Experience, Theory and Argument

Richard Ostrofsky
(February, 1999)
O. Henry has a story called The Man Higher Up about three scoundrels (the
author just calls them Labor, Trade and Capital), all down on their luck and
flat broke. Labor cracks a safe, and gets them some eating money and a
modest stake. Trade uses the money to buy some gimcrack merchandise,
and the three friends go on to make a fortune, taking the rubes at country
fairs. Then they divide their profits and go their separate ways. Some years
later, Trade and Labor run into each other, again in dire straits, having lost
their life savings. It turns out that they had both invested in a real estate
scheme to purchase and develop some land in Florida that turned out to be
underwater. In further comparing notes, they at last figure out that the
mastermind behind this venture was (as you will certainly have guessed)
their old friend Capital: the man highest up. It may be interesting to
compare the powers and limitations of the three cognitive strategies called
experience, theory and argument by analogy with this economic parable.
Experience, like labor, is at the root of it all – the last resort when you
are out of ideas, and the first when you are just getting started. With a stock
of experience you can begin to theorize, aiming (like any good merchant) to
realize an intellectual profit through parsimony – by explaining much with
little. Experience and Theory are mutually dependent, of course, as labor is
with trade. The paradigms, concepts and models of theory enrich
experience; experience motivates and validates theory. Indeed, without
some prior body of theory – if only the theory embodied in the structure of
one’s own nervous system, no experience would be possible. The old dream
was that this spiral must wind round and round, ascending ever higher
toward some grand vision that would embrace absolutely everything.
However, for various reasons that need not concern us here, this outcome
no longer seems either feasible or desirable to many thinkers. Instead, we
have the prospect of endless argument among competing summits: each
fully evolved and perfected according to its kind, yet unashamedly different
from the others. Is this mere confusion? Or does argument have cognitive
content in its own right?
 To the extent that argument can be considered knowledge, it clearly
subsumes and operates on experience and theory, analogously to the way
that capital subsumes and operates on labor and trade. For our analogy to be
of interest, what needs be shown is that argument embodies knowledge – or
the potential for knowledge – in some way comparable to that in which
capital embodies the potential for livelihood. We are thinking of argument
now not as a process, but as a kind of structure: a structure of ideas,
perceptions, concerns and so forth: an ecology of mind, as Gregory Bateson
called it. These are, of course, in conflict and competition with one another,
and it is this conflict and competition that we are most aware of, most of the
time. Indeed, almost our whole effort as finite human beings must be to
play our own side of whatever games we are engaged in, and let the game
as a whole take care of itself. And yet, to anyone who lives among books, as
I do, it becomes quite evident that the biases and partialities of the various
authors are less significant in the long run than the fund of thought and
passion left for us to draw upon – to learn from, invoke, and develop further
for our own purposes.1
A fund of this kind can indeed be seen as “intellectual capital” – for the
owner of a book store, literally so. Whatever they mean to me as a reader, as
a small businessman, every book in my store represents an illiquid asset,
that is worth almost nothing at all until the day some customer brings it to
my desk, buys it, and carries it off to its new home. From a purely
mercenary perspective, all books (as distinguished from editions of books)
are created equal. A Penguin copy of Plato’s Republic is worth about the
same as one of Machiavelli’s The Prince. A work by Bill Buckley sells for
about the same as one by John Kenneth Galbraith, a St. Augustine as a
Nietzsche, Anaïs Nin as the Marquis de Sade.
Yet this ultimate reconciliation of antithetical books and authors is more
than just mercenary. You will have to read both Plato and Machiavelli, and
Buckley and Galbraith, if you have a serious interest in politics. You will
want to read both Augustine and Nietzsche to get a sense of what religion
has meant in the human experience, and what it can still mean today. You
will have to read Anaïs Nin, the Marquis de Sade and a hundred other
writers to get a sense of what sex has meant and means. It is one thing to
live and collect experience. It is another to think and theorize. But if you

1 As a previous book of mine, Sharing Realities, discusses at length.

actually want to understand an issue, you have to get your head around the
whole argument about it, and then reflect on your own experience in its
light. On controversial matters, the argument itself is the highest form of
knowledge, because it is in Argument’s pocket that the winnings of Theory
and Experience end up.