That’s just it, though: we assume we’re wrong. We audit ourselves. Watch any of the press conferences where the Georgia election officials detailed the extra work they did.
It is that we assume we are wrong for the important things, and double check, triple check, that separates our viewpoints from those being deplatformed.
It can’t possibly work like that, logically. Those being deplatformed are as certain as you are that they are right.
I’ve been disillusioned about this e.g. in trying to have conversations about religion with believers. No matter how much better I think my case is, they will think their case is just as much superior to mine. For every time I double check my books, they double check theirs.
Philosophically, I don’t think that’s a “solution” to the puzzle.
What are you checking books for? Run experiments. Don’t go to your books about dropping weights off Pisa, just _drop weights off Pisa_. I don’t care what people are certain of: either those weights fall independently of their mass or don’t. If you are treating it like philosophy instead of science, you’ve already lost the thread.
Gravity isn’t particularly controversial these days, no. Many things that aren’t now, though—like the curvature of earth, or heliocentricity—once were; that a topic is controversial doesn’t mean there’s no right answer.
And I would agree that political science is largely concerned with philosophy, but let’s not mistake any old politicized belief as fitting under the umbrella of “political science”: that e.g. a manual recount renders any conspiracies about an automatic ballot-counting machine irrelevant to a final vote tally is a matter of common sense, not profound debate—and yet this has proved a controversial point these last few weeks.
That’s just it, though: we assume we’re wrong. We audit ourselves. Watch any of the press conferences where the Georgia election officials detailed the extra work they did.
It is that we assume we are wrong for the important things, and double check, triple check, that separates our viewpoints from those being deplatformed.