RECONCILIATION

Let us begin with a frank question: How is conflict resolution possible in the abstract sciences? So far I have been emphasizing the cost-benefit factors that attach to ad hominem maneuvers. Actual argumentative practice suggest five prominent forms of the ad hominem.

1. arguments per impossibile

2. reductio ad absurdum arguments

3. reductio ad falsum arguments

4. refutations of the Aristotelian sort

5. other arguments from cost.

Since each of these is a strategy for winning an opponent to the antagonist's view of things, or to get the opponent to abandon the defense and advocacy of his own version of those matters, it is appropriate that we give these five dialectical techniques the general name of procedures for surrender.

We have seen that reductio arguments, as they are standardly described by logicians, are caught in the maw of Philosophy's Most Difficult Problem (one disputant's reductio is another disputant's proof of a surprising truth). We shall have later occasion to see that not even the argument per impossibile escapes this snare.

Of the five, the last two – refutations and arguments from cost – stand out for the resistance they make possible to the Problems' indeterminacy.