Consistency and Correctness

When I am participating or observing a philosophical discussion, whether it be about religion or politics or science there are two measurements that I have come to use in regards to evaluating the participants positions.

The first is correctness. Do I think they are correct. Usually this is a measure of how much they agree with me, but not always. How else do you change your mind? Usually the more they agree with me the less interested I am in discussing the topic at hand because it becomes boring. An echo chamber is nice to a point, but eventually I want to hear something different.

The second is consistency. Are there arguments consistent and well thought out. This really is the messier of the two, and the one where the most people fall off the wagon so to speak. It's easy to hold an opinion. And it's easy to talk about that opinion for the thirty seconds or so required to burn through a half dozen bumper sticker slogans. Well thought out and internally consistent opinions are a little more rare.

So all together there are four classifications of opinions/arguments.

1. Correct and consistent
2. Incorrect and consistent
3. Correct and inconsistent
4. Incorrect and inconsistent

I think I'm going to talk about them in more detail tomorrow. It is late.