The Necessity for Intellectual Standards
While it is beneficial to engage with others in difficult discussions, it is more important to ensure that minimum philosophic standards are in place and met before engaging in them. If both parties do not value reason, evidence, and truth, then the party that does will likely be wasting their energy in the conversation, because the other party values being right over discovering the truth. Dialogue can be a means of progressing viewpoints, or it can be a competition between viewpoints, but participants cannot value both the desire to progress and the desire to be right at the same time. This is because one party will utilize impartial objective standards, while the other will use their partial subjective emotional states, as their means of measuring the validity of an argument; like oil and water, they do not mix.
"Before you can convince someone using logic, and before you can bring them evidence—first, they must believe that evidence is worth viewing at all." ~David Stewart
