The Need for a Neutral Space of Dialectical Enquiry in the Community
This weekend someone asked me what were my thoughts on AI. I started trying to express why I thought the situation is rather scary, trying to lay out some elements to articulate some of my thoughts. But the person had an opinion on it, which I assume he thought was inconsistent with mine, and started interrupting me to tell me about it. I found myself in a defensive mood, not being able to express what I was trying to say, trying out different random things to see if it might catch, but he never listened to what I was saying for more than a couple of sentences. Eventually he stopped engaging with the subject and made it clear that he didn’t want to discuss it any further. I felt frustrated, unable to articulate a coherent thought, and dismissed from further exploration of the topic.
It’s not a topic I initiated; he asked me what I thought about it. But I didn’t sense that he wanted to hear what were my views. Elements of what he said when cutting me off were elements I could have worked with to try and reach a constructive resolution of the seeming clash between our ideas. I say a seeming clash because I’m not sure we hold such opposite views at all. What I’ve experienced, and I wrote Logic in the Wild partly to try and help people to better apply logic in the community, is a failure of engaging in what I call a “neutral space of dialectical enquiry”.
This is one of the main points of Logic in the Wild—the other being that logic is the Guardian of Coherence—namely that logic can help interaction in the community if people can enter a space with a logical mindset. To enter the space with a logical mindset is to suspend opinions and beliefs and focus on the coherence of other people’s views. Instead of cutting me off and asserting that AI isn’t scary because it’s just like previous technological advances, my friend could have asked why I found AI frightening. This approach would allow us to explore whether my concerns were coherent with other views he held, which we likely shared to a significant extent.
By immediately focusing on content and opinions, instead of coherence and logic, the dialectical space was closed off. It stopped being dialectical when we were not able to consider the topic from various perspectives and try to figure out what each other thought. Mind you, I probably failed to engage as well in my defensive reactions when I felt my ideas dismissed. Logic failed in this instance because we both failed to engage in a space with a common logical goal.
That’s one thing you’ll learn in Logic in the Wild, that logic isn’t an individualistic discipline, but rather a communal one that requires cooperation and constructive engagement with one another. Indeed, it can foster that constructive communication by offering neutrality and a way to explore various ideas without locking horns on basic beliefs and opinions.
I wonder if you’ve experienced similar situations in your community, and also if you can think of moments when you’ve failed to engage in a neutral space of dialectical enquiry. Do you reckon you could have done better had you approached the discussion with a logical mindset?
