The risk of being wrong

Something I hope accomplish by having this blog is to break down, or at least weaken, my inhibition about laying out arguments unless I can and do fully qualify and support each statement. Striving for that is certainly a good impulse, but often it’s only possible to work out the implications of and gather the evidence for a claim once you’ve hammered out its details by putting it down on paper, so that it becomes a solid thing that can be pointed to and checked back on. Sometimes even, I suspect, it’s necessary to glass over one dubious proposition in order to clear the way to investigating, or laying out an explanation for, a more important point. To put it perhaps too dramatically, making an argument requires taking a risk—that you might be wrong. It is impossible to eliminate this risk permanently or with complete certainty, and indeed, writing that refuses to take it on will find itself pushed into claims that are either so conservative or else so obscure that they don’t even warrant objection. It will never have to suffer being told it’s wrong, but neither will it excite anyone’s interest.