Fleshing Out A Concept Of Plausibility Tolerance

Note: This article is actually something that has been sitting on the backburner for a while, but now that I’m more available to work on the blog I wanted to get it out quickly. As always I reviewed it a number of times, but there may still be a few spelling errors or grammatical errors. Hopefully the content makes up for that, but if there are any apologies in advance. Without further adieu enter the article…

An argument that I’ve heard many different people make in various contexts is one regarding how we can essentially rank different subjective judgments by considering tangential information. A term I think summarizes what I think we’re trying to get at is something like “Plausibility Tolerance.” While I take no special credit for putting two words together or fleshing out this idea that many before me have touched upon, and I’m sure someone else has attempted to do what I’m doing here, I’d still like to talk about this because I think it is so infrequently visited as a valid thought framework. To say a little bit more about what plausibility tolerance is, essentially it’s the idea that although people may have their own takes or opinions on things, when an opinion starts to play the right or wrong game rather than the preference game, I think that is where this concept thrives. If someone recognizes various flavors of icecream not as good or bad, but as preferred or not to their tastes, then we needn’t really engage in further discussion. If instead someone makes an argument that coconut icecream is inferior to chocolate because fewer people consume it (for the sake of example), what this really is in my mind, is an attempt to muddy that you are making claims that live in the world of fact, by including a dirty move of sliding in a value judgment based on your own thinking. So how does Plausibility tolerance come into this domain? The idea is that we could, for instance, approximately determine what other people think about the two flavors and how they might process the previous value judgment. We could also gather some data about how people enjoy chocolate versus coconut icecream, and we could even make evolution based arguments about why certain people might prefer one over the other and what have you. The point is that even though coconut icecream being inferior to chocolate icecream is not a discussion of simple facts, it’s a discussion about how a large number of people might process that value judgment. So why do the numbers matter? Because a statement of inferiority becomes meaningless if only one crazy person really believes it. This is completely opposite to simple facts (probably not the best term) such as 2 + 2 being 4. That remains true regardless of how we may feel about it. Contrast this with a value judgement of inferiority, where in order for it to have an effect or to be considered basically true but not technically true if you will, you probably need support for the idea that seems significant in whatever population you are sampling.

Another better example we could use to flesh out plausibility tolerance is in conversations about art or music. One crucial point, that I tried to make before, is that in order for plausibility to matter is has to be anchored to something. If we ask “, is Billy Joel better than Madonna?” the question itself is underdetermined to the extent that we can’t be sure that Billy Joel and Madonna are actually comparable, and we also don’t know what we are comparing to rank them. Rank is the keyword here. In order for a hierarchy to arise in my sense, first a goal or destination point has to be set. Without this we can’t really compare various things even if they appear similar because we don’t know what we are trying to evaluate. If instead I offered a more specific question such as “, Is Billy Joel’s music more complex than Madonna’s?” the fantastic thing, is while this is still not objective, complexity is something that is study-able. We can listen to and disassemble the songs of each artist and go down the list, and make a fair judgment based on our findings. We may ultimately find that they play with complexity in different ways and in ways that aren’t easily comparable enough to rank them, which is fine. Plausibility tolerance really shines when juxtaposing extremes. When we rank two dissimilar things on some particular attribute it becomes easier to call bullshit. it should be noted that what plausibility tolerance buys us is the ability to not get stuck in conversations where someone asks a bad question like, “Is Art Tatum a better musician than Tupac?” We learn to reign in the conversation by sharpening up what we are trying to compare and make value judgments on. It’s easy to figure out which is sweeter between a stalk of celery and an apple, but what about two things that are similar in sweetness but in very different ways? Coming back to PT, if we want to ask “, is fool in the rain more complex than the band-aid brand jingle?” we can begin to make fair and reasonable assessments that get us closer to facts than preferences. What PT is really intended to do is deal with these numerable cases of things that live in-between simple facts and preferences and have productive conversations on these things, without devolving into mere wars of unresolvable differences in preference or opinion. Obviously one can make the argument that the band aid brand jingle and fool in the rain aren’t even comparable thus making the comparison and relevant value judgments void, but the problem with this, is they are comparable even if we would like them not to be. Opting out may be valid, depending on the question, but to be caught claiming the band aid brand jingle is as or more complex than fool in the rain would strike anyone as too “implausible” to be taken seriously.

I could probably say a decent amount more on this topic, but I think that I’ve essentially made my point. I hope this has been thought-provoking or useful in some way, and I hope you will be well.

Orion Aeneas Webster,

FourthEyeBlog Author