Dialectical win conditions

When I was studying at university, my lecturers always emphasised the concept of dialectic. Roughly speaking, this refers to having a conversation between different views. So for example if I opposed abortion, I would need to consider the arguments for pro abortion views, essentially having some kind of imaginary argument between a proponent and denier of abortion. In philosophy, dialectic is a very good thing. We're told to present the views of all sides in a charitable way, and to best represent the opponent when engaging in dialectic. For example we shouldn't misrepresent what they say, and we should take their argument in the strongest vein possible. Furthermore, what is important is typically the argument itself, as opposed to who it is that supports the argument. In this way, we tend to avoid cases of ad-hominem.

The important thing in dialectic however appears to be that the prize is truth. The reason we engage in the dialectic is because we want to know what is right. There is no shame in switching sides if we discover through this argument that the position we originally were in favour of is unable to deal with a given counter argument. Now the goal of truth we tend to think of as a valuable one, but it is clearly not the goal of all debates. In certain debates (for example competitive debating) the challenge might be to outsmart the opponent and to convince people of a given conclusion. One doesn't need to engage in fallacies to do this, few cases are black or white and one can make a strong argument in favour of either side. 

At first glance, if our goal of dialectic is truth, then it would seem strange to refer to a dialectical win conditions. The issue here is that the 'winning' is not something had by a person making an argument, but instead by the side or argument itself. Many people think that the truth is non epistemic, that what is the case does not depend on what people know about it (this position is known as realism). Even to someone who denies this, they can believe in what I describe as dialectical realism; they think that the nature of rational arguments should eventually favour one position (even if it is an amalgamation of others). For this to occur however we need to describe what can make one position 'defeat' another position. So in a given dialectical, we need this idea of a dialectical win condition. Note that this does not need to be all encompassing, it could just apply to a specific point.

For example let us return to our abortion example. This is an extremely complicated position of course and there are many different strands that are important here. Let's start with one specific strand, the personhood claim (P):

P: a fetus is a person

As individuals engaging in dialectical, we should at the very beginning be neutral; until we hear reasons we should not assume is correct. We do however have intuitions, which certainly should play a part. We also think that there exists the truth regarding this claim. Not simply whether the claim is true or false, but what the actual landscape of morality in this context is. Simplifying things we might consider two sides, Pro and Den, where Pro is in favour of P and Den is against P. It is important now to define what might be required for a given side to 'win' our dialectical. The idea is similar to how we evaluate theories, scientific or otherwise. We need some kind of independent, objective conditions that we can use for evaluation that everyone agrees with so we can all determine if one side has defeated another.

For our case we might use something like the following:

Pro wins if they can come up with a plausible account of personhood that in which all foetuses fit into the account.

Con wins if they can show that accounts of personhood should not include foetuses.

This would of course require some kind of further conditions on 'what is a good account of personhood', which will itself have win conditions based on things like '1) satisfying intuitions, 2) works well with moral' and so on. 

Essentially our goal here is to find some kind conditions for theoretical success of a theory, that everyone can agree with before the dialectical has started. It is in many ways similar to John Rawls' veil of ignorance, where everyone determines what an ideal distribution is without knowing their own place in said distribution. Here everyone determines the ideal conditions for a given theory, or what it takes for a theory to be proven correct or false, before we start our argument concerning it.

Now one issue with this idea of win conditions is that it stops backpedalling, which can also be a negative. Perhaps one the debate has started one recognises certain problems that were not present in our win condition stage. Here we get a disanalogy with the veil of ignorance since we lack the same symmetry for each party. If our goal is the truth then certainly we must accept a degree of backpedalling. I don't think this is fundamentally a problem however. What the idea of the win conditions does is only to help us seek the truth. As long as our backpedalling is motivated by our truth and not our desires to win, then such backpedalling can be viewed as a good thing. It is just the same as denying a set of axioms as useful since something intuitively important cannot be proven from them.