Suppose I read Gayatri Spivak and come across her concept of sanctioned ignorance. What method do I use to determine if this is a 'good' concept or not? I think that internal consistency is a good place to start but I don't know other criteria to use.
Well this other comment said a little bit of what I was going to say. The important thing is if it's useful and helps you understand things. If that's what we're looking for, then a logical inconsistency doesn't necessarily mean that a perspective should be dismissed. There are several types of cases that come to mind:
Wittgenstein's Ladder is the idea that a wrong explanation can sometimes help further your understanding of something, most often by giving a simplified version of it that is technically wrong, but gives the general idea. This concept can also be called a "lie-to-children" or "all models are wrong," because the only perfect model of a thing would be the thing itself. For example, Bohr model of the atom is wrong, and so is the whole of Newtonian physics, but we still teach those things because it's not important to explain the uncertainty principle and electron clouds when you're first learning about atoms or to explain relativistic effects when you're modelling motion where those effects are negligible. The simplicity of those models means they don't necessarily hold up under heavy scrutiny, but they are still useful for teaching and for modeling, so they still get used.
Sometimes a person has a valid point, but they may not know how to express it well and might end up contradicting themselves, but you might have to look past that to understand their broader point, especially when the contradiction isn't relevant to their main point. Related, sometimes a person might know and acknowledge that what they're saying doesn't make sense, but they just want someone to listen to how they feel. Tolerating logical contradictions can help you better understand other people's experiences, which is valuable. Sometimes, they may even have an insight that they themselves haven't fully realized yet, or that they're expressing imperfectly.
The conception of belief as an absolute binary linguistic proposition isn't always accurate to how our minds work. For starters, you can teach a child to memorize and recite a certain proposition, but that proposition might not mean anything more to them than it would to a parrot. Likewise, a person might take a piece of advice too far or try to apply it in a situation where it doesn't apply, for example, the phrase, "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism" contains a truth, but if it's applied in absolute in universal way, such that all criticisms of unethical consumption are dismissed outright (to use an extreme example, defending slave owners because even if they freed their slaves, slavery would still exist and they'd still be participating in an unethical system), then it's no longer valid. In order to accurately understand the truth behind "no ethical consumption," we must also understand criticisms of that idea, which may mean maintaining a dialectic of two opposing and contradictory perspectives, understanding the limitations of each.
Zen Buddhist koans are sometimes intentionally contradictory or counter-intuitive, often in order to challenge fixed, limited modes of thought. It is difficult to use them as an example as explaining them can defeat the purpose, you are supposed to experience the confusion and arrive at an understanding of your own accord. But something that's similar to a koan is Pig Poop Balls. When a chud comes around looking to mouth off about their meme understanding of socialism, it's usually obvious that they have this completely uninformed opinion and they're not going to listen to anything we say. To engage with them logically, even if you're refuting them, is to implicitly say that they're worth engaging with in that state. From the chud's perspective, it's like, "You're being illogical! You can't just tell me to post hog, you have to debate me in the marketplace of ideas!" But that's the thing, we don't. We can choose to engage with them however we wish, and if they're not willing to listen then there's no point in giving them the time of day. Maybe the comparison is a stretch but I think it's analogous, sometimes, everyone approaches things from the same mindset as a chud excitedly logging on to post lol gommunism no food iphone vuvuzela, and if someone can throw down an obstacle that requires you to back up and think, that can be a good thing.
In light of those and other criticisms, there are good reasons to consider things beyond the surface level of logical consistency, and to sometimes be willing to look past logical contradictions.
This comment gives me a lot to think about, do you have any recommended books or authors to go further into this topic? Thanks
Hmm, I'm not sure what to recommend as a lot of it comes from squaring my background in science with lived experience and philosophical concepts that are often kind of inaccessible, and also because I'm coming at it from multiple angles.
In my first point I mention Wittgenstein, but reading him directly is difficult to parse. "All models are wrong" is a common aphorism in statistics but I don't know if anyone's really expanded on it into a book. How to Lie with Statistics is a famous book that's somewhat related. Terry Prachett was a fan of the "lie-to-children" idea and discussed it in The Science of Discworld, which is more accessible but less formal.
