The dialectical seems to work rather nicely for descriptive issues. If we have a phenomenon and we want to understand it, the dialectical helps us produce the best theory. The goal here is to simply obtain the best explanation for a phenomenon, and in this case it is natural to look at all of the available evidence and take the best one. There are certainly some issues in terms of how we can determine the 'best theory', but these issues don't seem too worrying. Scientists for example have to wonder routinely about what criterion are relevant when deciding which theory to prefer. Factors that are useful seem to be explanatory depth, ontological simplicity, predictive power and coherence with other established theories. This criterion seems to be mostly transferable to any descriptive issue. The important thing is some kind of assumption about that there is this objective world that does not care what we know about it. The valuable criterion are those that give us a best picture about this objective world given the snippets of evidence that it provides us with. The crucial thing here is that we have some kind of epistemic availability. It seems that since the world is in an objective, mind independent state there is some kind of reliability and consistency about our access to it. That is, we tend not worry that the whole thing is illusionary or that we have all just made some mistake. (Sceptical arguments might do this, but these aren't really taken seriously I think).
Now when I discussed the 'best theory' we already have some element of normativity. Normativity essentially is a discussion on what is good or bad where the goodness or badness is relative to some context. For example we might be looking for a normative theory of morality, where we ask what is good or what is bad. We might be looking for a normative theory of epistemology where we ask what sort of norms our beliefs should follow. In my previous post about the dialectical and objectivity, there is some kind of implicit assumption about normative epistemology. I have assumed that the truth is the cardinal virtue of epistemology and that this is what we seek beyond all else. I have implied that dialectical which is meant to represent objective rational thought relies on seeking accuracy and truth, and following our evidence. Now whilst I have made normative and one might think subjective committments about what rationality is, I think connecting objectivity, dialectical and truth together is reasonable. If our goal is to see this mind independent reality, it seems fairly clear that our goal is truth and how to get to the truth (evidence). If we have a different goal than objectivity, that's fine. But if we're committing to objectivity, then the dialectical truth goal seems a logical conclusion.
Now we have this challenge in terms of how to reconcile normativity (what is good) and dialectical (what is the truth). One of our issues is that normativity often requires a certain kind of epistemic access to the good. For example if we want to engage in political discussion we will tend to speak in words such as 'right, wrong, moral' and so on. These are all normative claims. However to justify them we seem to appeal to things like intuition or common sense. This leads to some serious concerns. If we want to engage in dialectical about whether abortion is morally wrong or right, we want to be seeking the truth about morality. Yet since we have some epistemic issues with accessing 'the moral', it is difficult to see how we can be objective when discussing these topics. Note this is not a ontological committment about whether morality itself is objective. Morality can be objective and we still face these issues because what we are concerned about is our epistemic access to morality. Our goal is truth but any evidence we have seems to be epistemically suspect and we cannot seem to be sure of its reliability which makes it hard for us to say if we're being objective or not.
Let's consider a specific goal for now. Consider something like freedom of speech, which is intuitively perhaps something of value. We then consider an issue such as hate speech. It is natural and is in fact commonly asked whether something like hate speech should lead one to deny claims of freedom of speech. Suppose we engage in a dialectical about this issue, we might list the win conditions as follows:
Freedom > Hate: if we can show freedom of speech overides everything, perhaps even showing value in allowing for hate speech.
Hate > Freedom: if we show that hate speech is sufficiently destructive that it should overrule freedom of speech.
Obviously it's a bit more nuanced than that and we can require definitions for each. We'd also need to say whether what sort of hate speech is so bad that it might override freedom and vice versa. We have however the bare details of such a dialectical.
Now we face a challenge here with our dialectical since at some point we kind of need an argument along the lines of 'hate speech is bad for reason X, which means it overrules our reason Y for freedom of speech'. Here the good and the bad are obviously important and are normative instead of descriptive. Certain approaches of dialectical still seem important: we of course don't engage in ad hominem and our goal is the truth. Yet it seems that seeking the truth in this context is difficult because it relies on some kind of committment to the good and the bad.
Let's consider a specific goal for now. Consider something like freedom of speech, which is intuitively perhaps something of value. We then consider an issue such as hate speech. It is natural and is in fact commonly asked whether something like hate speech should lead one to deny claims of freedom of speech. Suppose we engage in a dialectical about this issue, we might list the win conditions as follows:
Freedom > Hate: if we can show freedom of speech overides everything, perhaps even showing value in allowing for hate speech.
Hate > Freedom: if we show that hate speech is sufficiently destructive that it should overrule freedom of speech.
Obviously it's a bit more nuanced than that and we can require definitions for each. We'd also need to say whether what sort of hate speech is so bad that it might override freedom and vice versa. We have however the bare details of such a dialectical.
Now we face a challenge here with our dialectical since at some point we kind of need an argument along the lines of 'hate speech is bad for reason X, which means it overrules our reason Y for freedom of speech'. Here the good and the bad are obviously important and are normative instead of descriptive. Certain approaches of dialectical still seem important: we of course don't engage in ad hominem and our goal is the truth. Yet it seems that seeking the truth in this context is difficult because it relies on some kind of committment to the good and the bad.
I think this is partly what makes certain aspects of debate complicated. Whilst we want to fully engage in objective thought, certain topics require large committments to normative statements that are hard to verify given our epistemic access. It seems the best we can do is to attempt a dialectical to obtain some kind of agreed upon 'axioms' or 'premises' concerning the relevant normative concept.
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