[MaxWilson]

K said:
And that is the crux of our disagreement. I've been making logical arguments and you've been making moral arguments. Logical arguments have winners and losers by determining who has the stronger argument, and moral arguments have two losers (since there is no criteria for strength of argument and which should prevail).

Logical arguments have the same criteria for "winning" as moral arguments: can you convince your audience? You're aware that there's no way to prove that a logical proof is correct without an invoking a shared metalogic. In practice nobody reasons about their metalogic, they just declare victory, as both you and Jim have done, or come to an understanding, as great men do.

One of the first interesting experiences I had in this project at Princeton was meeting great men. I had never met very many great men before. But there was an evaluation committee that had to try to help us along, and help us ultimately decide which way we were going to separate the uranium. This committee had men like Compton and Tolman and Smyth and Urey and Rabi and Oppenheimer on it. I would sit in because I understood the theory of how our process of separating isotopes worked, so they'd ask me questions and talk about it. In these discussions, one man would make a point. Then Compton, for example, would explain a different point of view. He would say it should be this way, and he was perfectly right. Another guy would say, well, maybe, but there is this other possibility that we have to consider against it.

So everybody is disagreeing, all around the table. I am surprised and disturbed that Compton doesn't repeat and emphasize his point. Finally, at the end, Tolman, who's the chairman, would say, "Well, having heard all these arguments, I guess it's true that Compton's argument is the best of all, and now we have to go ahead."

It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best---summing it all up---without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.

http://www.brics.dk/~danvy/lafb.html

-Max