FWIW I think you are leaving out an important step here: synthesis. The lack of synthesis is my general complaint with these sorts of approaches because it creates a debate rather than a dialectic and lacks a mechanism for convergence without additional constraints. Perhaps that’s what you are hoping to point at with “revise” in step 3, but there are many ways to revise something that don’t promote convergence over adversarial iterations.
I agree that convergence would be ideal, but I’m quite pessimistic of
how often it could be achieved even if our culture of discourse
encouraged it a lot more.
Here, the synthesis would of course ultimately rest on the shoulders
of the reader. It would be up to them to assess which of the sides
has made the better case for their thesis. The iterative nature of
the argument would at least ensure that obvious counterarguments
aren’t left unanswered, or if they are, the reader would have a better
chance of noticing it and could then adjust their beliefs accordingly.
Another benefit from an iterative approach of this sort: the reader
would have only one self contained argument to consider from both
sides instead of having to wade through possibly a long sequence of
rebuttals and rejoinders in which the forest is easily lost for the
trees.
FWIW I think you are leaving out an important step here: synthesis. The lack of synthesis is my general complaint with these sorts of approaches because it creates a debate rather than a dialectic and lacks a mechanism for convergence without additional constraints. Perhaps that’s what you are hoping to point at with “revise” in step 3, but there are many ways to revise something that don’t promote convergence over adversarial iterations.
I agree that convergence would be ideal, but I’m quite pessimistic of how often it could be achieved even if our culture of discourse encouraged it a lot more.
Here, the synthesis would of course ultimately rest on the shoulders of the reader. It would be up to them to assess which of the sides has made the better case for their thesis. The iterative nature of the argument would at least ensure that obvious counterarguments aren’t left unanswered, or if they are, the reader would have a better chance of noticing it and could then adjust their beliefs accordingly.
Another benefit from an iterative approach of this sort: the reader would have only one self contained argument to consider from both sides instead of having to wade through possibly a long sequence of rebuttals and rejoinders in which the forest is easily lost for the trees.