In nearly all Classical schools of logic & rhetoric—Sanskrit, Talmudic, Buddhist, Socratic, Islamic, and Christian as shown by St. Thomas Aquinas—an educated person is expected to know all the major arguments for the important sides of key questions.
In fact to obtain a “doctorate,” I have often heard that Tibetan Buddhists used to require a student monk to perform an all-day public argumentation of several sides of the same question, refute all the arguments, and offer a new, original synthesis. I believe the Indian Math followed the same procedure for millenia, and Socrates got himself killed for embarrassing public figures by humiliating them this way in the agora.
The ability to argue your opponents’ position better than they can and then handily defeating it in summary has long been considered the mastery of rhetoric. Thus playing the Devil’s Advocate is a valuable intellectual tool for the aspiring orator or public intellectual. Rose is right; Dawkins, wrong.
Thus playing the Devil’s Advocate is a valuable intellectual tool for the aspiring orator or public intellectual. Rose is right; Dawkins, wrong.
The ability to play devil’s advocate may indeed make you a better orator, and thus better at “public” intellectualism. But I don’t think this is the point of the article. The point is that the human brain is a messy, biased thing that can convince itself of almost anything, and if you want to be reacting to reality itself, instead of to your own wishful thinking, you don’t want to encourage habits of thinking that would make you better at convincing yourself of untruths. And given the messiness of human reasoning (priming, etc), even if a public intellectual resolved to base his own beliefs off one process while playing the devil’s advocate in public, he is likely to contaminate his personal beliefs in the process.
In nearly all Classical schools of logic & rhetoric—Sanskrit, Talmudic, Buddhist, Socratic, Islamic, and Christian as shown by St. Thomas Aquinas—an educated person is expected to know all the major arguments for the important sides of key questions.
In fact to obtain a “doctorate,” I have often heard that Tibetan Buddhists used to require a student monk to perform an all-day public argumentation of several sides of the same question, refute all the arguments, and offer a new, original synthesis. I believe the Indian Math followed the same procedure for millenia, and Socrates got himself killed for embarrassing public figures by humiliating them this way in the agora.
The ability to argue your opponents’ position better than they can and then handily defeating it in summary has long been considered the mastery of rhetoric. Thus playing the Devil’s Advocate is a valuable intellectual tool for the aspiring orator or public intellectual. Rose is right; Dawkins, wrong.
The ability to play devil’s advocate may indeed make you a better orator, and thus better at “public” intellectualism. But I don’t think this is the point of the article. The point is that the human brain is a messy, biased thing that can convince itself of almost anything, and if you want to be reacting to reality itself, instead of to your own wishful thinking, you don’t want to encourage habits of thinking that would make you better at convincing yourself of untruths. And given the messiness of human reasoning (priming, etc), even if a public intellectual resolved to base his own beliefs off one process while playing the devil’s advocate in public, he is likely to contaminate his personal beliefs in the process.