The Climber’s Agreement and Logical Charity

While there are now traffic jams on top of Mount Everest, climbing is a rather isolating activity. When you hike for days to get to a wall that has never been climbed, then spend sometimes days to make it to the top, no one is there to witness your exploit, and no one was there to see you climbing to the top. When you come back and claim a first ascent, most of the time, fellow climbers only have your word for it. This is how it is. If you don’t believe climbers when they tell you their stories, why should they believe yours? If a climate of scepticism were established in the community, progress in the sport would come to a halt.

The climbing community solves that problem with “the climber’s agreement,” which is to take a fellow climber at their word. When claims of first ascents are made with descriptions of the climb and pointers for future climbers, the community accepts the testimony. As Alex Honnold once said, there’s no cheating in climbing, only lying. The climber’s agreement is a factual version of the principle of charity, which in critical theory invites you to take your fellow thinkers as intelligent people. They might make a mistake in the process of communicating beliefs, but charity invites you to correct the mistakes reasonably and seek understanding of their views rather than deconstruction. It’s much easier to be sceptical than it is to properly understand something we don’t agree with.

I want to propose a similar attitude, not with respect to content, but logic. So the logician’s climber’s agreement would be to take fellow thinkers to hold coherent beliefs. They might make logical mistakes, but oftentimes those can be identified and corrected without change to content, so go ahead. Seek coherence in their thoughts. Much like the climber’s agreement, going the opposite and taking on a sceptical stance only blocks progress. I know, it’s quite easy to show some argument isn’t valid, because validity is very hard to attain. If my goal were to debunk arguments logically, let me tell you I wouldn’t have many friends.

There are contexts in which the rigidity of valid thinking is required, for the professionals, those who dwell in mathematics. For the rest of common people, we can chill a little. Not every climber is a pro climber, and so long as they are honest about how they climbed the wall, there’s no ground for judgment or dismissal. I wonder to what extent the climber’s agreement can be extended to dialectics in the community, and when it would break down.