Aporetics: Rational Deliberation in the Face of Inconsistency

1. The Nature of Apories

1  What Is an Apory? InGreek, aporíaliterally means animpasse, a blockagewherethereis no practicable way to go forward. The word eventually came to characterize any thing, situation—and even person!—who is difficult to deal with. In philosophy, it came to mean a puzzle, a perplexity, an intractable or at least deeply problematic issue. For present purposes, however, the term will be used in a more specific sense to characterize any cognitive situation in which the threat of inconsistency confronts us. Accordingly, an apory will here be understood as a group of individually plausible but collectively incompatible theses. A word on lexicography. In philosophical discussion, the Greek term aporia has been retained. This is a regrettable complication. For ease of usage, the term should be anglicized, along with harmony, symphony, melody, and, indeed, philosophy itself. Note, for the sake of illustration, the following cluster of contentions constitutes an apory:   1 The Nature of Apories 2 The Nature of Apriories 1. What the sight of our eyes tells us is to be believed. 2. Sight tells us the stick is bent. 3. What the touch of our hands tells us is to be believed. 4. Touch tells us the stick is straight. Here each thesis may seem undividedly plausible, but they conjoin to issue in inconsistency. And owing to the contradiction that arises among them, these statements cannot be maintained together. The interests of mere self-consistency require that at least one of them has to be abandoned and replaced—or at least qualified. With apories we thus have not only a collective inconsistency but superadd to this a conception of plausibility that enables us to retain as much information conveyed by the conflicting propositions at issue as the logic of the situation and the cognitive possibilities at hand permit. Or again concern the following claims: • Every person has some weight or other. • The weight of a person is given by a particular mathematical quantity. • Every particular mathematical quantity is accurate to ten decimal places. • The weight of a person is accurate to ten decimal places. Here again, we have individually plausible contentions that are collectively inconsistent. And it is just this that constitutes an apory. Situations of this aporetic nature arise in very different contexts of application. In addressing cognitive problems we seek to maximize our opportunities by pressing matters to the limits. We thus embark on speculations that not only reach but also overreach, and thereby plunge into inconsistency. This process reflects a general— and understandable—tendency to hypertrophy that manifests itself in many areas as populations or organizations grow to a point that threatens their very viability. And just this is a phenomenon that we encounter in various cognitive contexts; for our inclinations to ac- The Nature of Apriories 3 cept, or to conjecture, and even merely to suppose, often plunge us into inconsistency. Just here is the explanation for the pervasive proliferation of aporetic situations across a varied range of informationmanagement settings. The resolution of apories calls for a plausibility analysis that enables the chain of inconsistency to be broken at the weakest link. The factisthatanyandeveryaporycanberesolvedbysimplyabandoning some (or all) of the commitments whose conjoining creates a contradiction . In principle, the apory management is thus a straightforward process that calls for appraising the comparative plausibility of what we accept, and then restoring consistency by making what is less plausible give way to what is more so. It is this generic and uniform structure of inconsistency management that paves the way to that single overarching discipline of aporetics.1 The exploration of this domain is the principal task of the present book, whose central thesis is that there indeed is such a general and uniform approach to the rational management of apories. Useofthisaporeticmethoddoesnotissueinaguaranteeoftruth. All that the analysis is able to do for us is optimize—that is, to maximize plausibility via considerations of systemic coherence in matters of question-resolution. Aporetics is thus less a method of innovation than of regimentation: its task is not to engender new insights but to bring systemic order and coherence into those we already have. In Leibnizian terms, it is not an ars inveniedi but an ars componendi.  What Does Confronting an Apory Require? Theprimedirectiveofcognitiverationalityistomaintainconsistency and consequently to restore consistency to inconsistent situations. To be sure, it is a possible reaction to paradox simply to take contradictions in stride. With Pascal, we might accept contradictions for the sake of greater interests...