adelino.cattani@unipd.it

"Xaì prôtos éphe dúo lógous eînai perì pantòs prágmatos antikeiménous allélois" (Diogenes Laertius on Protagoras, 9.51).

This famous saying expresses in a nutshell the essence of controversy-based thought. In this paper, I will discuss a philological problem and an epistemic trouble posed by Protagoras’s saying – a saying which is abundantly echoed in the classical tradition.

I. The philological problem:  how to interpret "perì pantòs prágmatos"? Does it mean “on every subject” (on every issue, on every question) or “on every object” (on every reality, in every experience)? In the first case, we have a subjective reading of  pragmata; in the second, an objective (or heraclitean) interpretation, as notes Edward Schiappa (1991: 90). He points out that "the modern philosophical dichotomy of subjective/objective was not yet clearly conceived in fifth-century Athens" (p. 91) and  that the first step in recovering the significance of Protagoras's two-logoi fragment is to set aside the subjective interpretation as an unfaithful rendering of logos and pragmata.

II. The epistemic trouble: pro two-logoi or against two--logoi?

1. Pro: Our system of life and of knowledge is intrinsically adversarial in its structure. The legal system empowers the idea that justice and truth spring from two polarised oppositions. Politics is naturally oppositional and partisan. Great educational emphasis is set on the employment of antithetical ideas: a thing is known better from an adequate consideration of its contrary. So opposition and agonism are considered as a method of developing knowledge, society and technique: "Opposition is a condition of advance both in the manufacture of armaments, for new weapons of attack are countered by new weapons of defence, and in the arts of peaceful government, through parliamentary institutions for the party in opposition must have an alternative programme and be set on becoming the party in office" (Gilby 1949: 110).
2. Against: Continual reference to the other side results in a pervasive conviction that everything has another side - with the result that people begin to doubt the existence of any fact at all. This is the position of Deborah Tannen: the idea that every issue has two sides is troublesome because it may happen that there is no other side, but only one side, namely truth. Whenever this is the case, one-sidedness is a must. The dramatic example of Holocaust denial is pivotal. Those who deny the Holocaust or slavery are exploiting our two-sides faith. To set the historical documentation and the its negation on an equal footing does not seem to be an equilibrated solution (Tannen 1999: 37, 39).

The problem with two-logoi arguments is, first, that arguments for and arguments against are merely juxtaposed, without yielding a choice between the alternatives, and, second, that opposition does not lead to truth when there are not two opposite sides but many sides. However, the problem of deciding and resolving the conflict remains also with "threefold" or "manyfold" arguments. Nor does it vanish when one simply assumes that there are "objective" reasons, whose value to resolve conflicts is taken to be their “obvious” superiority over "fallacious" reasons and "subjective" perceptions.

References

Gilby, T. 1949. Barbara Celarent. London: Longmans Green.

Rhetoric. Columbia, NC: University of South Carolina Press.

Tannen, D. 1999. The Argument Culture. New York: Ballantine Books.