tectonic plates of my worldview shuffling around.
Personally, the catalyst was actually the fine-tuning argument. I initially dismissed it as a kind of awkward puzzle that surely had some alternative solution. But as I began to question whether my materialist presuppositions were the only valid way to view the universe, the "best explanation" suddenly shifted. The "cosmic mind" you mentioned moved from looking like a completely unreasonable question begging to an unlikely hypothesis to the most elegant solution. It was, in a sense, exactly like you described with the oral vs. written traditions: once the conceptual framework shifted, the data points organized themselves into a completely different pattern.
So much of life is about trying to navigate miscommunication and alternative ways of viewing the world. It's a shame that it seems to be a topic so little thought about! I look forward to reading more of your work.
Very well said! Much of philosophy-Substack needs to read this post.