End of Story

"To be sure," Wittgenstein once remarked, "there is justification; but justification comes to an end." ¹ Judging from the testimony of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, here is how the problem of the justification of competing claims concerning the status of Schleswig-Holstein came to an end, in or about late 1863: "There are only three men who have ever understood it—one was Prince Albert, who is dead; the second was a German professor, who became mad. I am the third—and I have forgotten all about it." ² Of course, the matter of Schleswig-Holstein did not end in this way, courtesy of Otto von Bismarck (mostly): it provisionally ended with a brief war between Prussia and Denmark (in 1864), and then it provisionally ended again with another brief war (between Prussia and Austria) in 1866. The fact remains that Palmerston nicely describes the end of a problem, and hence the end of an argument, by describing the elimination of all of those who in respect to this particular problem were endowed with the power to articulate competing claims. Given that, in Palmerston's version of the Schleswig-Holstein affair, there were only three such people, the fact that one died, the second went insane, and the third forgot what was supposed to be the case, effectively ended the problem as such.

The Usual Motives

What is remarkable about this Palmerston doctrine is that the end of an argument is not attributed to any of the usual motives. The usual motives are three. First, an argument may end because one of the participants has demonstrated that everybody else's view was inconsistent or false or both, and because that demonstration has been accepted by everybody involved. We could call this the Protarchus motif. In Plato's Philebus, Protarchus, Socrates' interlocutor, remarks, toward the end: "The point has been reached, Socrates, at which we all agree that your conclusions are completely true." ³

Second, an argument may end because one of the participants has persuaded the others to drop certain (but not necessarily all) of their views. The fact that one has been persuaded by someone else usually elicits less effusive manifestations of agreement, and so there are really not many analogues of Protarchus's straightforward avowal. Even Gorgias's flattering self-description, in Plato's eponymous dialogue ("The rhetorician is competent to speak against anybody on any subject, and to prove himself more convincing before a crowd on practically every topic he wishes"), ⁴ testifies to the fact that persuasion remains in most cases shorthand for something one does to someone else, not for something someone else has done to us. Under the latter circumstances, one usually prefers to talk about truth or true beliefs, or about knowing it all along.

Third, an argument may end because someone (or everyone) was converted to a given view, although not by the means of any specific act of persuasion: this is the classic Pauline (or, rather, Sauline) case. Judging from the Acts of the Apostles, it would be, I think, utterly wrong to say that Saul, on his way to Damascus, after having heard the voice of God, could either reiterate the words of Protarchus or claim that he had been persuaded to change certain of his beliefs. God, meanwhile, is not known for impersonating Gorgias: omnipotence does not require persuasion.

Moreover, each of these usual motives often develops into a full-fledged way of paraphrasing the other motives. For Protarchus, demonstrations such as Socrates' appear to be members of the class of rational ways of ending an argument, whereas cases of persuasion would, at best, correspond to the (spurious) class of pseudo-rational ways of ending an argument. No Protarchus, Aristotle famously remarked that these are instead sort of rational ways of settling disputes. "Persuasion," he held in the Rhetoric, "is a sort of demonstration" that deals with "the approximately true." ⁵ And yet the approximately true is not merely false, as it is apprehended by the same...