Will the prudent man refuse to meet him in argument, and avoid examination and discussion with him? No, it is just the prudent man who is capable of reasoning logically and who is expert at questioning and answering, yes, and who is proof against deception and sophistry.
Will he then consent to argue, but take no pains to avoid being careless and casual in argument? If so, will he not cease to be the man we consider him to be? But without some such training and preparation as I suggest can he guard the sequence of his argument? Let them show that he can, and then all these speculations are idle; they were absurd and inconsistent with the conception we have formed of the good man.
Why do we persist in being lazy and indolent and sluggish, why do we seek excuses to enable us to avoid toiling early and late to perfect ourselves in logical theory?
A hypothetical argument is conditional, not written in stone. If I carefully keep in mind that I am speculating on what could be, there will be no danger of mistaking it for what must be; the former will help me to better know the latter.
Someone with a narrower perspective might object, on the grounds that positing conflicting premises can only lead to contradictions, where opposites end up being equally true. What he forgets is that there is a difference between getting the lay of the land and breaking ground, and that to examine it is not yet to agree to it.
In graduate school, I met a fellow who started coming by during my office hours almost every day, seemingly interested in whatever I happened to be reading or thinking. He promoted a sort of color-by-numbers religious orthodoxy, and it soon became clear that I had become his newest evangelization project.
I once told him how I was trying to make sense of the philosophy of David Hume, and that I wanted to consider how his claims of skepticism could be compared to a more classical realism.
“Oh no, don’t do that! You shouldn’t be reading books like that, you know. They’ll just confuse you with all kinds of modernist nonsense, and before you know it, you’ll be all turned around.”
“Wouldn’t it help to understand what I am setting out to refute?”
“Don’t be silly. We have the Church for that.”
There is certainly a danger in random musings, or jumping on the latest bandwagon that happens to come by, but that is precisely what the habits of sound reasoning are made to overcome. Instead of committing myself blindly, I have it within my power to form my judgments with my eyes wide open.
A question, if inspired by a genuine curiosity, is a good thing, and should exist for the sake of coming to terms with concrete answers. As I become more fluent in the principles of logic, I will also become keener at spotting all those pesky contradictions, and I will not need to run away from honest discussions about any conflicting points of view.
Even when dogmatists, of whatever sort, do engage in debate, it almost seems like their practices are a veritable checklist of both formal and informal fallacies. Listening to them can become like a guide in how not to think or live; it is ironic that those who would restrict the breadth and depth of my thought will only give me the opportunity to make it broader and deeper.
It turns out that the contradiction is not in entertaining different arguments, but rather in claiming that the prudent man should not think for himself, or that the good man should not be aware of his own choices.
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