I think there is some use of devil’s advocacy, at least in the sense that Michael Ruse meant when he said it is used “partly to see how far a position can be pushed before it collapses (and why the collapse),”
I’m a mathematician, so I use proof by contradiction fairly often. A typical application goes like this: I come across a statement which I believe is false, and wish to prove is false. Then I use deductive reasoning on the assumption that it is true. If I can prove something that contradicts what I already know, then I am successful. Otherwise, I update my belief about its truth value (it becomes slightly more likely that it actually is true).
What I do not do is try to make a plausible for why the statement should be true. I only do this for statements I believe might be true. So in the end, the main point of the sequence does agree with my intuition for making effective arguments.
I think there is some use of devil’s advocacy, at least in the sense that Michael Ruse meant when he said it is used “partly to see how far a position can be pushed before it collapses (and why the collapse),”
I’m a mathematician, so I use proof by contradiction fairly often. A typical application goes like this: I come across a statement which I believe is false, and wish to prove is false. Then I use deductive reasoning on the assumption that it is true. If I can prove something that contradicts what I already know, then I am successful. Otherwise, I update my belief about its truth value (it becomes slightly more likely that it actually is true).
What I do not do is try to make a plausible for why the statement should be true. I only do this for statements I believe might be true. So in the end, the main point of the sequence does agree with my intuition for making effective arguments.