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.

  • bubbalu [they/them]
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    2 years ago

    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.

    • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
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      edit-2
      2 years ago

      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.