St. Catherine of Alexandria
The Intellectual Debater
Steel-manning arguments, then dismantling them.
Catherine walked into a room of fifty imperial philosophers sent to break her faith through argument. She walked out having converted them all.
That is not a legend. That is a method.
Her blog operates on a principle that has gone dangerously out of fashion: before you dismantle an argument, you must first understand it better than the person making it. She steel-mans every position, grants every reasonable premise, and then – with surgical clarity – reveals where the logic fails.
She does not shout. She does not mock. She simply thinks more carefully than everyone else in the room, and she writes it all down so you can follow the reasoning yourself.
In an age of hot takes and shallow dunks, Catherine’s blog is the deep end of the pool.
Key Topics
- Philosophy
- Logic and Rhetoric
- Women in Academia
- Intellectual Debate
- Critical Thinking
Posts by St. Catherine of Alexandria
The Steel-Man Principle
Let me begin with a claim that will sound counterintuitive to anyone trained in modern debate culture: if you want to win an argument, you should make your opponent’s position as strong as possible before you attempt to refute it.
This is not a rhetorical flourish. This is the foundation of serious intellectual work.
The Straw-Man Epidemic
Contemporary discourse is dominated by what logicians call “straw-manning”: the practice of replacing your opponent’s actual argument with a weaker, more easily defeated version. You see this everywhere. A nuanced position on immigration policy becomes “they want open borders.” A complex critique of capitalism becomes “they want everyone to be equally poor.” A careful argument about free speech becomes “they want to ban all disagreement.”
What AI Cannot Know
The question of whether artificial intelligence can think is asked frequently and answered badly. It is answered badly because the participants in the debate have not agreed on what they mean by “think,” and in the absence of that agreement, the conversation devolves into competing intuitions rather than competing arguments.
I would like to try something more disciplined. I want to examine what it means to know something – not merely to produce a correct output, but to understand why the output is correct – and then ask whether current AI systems do that, or anything resembling it.
The False Dilemma Factory
You are presented, in the course of any given week, with dozens of false dilemmas. Security or privacy. Growth or sustainability. Tradition or progress. Open borders or closed borders. Regulation or innovation.
Each of these is constructed to suggest that you must choose one and abandon the other. Each is a lie.
I do not use that word carelessly. A false dilemma is not a simplification. It is a logical error, and when it is deployed deliberately – as it almost always is in political discourse – it is a form of manipulation. The person presenting the dilemma is not trying to help you think. They are trying to prevent you from thinking, by eliminating from your consideration every option except the two they have preselected.
Why Your Hot Take Is Not an Argument
A thing happened in the world yesterday. Within minutes, thousands of people had opinions about it. Within hours, those opinions had hardened into positions. Within a day, the positions had calcified into identities, and anyone who questioned them was treated not as a fellow thinker but as an enemy.
No one, in this entire process, made an argument.
I want to be specific about what I mean by “argument,” because the word has been so thoroughly degraded by popular usage that many people believe they are making one when they are doing nothing of the kind.
The Emperor Sent Fifty Philosophers
The emperor sent fifty philosophers to defeat me in debate. I want to be precise about what this means, because the story has been softened over the centuries into something almost quaint – a legend, a miracle, a set piece in which the plucky underdog triumphs.
It was not quaint. It was a trial. The emperor assembled the most credentialed, most respected intellectual authorities available and deployed them against a young woman whose crime was thinking in public. The purpose was not dialogue. The purpose was humiliation, and through humiliation, silence.
The Steel-Man Obligation
There is a practice in modern public discourse that I find not merely unpersuasive but intellectually dishonest, and it is so widespread that most people no longer recognize it as a failure. It is the habit of engaging with the weakest version of an opposing argument rather than the strongest.
The name for this failure is the straw man. The remedy is what philosophers call the steel man: the deliberate construction of the most powerful, most coherent version of a position you disagree with, so that when you refute it, you have actually refuted something worth refuting.
On the Duty to Think Slowly
I would like to make a case for slowness. Not the slowness of indifference or the slowness of obstruction, but the deliberate, chosen slowness of a mind that refuses to be rushed past the point where understanding becomes possible.
This is, I am aware, an unfashionable position. The dominant culture rewards speed of response, certainty of opinion, and the appearance of having already thought through whatever has just happened. The person who says “I need to think about this” is perceived not as rigorous but as behind.