Logical Wildcards

Let’s say you think you’re playing Five Card Draw, no wilds. You ship some cards and get some back, and end up with a measly pair of deuces.

This isn’t looking so hot. You’ve been bluffing a great hand this round, and don’t have the goods to back it up.

“Oh, we forgot to tell you,” says your friend Harriet, “Bernice is dealer and — while you were in the kitchen — called this round as deuces wild.”

What? Deuces wild? Just as you’re about to complain that the whole round was contaminated, you suddenly realize that with deuces wild, you have a royal flush!

The Utility of Wildcards

Wildcards are extremely useful. They can turn weak hands into kingmakers. They can turn low pairs into royal flushes.

Their power is that they don’t mean anything discrete and coherent unless and until they’re integrated into a final, optimal hand resolution. At that moment, they mutate and solidify into whatever the player pleases.

There is an analogous object, with analogous utility, in logic and rhetoric. Any claim that has no discrete and articulable truth value can qualify, and there are many ways that a claim can be “amorphous” in this manner.

• A claim may be many-faced. “My car is pleasing.” Well, what does that mean? Jake could call his car pleasing, when it doesn’t even work, but looks nice in his driveway. Vera could call her car pleasing, when it looks like junk, but performs great on the road.
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• A claim may be nonsensical. “My house is a thing against which there house is no house my house isn’t my house in transcendence, cannot it being.” The preceding sentence probably invokes various images in your mind’s eye, but it does not cohere, and thus can’t have a truth value.
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• A claim may be otherwise vague, unclear, ambiguous, or wide open to interpretation.
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• A claim may have a hidden referent. The many-faced example above is also a good example here. If the referent is explicated (what pleases Jake versus what pleases Vera), it can cohere. But as long as the question is without its necessary referent, it lacks a truth value. Subjective claims that are mistakenly put into objective language are very often guilty of this referent-lacking problem.

If any of these problems are present and yet are undetected, and treated like coherent and solid claims with discernible truth values, they can mutate and solidify around whatever the hand-holder desires.

Bridge-Making

Cheryl is late to my party, and I’m worried that she might be lost. In a misguided effort to comfort me, Brent claims the following:

• “Cheryl is flawless at finding a house if she knows its address.
• Thus, Cheryl is not lost.”

Of course, at this point, I think, “But what if she doesn’t know my address?” Brent suspects I might be thinking this, but doesn’t himself know whether she has my address or not. So he tells me something deliberately vague:

• “Cheryl has quasi-panomic knowledge.”

What does that even mean? Further inquiry yields only more such strange statements from Brent, each more unclear than the last, but all in supposed service of clarifying that odd term.

He hopes that I will eventually give up and accept his statement as a bridge. This happens when the images conjured by what he’s saying — a sense of “knowledge” and “full,” at least — come to a rest at some inferred coherent place, like, “She has my address.”

But I refuse to quit, and shout, “Brent! Does she have my address or not?”

“I’m trying to tell you the answer to that!” he says, “You see…” and then continues with the ambiguity.

Now, instead of coming to rest at something vaguely conjured, I can instead say, “Brent, what you’re saying is not cohering. So while it might express some manner of truth, I can’t use it as a premise in service of any conclusion.”

Bridge-Breaking

Soon, Brent appears to be drunk. “How many drinks have you had, Brent?” I say.

“Eight,” he says.

“In an hour??” I say.

“Yeah,” he answers.

“You’re drunk,” I proclaim.

“No I’m not! I’ve got a just-firm and nigh-set constitution,” he says.

“A ‘just-firm and nigh-set constitution?'” I ask.

“Absolutely,” he responds. “It means that eight drinks in an hour does NOT mean that I’m drunk. Such a thing would be unthinkable.”

I press him for a more dissected meaning of “just-firm and nigh-set constitution,” in order to determine whether he “has that,” whatever it is, but only ambiguity and dangling references (like circular references) come forth.

How on Earth can I determine whether he has the thing that invalidates my conclusion when the thing’s definition is “that which invalidates your conclusion” and nothing more?

Now, instead of coming to rest at the vaguely-conjured image of someone exceptionally tough who can hold a lot of alcohol without issue, I can instead say, “Brent, what you’re saying is not cohering. So while it might express some manner of truth, I can’t use it as a premise that would stop the accepted premises — how many drinks you’ve had in this period of time — from yielding the conclusion that you’re drunk.”

Brents Everywhere

These examples are rather silly, but in the abstract and confusing worlds of philosophy and theology, Brents abound.

And they’re incentivized to proliferate! Wildcard-loaded hands are “better.” And confusion, “subjective-as-objective,” and ambiguity all yield exciting conversations in fruitless attempts to reach cohesion.

This is especially the case in theology, where it is accepted and acknowledged that various revelatory statements are mysterious and beyond our comprehension. The error comes when those mysteries are treated as non-mysteries for the purposes of bridge-making and bridge-breaking.

As believers, we hold to revealed mysteries faithfully. But we should regard them with enough humble reverence not to treat them like pilons or sledgehammers.

In the meantime, if someone employs some strange term as a premise and refuses to articulate it in a coherent way, treat that term like it’s toxic glowing green and reject their logic until they take a break and figure out what they’re trying to say.

Bonus Video

This video, called “The Difficult Ds we Get for Free,” talks about how formal logic gets us “free truth” as corollaries of benign premises, but how the “dirty tricks” of ambiguity can be used as logical wildcards.

Bonus Illustrations

Logical wildcards can take on a life of their own as organism-like “memeplexes.” Their power compounds as they turn heuristics we depend upon (popularity & experts) into carriers by “capturing” them.

This happens very often with pejorative terms, which are useful as adaptable scapegoats or boogeymen. Common pejorative wildcards in Christian discussions include “Gnosticism,” “semi-Pelagianism,” “neo-Marxism,” “socialism,” “postmodernism,” “fundamentalism,” and “works salvation.”

However, it also happens with positive terms like “freedom,” “moral,” “rational,” “objective,” “Biblical,” and “Christian worldview,” through which a group’s partisan perspective can be smuggled: