Minimal Commitments of Dialectical Inquiry

What Must Be True for Questioning to Matter, and Why It’s a Game Worth Playing

I – What’s the Point?

Many arguments fail not because of errors in logic, but because the conditions for genuine disagreement are never actually met. Most disputes, regardless of discipline, happen before important terms, ideas, or even the scope of an assertion are clarified.

This work is concerned with a common type of argumentative failure. A dispute may present itself as rational inquiry. Does it truly satisfy the conditions that make meaningful disagreement possible? If not, it is no more than mere opposition. This failure is of intelligibility, not a failure of intelligence or rhetorical ability.

This work does not claim to exhaust all meaningful practices of understanding or correction, only those that operate through reasons, disagreement, and refutation. Its primary focus is dialectical inquiry.

II – Why Inquiry is Not Neutral

Inquiry must not be neutral in the sense of being free of presuppositions if it is to occur at all. This isn’t to say that people are merely bad at arguments, nor is it a claim about bias, bad faith, or ideological distortion. This is a requirement for inquiry to be intelligible in the first place, and not a moral or philosophical failure. If dialectical inquiry is intelligible, it must rely on a stable reference and the possibility of being corrected through some form of engagement.

Outcomes can be neutral, however, neutrality about conditions makes inquiry unintelligible. Inquiry itself begins with a question, which assumes that answers are possible, that reasons for questioning can count, and that disagreement may be meaningful. One may ask if skepticism is excluded by this condition. Skepticism legitimately belongs within this non-neutral space.

Let us use an operational definition of skepticism: Skepticism withholds assent, tests claims, and refuses premature closure. Does skepticism not presuppose the very conditions it questions? Does doubt only function where correction is possible? Does withholding assent to a claim mean denying intelligibility? This suggests that questioning presupposes that an answer can matter, that doubt only functions where correction is possible, and that error can only exist where truth is meaningful. The only error that may follow from this is the denial of intelligibility itself.

Many positions operate as if questioning matters, but withhold the conditions of questioning itself. One may assert that an answer is equally grounded in nothing, or that correction is mere preference, or that inquiry is a mere battle of rhetorical strengths. Some may even continue to speak while opting out of these necessary conditions for inquiry. If assertions are merely perspectives, what is the purpose of argument? If there is no stable reference for the definition of a key term, or if disagreement is merely performative rather than a genuine means of discovering truth, is there a point beyond personal expression or subjective critique?

These appear to be inquiry but no longer function as inquiry. Inquiry, then, must not be an emotional disagreement, mere irony, or refusal to accept a particular answer. Some shared purpose must be presupposed for a conversation to actually go anywhere. If inquiry is a game, then there must be conditions and some moves must count. It follows that some moves constitute opting out of the game being played in the first place.

III – The “Game”

Voluntary participation, shared conditions, moves that count, and the possibility of success or failure make inquiry into something like a game. No one is forced to participate, and disagreement presupposes at least one shared condition or constraint. Success, in this game, is intelligibility. There are several outcomes that may not strictly count as failure, such as opting out.

One may ask: “Well, who made these conditions?” No one did. They are not imposed. These presuppositions were discovered in the practice of inquiry itself, by examining what is implicit in asking, answering, disagreement, or the possibility of a “correct” answer. No authority enforces them. Equally important is that these presuppositions do not create truth, but are important for discerning what exactly truth could even be, and what could be true as a result.

There are several valid moves in this game: An assertion that may be challenged, a definition that can be clarified, or reasoning that can be evaluated all count. The concern of this work focuses much more on the implications of opting out of the dialectical game. Opting out makes inquiry impossible. So what exactly makes inquiry possible?

IV – The Rules of the Game – Minimal Commitments

These are called “rules”, “presuppositions”, and “commitments”, not because they are chosen beliefs. Making them explicit is what inquiry already commits us to if it is to remain intelligible. These are not universal conditions for any meaningful human interaction, but conditions for inquiry that seeks correction through reasoning.

A. The World Makes Sense – Ontological Preconditions

1. Reality is intelligible. The world isn’t nonsense.

2. Reality is not exhausted by opinion. Things aren’t true just because we say so. There is a difference between what seems and what is.

