In Depth Explanation of Blog's Philosophy Part 3 (Dialectics vs. More Complex Structures)

I think this is an important issue to address because it gets at the fundamental way I initially wanted to structure this blog.  And I guess it is an appropriate thing to resolve before I move on into doing other concepts.

A dialectic is based in the Greek philosophical dialogues which involved two different perspectives on an issue and attempted to reach truth through discussion.  Neither side was very beholden to their perspectives, but instead they tore apart their opponents ideas and attempted to reach the "golden nugget of truth" that existed within it.  Or, as it tends to play out, prove the idea of their opponent false altogether.

I think that the last aspect of a dialectic discussion is actually what this blog is against.  The idea that in order to reach truth you must "destroy" an argument, and in so doing you will reach a more accurate conclusion.  I don't think that this tends to work out, as I explained in the Explanation of the Blog's Philosophy part 1.  Instead, I think that this form of dialectic has led to people who really think about both sides of an issue to feel that both sides are false.  That there is very rarely a "correct" answer when there are two opposing viewpoints that are critical of each other.

(The exception of course being like issues of race, or sexual orientation, where in my view there is clearly a correct side.  However, I think that to say that someone should be "equal" is actually the middle of the road argument.  It suggests everyone is the same, which is the middle between two radical perspectives of one group should be stronger, and another should be weaker.)

In that way I have come to like the Hegelian form of dialectic.  Where there is a thesis an antithesis and then the solution to these two ideas is the synthesis.  (For example, thesis = dogs, antithesis = cat, synthesis = cat-dog.)  The flaw in this thinking is obviously "more complex structures" we can have more than two oppositional ideas.  There could be three ideas that interact, or whatever.  Dropping into a thesis-antithesis pair (sometimes referred to as a dichotomy), is a fairly simplistic form of thinking sometimes.

However, I really like the idea of "merging" concepts that exists there.  And ultimately that is the form of analysis that I want to establish in this blog.  One in which we focus on a framework of "resolution" rather than opposition.  Consequently, the more complex structures of analysis that were taken in opposition to the dialectic are actually possible within a sort of dialectic. 

We could take three ideas and merge them together just as easily (well, just as theoretically possibly) as we merge together two ideas, and I actually think that this is would be a beautiful thing to do.  I think the more we merge together the more truth we would be able to get out of the merger.  And this kind of touches upon a direction I want to take this blog in eventually, namely, merging ideas that have already been merged together.

And so I guess as a response to this criticism, people should feel free to suggest 3 opposing ideas, or 4 opposing ideas just as much as they are free to suggest 2 opposing ideas.  The interesting thing about these two "opposing ideas," though, is that I don't really feel that they were ever opposing at all.  But maybe that is the point of all this.