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Keith Larman wrote:
Some topics are difficult to discuss. Sometimes people think you're criticizing what they do because you do something different from them. Which makes discussing why one thinks a certain path is better for them sometimes fraught with danger. Thar be dragons...
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Eric Voegelin wrote an essay titled "On Debate and Existence" in the 60's about such problems of debate. I revisited it -- and it has this:
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Rational argument could not prevail because the partner to the discussion did not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode … called the Second Reality. The argument could not achieve results, it had to falter and peter out, as it became increasingly clear that not argument was pitched against argument, but that behind the appearance of a rational debate there lurked the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth.
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Of the present topic -- there are differences in terms of acceptable evidence to various people -- or our approach to the truth, as you term it -- but I do not really think that, in the main, anyone -- with but a few possible exceptions, falls in the latter category. But I suspect a few have harbored the suspicion that some on the other end might.
That sense of suspicion seems to drive the danger you note -- and some of the occasionally heated comment (noted above) is testament to it. But this is not, I think, the more fundamental divide that concerned Voegelin -- I don't think that really is in play here. Everyone on this topic seems genuinely interested in the truth of WHAT works, as well as WHY it works -- and how best to make it work better.