My second point draws from experience dealing with people. Sometimes people are bad at expressing things or downplay their understanding, but they still have a point you can learn from. But it's also known in a philosophical context as "The Principle of Charity," or what's sometimes called "Steelmanning," as the opposite of "Strawmanning." That is, taking the strongest interpretation of someone's argument, even to the point of looking past minor discrepancies if they're not relevant to the central point. On the other hand, there's sophistry, where because of rhetorical skill, you can make an unreasonable position appear reasonable. As a thought experiment, consider that you're trying to convince a child that the earth is flat - while your position is completely wrong, you can probably "win" the argument, especially if you know more about relevant fields of science. Ancient Greek philosophers talked a lot about that sort of thing, for example Plato's Gorgias.
My third point relates to criticism of rote memorization which is often considered in the study of education and how people learn things, but I don't really have anything specific to recommend. I believe it also relates to what Deleuze was on about but I couldn't really recommend Deleuze because he's pretty inaccessible and tbh I'm not confident I actually understand him correctly.
As for my fourth point, I can recommend Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind as an introduction to Zen Buddhism. It's from a branch of Zen (Soto) that de-emphasizes koans, but Buddhist teachings in general are often written in a way that is contradictory on the surface level. If you want something that's more modern and Western in style, there's Hardcore Zen, though it's not for everyone, if the Pig Poop Balls analogy I used resonates with you you'll probably get something out of it. Generally I wouldn't recommend trying to approach koans before understanding a bit about the broader theory and practice of Buddhism.
Sorry that that's completely all over the place but like I said I'm using multiple angles here and they come from many years of personal experience butting my head against a wall and trying to be super logical all the time and dismissing perspectives that didn't fit within that framework before finally arriving at various realizations that critiqued that approach.
Those are good starting points for further inquiry, thanks!
Your argument seems to be almost like a platonist suggesting that inconsistent arguments are imperfect expressions of the 'real' perfect argument. Inconsistent methods or arguments can seem convincing if they start in the real world and correctly identify phenomena even if they don't make sense. For example, I could say the moon orbits the earth because of gravity, but the sun because of god's love. My argument doesn't contradict real observations about the sun and moon but the method is inconsistent and unjustifiable.
It's very easy to come up with a perspective with a logical contradiction that doesn't make any sense, but that doesn't mean that all perspectives that contain logical contractions are worthless. All you've done is take a correct perspective and then added some nonsense to make it worse, which is inorganic and doesn't really relate to any of my examples. I'm not claiming that all arguments that contain contradictions are valid or worth considering, but rather that there are several specific circumstances or particular reasons why some of them are sometimes still worth listening to.
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If something is logically consistent, it will also often produce contradictions. You won't be able to avoid contradictions just by dismissing things as soon as you encounter an inconsistency, you'll just limit your understanding of the world. Contradictions are encountered all the time in science, and it's not uncommon for a field to just have to deal with a contradiction for decades before someone finally figures out how its possible to square two seemingly incompatible principles with each other. As an example, the Black Hole Information Paradox pits some of the most fundamental principles of physics against each other, and either something has to give or someone has to find a very clever and insightful resolution, but until then we just have to live with it, and if you just tune it out because it's a contradiction, then that's not going to get anyone anywhere.
All of my examples address that point and frankly I'd ask that if you expect me to explain further then you should provide better criticism than a blanket dismissal with no explanation.
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I'm not sure where I suggested that, "One should take as their way of understanding reality a schema that starts in contradiction." What I actually said was, "a logical inconsistency doesn’t necessarily mean that a perspective should be dismissed."
This post asked "How do I tell whether a social theory concept is 'good' or not," and suggested that internal consistency was a good metric to use. I countered that there are cases where an idea may be worthy of consideration, even if it appears to contain a logical contradiction. You seem to have interpreted that as saying something like, abandon all logic and process everything through a lens of nonsense. It's a rather bizarre interpretation of my position. I'm saying, you shouldn't throw something away just because it's covered in mud because maybe you'll find something valuable beneath the mud, and you're interpreting it as if I said, "mud is valuable."
I have no idea how you think that two principles creating a contradiction yet still having value is anything but the exact point that I'm making. Unless, again, you're taking my position to be "mud is valuable" as opposed to "mud can be washed off." Doing "substantial further work to produce a theory that does not create this contradiction" is exactly what I'm saying, as opposed to outright dismissing anything that creates a contradiction - washing the mud off instead of throwing the whole thing away.