Articles by Robert Talisse

Just a quick distraction from the excellent discussion of David’s book. A short pop piece that I wrote with my friend Yvonne Raley titled “Getting Duped” is about to appear in Scientific American Mind. “Getting Duped” identifies a new fallacy, a twist on the Straw Man, called The Weak Man, in which one picks one’s weakest opponent, soundly refutes him or her, and then claims that the weak opponent is representative of the strength of all opposition to one’s view. The claim is made that much of the polarized discourse in popular political commentary employs this fallacy (viz., refute Ward Churchill, then claim to have refuted Noam Chomsky). Anyway, I thought it might of of interest. Here’s a link to the piece: “Getting Duped.”

It should be mentioned that “Getting Duped” draws on a paper I co-authored with Scott Aikin that appeared in Argumentation titled “Two Forms of the Straw Man”.

Comments, criticisms, thoughts, refutations, etc. are of course welcome.

Just a quick note to Public Reasoners: I’ve taken up the editorship of Public Affairs Quarterly. I’m still getting my bearings, and submissions info on the journal webpage needs updating, etc., but I hope you will keep PAQ in mind for your work.

Happy New Year to all,

–Bob

I’ve been working on Berlin-style value pluralism lately. I’m particularly concerned with the attempt (made by Galston and Crowder, among others) to derive liberal political commitments from value pluralism. My sense is that value pluralism has no entailments regarding politics. But that’s a topic for another day. I’m writing here to try to get some help on the meaning of a comment by Bernard Williams frequently cited approvingly in the value pluralist literature.

In his introduction to Berlin’s *Concepts and Categories*, Williams claims that “if there are many and competing values, then the greater the extent to which a society tends to be single-valued, the more genuine values it neglects or suppresses. More, to this extent, must mean better.”

Maybe I’m just being thick-headed about this, but I don’t see how “more must mean better,” unless some common measure among values is presupposed; but value pluralists must deny that this kind of common measure exists (the lack of common measure in part explains the incommensurability among values and the unavailability of rational rank-orderings among them). So it seems to me that Williams’ “better” must not mean *morally* better. But if that’s the case, then I don’t see how Williams’ point is of much use to the value pluralist.

Am I missing a natural reading of Williams’ comment that’s both consistent with value pluralism and of use for making the case that value pluralism entails liberalism?