3. Normative agreement or disagreement requires shared constraints on application. One cannot meaningfully agree or disagree about what ought to be done unless there is some agreement about the circumstances, facts, conditions, or meaning to which the judgment applies.

4. The Law of Non-Contradiction. Something can’t be and not be at the same time.

Words can exclude possibilities. This exclusion is a fundamental condition of linguistic “grip”. Our words can “latch” onto the world in a way that is stable enough to rule other things out.

B. We Can Tell When We Don’t Know – Epistemic Preconditions

5. Ignorance can be recognized. We can say “I don’t know.”

6. Aporia is an important intermediate state, but not the end. Being stuck is part of learning. Not knowing is valuable because knowing is possible. Uncertainty does not necessarily halt inquiry, nor does it prevent practical orientation outside of it.

7. Method matters for what counts as justification. Different methods affect what can be shown, tested, corrected, considered, or ruled out within an inquiry. This does not settle whether truth is discovered or constructed. It only names a condition for meaningful evaluation.

C. Words Can Both Work and Not Work – Linguistic Preconditions

8. Language can succeed, and fail, at disclosure. Words can be right or wrong. Words are neither magical nor just arbitrary.

9. Inquiry requires mutual clarity and ability to be corrected. To seek understanding with others is to take responsibility for being understandable and responsive to correction.

D. People Matter in Conversations – Human and Dialogical Preconditions

10. Inquiry requires discipline, not just curiosity. Wanting to know isn’t enough. Wanting truth is not the same as being fit to receive it.

11. Participants in inquiry must be responsive agents. Inquiry presupposes the capacity to answer, to be corrected, to clarify, or to withdraw.

12. Understanding in inquiry requires mutual recognition. Meaningful agreement or disagreement presupposes that participants can recognize when they do and do not understand one another.

These commitments are not optional beliefs within inquiry. They are already in use if inquiry is happening. How many can be disputed before inquiry becomes something else?

V – Category Clarification

Disputes often fail before evidence, logic, or sincerity matter. If someone is making a claim, that claim belongs in a specific category.

Refutation, correction, and meaningful exploration can only occur within the same category. Different claims require different responses, and certain responses may be invalid for the category of claim being asserted. Disagreement stalls when category shifts make legitimate disagreement impossible.

A common error is shifting categories during an argument, making correction impossible. This error is tempting since one can often intuit a connection between claims. An argument often begins in one category, ends in another, and is responded to from another. This leads to resistance and misunderstanding. We will work with descriptive, normative, and explanatory claims as examples.

An example of a descriptive claim, one that merely aims to state facts about the world, is “This chair is wooden.” What is required for this to be true? Correspondence to reality is required. Correction is possible if there is evidence that it is not a chair, but made of metal, or that it is actually a table. What cannot answer this inquiry is whether the chair is good or bad, or what motive the observer has for this claim.

A normative claim assesses rather than describes. An example is “This policy is unfair.” For us to analyze whether something is fair, we must discuss alignment with standards, coherence with reasons, or some sort of good that is shared between interlocutors. This claim cannot be disputed by factual refutation or emotional reaction. One may also reduce such a complicated inquiry to mere opinion. Opinion constitutes leaving the game, unless one is working within the realm of opinion in the first place.

Another example is an explanatory claim, seeking understanding rather than description. A fine example is “The bridge collapsed because it is old.” For this to be valid, it must be a coherent and adequate explanation of the bridge’s collapse. An example of a valid response is a better competing explanation. Raw data, a value judgment, or a statement of preference are not sufficient to answer this claim on their own. Without explanatory criteria being named, there is no possible correction.

The most common trap is to leap from one category to another. For example, one claims that a vehicle is less fuel-efficient than other vehicles. One may respond, “Then it is a bad car!” It appears to be a valid disagreement, but a factual claim was met with a value judgment. The standard by which the vehicle was judged was never made explicit, and there is no intelligible link between the two ideas. This results in no possible correction to the inquiry. Without naming what connects those two statements, correction becomes impossible, and inquiry stalls.

Another example may be a shift from evaluative to descriptive. One may say, “What you just said was cruel.” And a common response is that the other did not intend to be cruel. The intent is certainly relevant, but not a genuine response. A moral evaluation was met with a psychological fact. The actual question was never addressed, and usually results in both people speaking past each other, but never actually meeting the claim where it intended to work. Without an explicit standard, correction is impossible. Clarifying intent answers a different question from the one actually being asked by the claim itself.

One may also say that a possible reason for increased crime rates is economic pressures. Another may say that the claimant is excusing criminal behavior. An explanation of a problem was treated as advocacy, collapsing inquiry into a moral accusation.

These errors are not only performed by an interlocutor, but can be equally common in a claim itself. A category may drift within a claim or an argument itself. For example, one may begin by saying that a claim is true, then that people feel strongly about it, and end by saying that all perspectives are worthy of respect. A claim cannot be meaningfully disagreed with if it changes what it is doing mid-argument. Disagreement requires meeting a claim where it operates.

Not every category shift is a mistake. It may function as a cry for help. It can be a signal that inquiry is no longer the right activity. It may be tempting to treat these conditions as general conversational rules, and that temptation should be resisted. Dialectical inquiry is one mode of engagement among others. It is appropriate when the goal is clarity, correction, or discovery. It is not appropriate where the goal is comfort, trust, or emotional repair. Nor do these conditions address ritual or spiritual practices, and this is not a failure of inquiry. To insist on these conditions with the required precision where reassurance is needed is not rigor, but a category error. Likewise, to treat inquiry as hostility is to mistake its purpose entirely.

VI – Explain It to a Five-Year-Old

A child doesn’t need philosophy to know when a game has stopped being playable, when a question hasn’t been answered, or when words are being used to avoid understanding rather than to reach it.

A group of kids is trying to play a game. No one agrees on the rules. When they try to start, someone tries to change the rules mid-game. One says that his mom says he knows the rules. Another says that the rules don’t matter. No one has any fun. Everyone is just arguing to win, not to play the game. The problem is not mere disagreement, but that nothing counts anymore in the first place.

Changing rules mid-game? That is a category shift. Saying the rules don’t matter? Denying the ability to be corrected. “Mommy says so.”? Substituting authority for inquiry. No game, no fun. If a child can detect this failure, sophistication is not the issue. The issue is refusal to play the game in the first place.

VII – Anticipated Objections

One may be inclined to argue that, even in my attempt to avoid smuggling in ideas through the back door, this method smuggles in ethical normativity through the side door. This is an excellent observation, as assigning an ethical norm to a description of what makes inquiry work would be a major category error. “Normative”, in this case, is conditional normativity, and means what counts as a genuine attempt to understand, and not a moral obligation on the part of someone involved. This is solely a condition of intelligibility, not an ethical prescription.

One may also say that this method intentionally excludes opponents within a dispute. This would reduce the framework from a set of claims to a means of locking someone out from being understood and engaged with. However, these claims are diagnostic and not dismissive. An opponent requires the same ability to be understood for genuine inquiry to occur. It is not simply about the ability to agree, but the ability to be intelligible in principle. Opting out is not an insult, a comment on one’s moral state, nor a means of silencing someone. These conditions are required for correction or refutation to be possible in the first place.

People also may disagree without shared constraints. This is a reasonable concern, as the term “meaningful disagreement” may be taken as a means of dodging conversation. As stated above, there may be a genuine lack of shared constraints and the argument enters the distinct realm of conflict or persuasion, but those are not the same thing as inquiry.

The final critique that may arise is that treating inquiry as a game is flippant and unfruitful. The metaphor functions to build on the conditions demonstrated, and not to define inquiry as a literal game. It simply acts in a similar way, since games have conditions, valid moves, and failures to continue playing. It is meant to explain, not be a foundational description of what inquiry is. Once intelligibility is understood the metaphor may be safely discarded.

VIII – Self-Application

If this method fails, it fails by its own criteria. Let’s examine a claim that may appear to meet the conditions mentioned above, but smuggles in several grand assumptions unfit for the scope of this essay. Consider this candidate that one may propose for the third condition:

3. The good is downstream from the real. You can’t know what’s good if you don’t know what’s true. Inquiry into value presupposes intelligibility about what is the case. Even disagreement about the good relies on shared reference to the real.

Let’s apply this method in full:

What is the category of this assertion? If this is meant as a minimal condition rather than a substantive thesis, let’s assume that it is a claim on a minimum condition for inquiry to occur. It states that, for what is “good” to be intelligible, it must be known through what is “real”. For this claim to work, there must be an intelligible “real” that is beyond simple “reality”. We must also accept metaphysical realism, the dependence of value and judgment on something ontological. This may be good prose, and defensible if realism has already been asserted, but shifts categories from a description of inquiry to what must be the case metaphysically for the definition to hold.

Here is another example, drawn from a possible definition of the ninth condition:

9. Clarity and understanding are a moral achievement, and not just a technical one. Trying to be clear is being kind in showing regard for your interlocutor. How we speak and think affects who we become.

This claim states that clarity and understanding are not only ideal for inquiry, but are required ethically. Not only is it good practice to inquire, it is also an act of kindness towards an interlocutor, and that the process of speaking can have an effect on who one is and who one becomes. Again, it sounds quite pretty, but makes several major claims based on what morality and kindness are, and implies some sort of philosophical formation through words. Rather than answering the original question and remaining in its scope, it shifts into a normative claim on how one should interact to be moral.

A final example of a claim one could easily make:

11. Persons are not interchangeable with systems. Who’s talking matters. Inquiry is always undertaken by someone with the capacity to be questioned, corrected, clarified, or to refuse to continue.

This seems quite minimal at first, and almost dangerously true. It simply states that a person matters within the context of inquiry, and assigns the importance of their capacity to engage and be engaged. However, it makes several assumptions about what a person is, what a system is, and what a person is ontologically. Rather than remaining within the scope of the claim being made, it opens up the floor for many metaphysical debates. Rather than serving a functional role, it could easily be misread as acting ontologically.

The issue was not that these claims were indefensible. They were simply doing more work than the scope of the inquiry required. Each of these claims was present in an earlier draft of this essay until refined into the form they take in Section IV above. (Please see “Author’s Note” below for other examples)

IX – Conclusion

Beyond identifying the minimal commitments required for inquiry to occur, this framework also serves as a diagnostic tool. It can reveal where inquiry has stalled and how easily assumptions may enter unnoticed.

Now that this is clear, let’s read some Plato!

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Appendix:

Useful Diagnostic Questions for Inquiry:

• What must already be true for this to be intelligible rather than just noise?

• What must be true for this to be a meaningful thing to ask?

• What is being presupposed but not argued?

• What conditions must hold for disagreement to be possible rather than arbitrary?

• If this claim were false, what would actually break?

• Does this operate at the level of being, descriptive, or explanatory?

• What kind of answer would even count here?

Author’s Note:

Here is how easy it is to slide from minimal conditions into rather grand commitments without noticing.

I initially believed several of these conditions were strictly minimal, but I accidentally smuggled in some major metaphysical assertions in earlier drafts of #3 and #9. I want to show how easy it is to do so.

• (Earliest Version) 3. The good is downstream from the real. You can’t know what’s good if you don’t know what’s true. Inquiry into value presupposes intelligibility about what is the case. Even disagreement about the good relies on shared reference to the real.

• (Middle Version) 3. Normative disagreement requires shared reference to reality. One cannot meaningfully disagree about what ought to be done without some agreement about what is the case.

• 7. Method matters without creating truth. How you look matters, but it doesn’t make the thing. Method does not invent reality, but conditions access to it.

• 9. Clarity and understanding are a moral achievement, and not just a technical one. Trying to be clear is being kind in showing regard for your interlocutor. How we speak and think affects who we become.

• 11. Persons are not interchangeable with systems. Who’s talking matters. Inquiry is always undertaken by someone with the capacity to be questioned, corrected, clarified, or to refuse to continue.

• 12. Meaning is discovered between persons. We understand together. Understanding is relational but not subjective.

On further reflection, as lovely as they sound to the author’s ears, they presuppose substantial metaphysical and ethical commitments. These views may be defensible, but they are not required for inquiry to function. I have chosen to preserve them here to show how easily these assumptions can sneak in unnoticed.