Some short thoughts that I was having yesterday (none of them are original but I did keep thinking them over):
(1) The preconditions for argumentation (in other words justification) must be considered justified by those in argumentation. If one says that a precondition for argumentation is unjustifiable then that amounts to saying argumentation is unjustifiable since the precondition is needed for there to be argumentation; however, it is obvious that the claim “it is justifiable to claim justification is unjustifiable” is contradictory. The speaker would be engaging in a performative contradiction since he would be engaged in argumentation, presupposing it is justifiable, while saying that it is unjustifiable.
The importance of the performative contradiction comes from the fact that one can only justify propositions in argumentation. It makes it so that nobody could ever justify the opposite of what must be presupposed as justifiable in argumentation.
It also follows that any facts or norms that follow from those preconditions must also be considered justifiable. Anybody trying to justify otherwise would land in a performative contradiction as they would be attempting to deny what they must presuppose as justifiable in argumentation.
(2) Anybody that argues, say, that the norm of body-ownership is unjustifiable would be engaging in a performative contradiction. The denier could say that they aren’t punching the other guy now but that doesn’t mean they must presuppose the norm as valid, but they would be missing the point that to enter into argumentation one *must* respect the other person’s exclusive use of their body. The rule “each speaker must respect the other speaker’s exclusive control over their body” must be followed during argumentation, and if not then it is not argumentation, i.e. justification, but some other action. By following that rule they would be implicitly accepting it as valid, thus any claim otherwise would be contradictory. It is obvious they would be accepting the rule as valid since if they said “No, I do not accept that rule as valid,” then they would be standing there while following that rule and not doing otherwise.
(3) As Stephan Kinsella pointed out in the forum thread I linked yesterday, the justification of forceful actions presupposes that force is, prima facie, unjustifiable. If one wants to deny this and say force is prima facie justifiable then one would consider it necessary to justify force (as they would be doing so in their argument) instead of simply going out and using force without justification. However, just going out and using force isn’t justification, so it is clear that force is prima facie unjustifiable. As such, anybody engaging in argumentation must and does consider physical conflict as a problem where the use of force must be justified, and since argumentation is the only action in which we can justify or deny claims it must be considered as true that there is a problem of social conflict.
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