Adversarial Philosophy

I have a friend. He's an analytic philosopher, and his favorite word is "objection". If you know anything about analytic philosophy, this should really come as no surprise. Philosophical debate, tuned to an analytic key, usually goes something like this:

For: I believe X, for reasons a, b, and c.
Against: X is dubious; I can easily show that a and b are false through the following thought experiment T. c is a bit more tricky, but it has a great deal of intuitive implausibility.
For: Your version of T is misleading because it has implications x and y, which, given thought experiment T1, seem unacceptable. c may be intuitively implausible, but that doesn't show that it's false.

And so on, ad infinitum (or ad nauseum).

It's easy to see why my friend's favorite word is "objection".

This leads me to believe that analytic philosophizing is essentially adversial. The metaphor I'm thinking of is closely related to hand-to-hand combat, perhaps in a kung fu dojo. In this case, the point is to isolate your opponent's weaknesses and then exploit them. Of course, being able to find and exploit weaknes will require a great deal of technical training on your part, but once you've got it, you should be able to disarm just about any aggressor.

This is what goes on in philosophy as well. The point, in this case, is to find the weaknesses in your opponent's position and then raise "objections". If you're skilled enough (i.e., if you've studied enough logic), you'll be able to disarm your opponent intellectually, regardless of his position.

This kind of attitude toward philosophy is quite clearly beneficial. It allows us to maintain a posture of cautious skepticism and keeps us (relatively) impervious to vague and questionable assertions.

But it's also debilitating. Most importantly, by looking for the weaknesses in our opponent's position, we run the risk of overlooking its strengths--that is, aspects of his position that have merit and might be profitably incorporated into our own. In a fight, the point is victory. Everything else is ancillary.

So I would like to offer a new metaphor: not fighting, but dancing.

More later.