I've mentioned this earlier but there is some kind of inherent difficulty with being objective. I have expressed disdain towards the political but have also suggested that maybe one is unable to fully remove the political from what they say. In my previous post I discussed the concept of dialectical win conditions and that a dialectical is a certain kind of discussion or debate that focuses on accuracy or truth. In this post I want to describe how we can use dialectical to discuss some ideas of objectivity.
What is objectivity? In philosophy it is typically used to refer to truth outside of one's own subjectivity, which is meant to remove bias from the thinker. For example we might think that it is an objective fact that there exists a city called London. In this sense, objectivity has many links with realism. In fact, one might define realism as referring to an independent, objective reality that is mind independent. That is, where the truth of things do not depend on the epistemic states of thinkers.
One of the main goals of rationality seems to be to ensure objectivity and seek out this objective reality. That is, what we believe and what we do should ideally be optimal with respect to the truth. As an example, we should believe what seems to best fit the evidence we have, where the concept of evidence is taken more loosely to include both factual information but also different arguments. The reason we follow our evidence is because we might think that evidence is the thing that best leads us to the truth. Now we recall that the dialectical goal is to have a discussion where our aim is to seek this truth. Where we are not concerned about motivations such as 'being right' or the political impacts of having the discussion. It is natural then to link together the concept of a dialectical with objectivity.
Now something to note is that discussions have different purposes. That is, the discussion not only seeks accuracy. For example, we might think that certain political discussions are often veiled with some kind of moral or political goal. Politicians are limited in what they can say because their presentations and debates are not dialectical. They need to win and convince the people and thus they also often have a rhetorical goal.
A second notion of objectivity often relates to some kind of measure or objective. For example, we might think of statistics as objective, whilst our interpretation of statistics can be subjective. There are different measures, perhaps the most obvious being monetary or quantity. For example how much an average man in the UK is paid, or how many women have abortions each year. We also might however think that things like utility or happiness can also be measures. This leads us to a slightly different way of thinking; where the purpose of our discussion is to try and maximise some kind of concept in which we cannot precisely measure, but have intuition about. For example, the goal of my conversation with friends might be for enjoyment (which we may not be able to measure) and thus certain things might deliberately be false. Or I might have a conversation for the intellectual thrill, and then I might emphasise maxing out these aspects. Here, objectivity just is with respect to optimising a certain factor.
One issue we might have is to separate the accuracy goal from other objective goals. For example if we are having a discussion about morality, e.g. whether abortion is permissible. We might attempt to have a dialectical, where we say that the thing we want above all is the truth on the issue. However when we attempt to make arguments about abortion, we may have to appeal to our intuitions about morality, which is a naturally emotive subject. In fact these themselves will often be used as arguments themselves. This may lead to some kind of tension. To avoid this, we must be rather careful with our emotions in determining where our arguments are coming from. If we are engaging in a dialectical, then even when dealing with arguably emotive concepts such as morality, we should recognise where are emotions are coming from and keep in mind the overall goal is the truth.
The main benefit of seeing objectivity in terms of the dialectical is it provides us with some kind of measure of seperating the 'political'. Even when having these difficult political or moral conversations we are able to justifiably say things for the purpose of obtaining the truth. At the same time, it also makes the purpose of discussion clear. If someone forces you to police what you mean (you should plausibly police your presentation of what you mean), then this can aid you in showing that they might not be looking towards the same goal of accuracy, and make clear that their approach may not be rational.
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