Neutrality vs Equality vs Equity
In Logic in the Wild, I present logic as the guardian of coherence and compliment it for providing a “neutral space of dialectical enquiry.” Guarding coherence requires attention to structure and reasoning rather than belief and content. Engaging in a neutral space of dialectical enquiry is to focus on coherence rather than content when contemplating various perspectives on the same issue, alone or with others. Focus on how they reason, not what they believe. Being neutral means, in particular, that no one’s opinion or belief is imposed on the space, that no one is forced to accept as true what they don’t believe in.
Engaging neutrally requires the suspension of strong opinions and beliefs for the sake of the enquiry. If, when engaging with fiction, the audience is sometimes required to suspend disbelief, which means accepting things they wouldn’t accept in real life, such as superheroes, monsters, or interstellar space travel (do you believe in it?), suspending belief in a dialectical space is not similarly being more gullible, but rather suppressing one’s beliefs unless they can be justified and shared. If you want others to adopt a belief in a neutral space, you need to motivate and argue for it. How does it benefit others in the same space? How is it better for the group? And if others have views they want to support, hear them out with a charitable ear, seeking coherence and conciliation.
That’s the positive side of neutrality, that it allows us to play on an equal field, one in which everyone is treated equally. Equality, however, doesn’t guarantee equity. That’s true in real life, that even though we pretend that everyone has equal opportunity in society, only some achieve fair outcomes, sometimes because of luck and hard work, but most often because of their situation in society, which allows them to ignore or overcome barriers that stop others not similarly situated.
I believe the same can happen in a dialectical enquiry, that imposing neutrality without concern for fairness leads to an equal but non-equitable space. Some need to give up a lot more than others to enter that space, their voices get silenced because they can’t find a neutral way to express them, and their identity gets erased and so do the richness and wisdom of what they have to contribute. This can indeed happen deep in accepted standards of reasoning, which favor orthodoxy over difference by seeking equality, thus failing to achieve equity and fairness.
