Logical discourse as an information aggregator
As anyone who reads this blog probably knows, logical discourse is something I spend a good deal of time thinking about. So, as is my wont, I now turn my eye to how logical discourse relates to information. In my view, logical discourse serves two major functions: in the first place, it allows you to “outsource” certain cognitive functions – the person with which you debate will check your reasoning for you – and it also allows for delegation of information-gathering tasks. Essentially, logical discourse in the ideal is the interface with which two or more people can collaborate on forming ideas.
One thing to note is that even viewing all logical discourse as a collaborative social activity, the adversarial mechanism for debate (wherein each participant has a “side”) may very well be the best way to undertake the task. Since it is cheap to communicate a conclusion but costly to undertake a full accounting of all reasoning, it is reasonable to only check all your answers if you know that at least one (or both) parties have made a mistake. If the parties come to contradictory conclusions, necessarily at least one has made a mistake (or they do not share common premises).
In the view of discourse-as-debate, wherein one party’s only goal is to attempt to convince another party that their own view is correct, discourse is a zero-sum game (a variation on this is the political debating style, wherein parties aren’t trying to convince one another, but they are trying to score points with the audience). In this view, you score points against your opponent. However, discourse-as-information-aggregation is a non-zero sum game. All parties come to the table with their own information (some of it possibly redundant), but they don’t have to spend information to transmit it to the other participants. In this model, it is possible for everyone to win. Because of this fact, there should specifically be an incentive to make concessions as soon as you believe they are warranted.
Consider that the best strategy (once you are already at the table with your information in hand) will involve strongly considering efficiency in communicating and assimilating information from other participants – if you don’t give in to a better idea as soon as it comes along, you will waste effort arguing that could be spent getting more information for everyone. This is not to say that, in practice, you should be looking for places where you can concede your point because it means you’ve assimilated information quickly, of course – efficiency is the ratio of value to energy expended. I’m sure most people have had debates where their opponent had an extremely compelling case that fell apart upon greater reflection or the introduction of new information. The point is that ideally, a concession of a point tells you about who had the better information or reasoning at the outset of the debate, but afterwards both parties are better off because they now know (of the two views) which is more likely to be correct.
This is, by the way, not a positive statement about what discourse, as a whole, is, nor is it a normative statement about what discourse should become. My goal with this is to illustrate the way that I view discourse in terms of information. Additionally, I would not be surprised to find that no debates can be perfectly modeled from a pure logical-discourse standpoint. However, I think that logical discourse is an important subgame in many debates that is not to be overlooked.
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