For what do we promise in a discussion? To establish what is true, to remove what is false, to withhold assent in what is uncertain. Is it enough then merely to learn that this is so?
“It is enough.”
Is it enough then for him who wishes not to go wrong in the use of coin merely to be told why you accept genuine drachmas and reject spurious ones?
“It is not enough.”
What then must you acquire besides? Surely you must have a faculty to test and distinguish genuine drachmas from spurious.
Is it not true then, in regard to argument also, that merely to hear what is said is not enough; a man must acquire the faculty to test and distinguish the true from the false and the uncertain?
“It must be so.”
This being so, what is required in argument?
“Accept what follows from the premises you have duly granted.”
Here again, is it enough merely to know this? No, you must learn how a conclusion follows from the premises, and how sometimes one proposition follows from one other, and sometimes from many together.
Amidst all the rules that we are told must be good, and all the statements that we are expected to embrace as correct, we will often overlook our own powers of discernment.
There will be no merit in a law that cannot be shown to be just, and there will be no authority in an assertion that cannot be demonstrated. If I am unable to distinguish between the true and the false, the right and the wrong, any one affirmation will be just as acceptable as any other.
It is usually our unwillingness to judge correctly, and not some inherent unintelligibility to the Universe, that so quickly leads us down the path of relativism.
It will be necessary to differentiate what we know from what we do not know, and yet to say that alone is still not sufficient. In order to affirm that something is true or false, I will also have to understand how and why it is true or false; it is the proof itself that ties down the conclusion, which would otherwise have no weight and just float away.
Epictetus offers a helpful analogy: it is certainly good business to work with genuine currency, and bad business to work with counterfeit currency, but that guideline will be quite useless if I cannot first tell the one from the other.
As a child I was amused by those scenes in old Western films, where a cowboy would bite down on a coin before accepting it. It never seemed to do anything with my own nickels or dimes, and it was all a mystery until years later, when someone was kind enough to explain that it was a way to test for the purity of gold.
It’s something like saying I should trust honest people, and not trust dishonest people, even as I have no standard to know who’s who.
Perhaps it is sufficient, therefore, to only accept conclusions that follow from premises? Yes, but from what sort of premises, and in what way are they crafted together to form an entire demonstration? What is the order of these connections, and how many steps must I make?
If I claim that I will only follow the lead of a good argument, I now face the task of actually identifying the nature of a good argument.
“Are all those details really that important? What about the big picture?”
The devil is in the details. There is no whole painting without many careful strokes of the brush.
If, for example, I hear someone telling me to eat a healthy diet, he would be entirely correct. This will be meaningless to me, however, if I cannot identify what constitutes such a diet, and it will be totally arbitrary without also providing a reasonable explanation for why it is healthy.
“I’ll take a diet soda with my burger and fries.” No, that won’t do, and it helps for me to understand why that is the case.
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