Dialogue versus Dialectic
The basic instinct and behavior of analytic philosophers is to jump on the first expression of a thought by someone and start to clean it up … like a swarm of dung beetles attacking a newly deposited wad of scat. I now think this is a mistake. For one thing, in practical and social terms, it can immediately shut down meaningful dialogue between two interlocutors. Granted, for two analytic philosophers, it is a joyful activity, and may even be productive. But I submit, as an empirical hypothesis, that this approach to conversation serves with most people to shut them up or to wall them behind a wall of defensiveness, thereby aborting the development of a thought that could otherwise have been midwifed. But even more essentially – and this is my new thought now , which an analytic philosopher would be salivating to dissect and dismantle with counterexamples – I now view the activity as resting on a mistaken worldview. By “world” here I mean the world of our experience, the world as