I’m not familiar with a “doctrine of acceptance”, and a quick search talks only about contract law. Do you have a description of what exactly you’re objecting to? It would be instructive (but probably not doable here, as it’s likely political topics that provide good examples) to dissect the cases that the doctrine comprises. My suspicion is that the formulation as a doctrine is cover for certain positions, rather than being a useful generalization.
To the boat analogy, “acceptance” can mean either “acknowledgement that water is entering the hull”, or one of the contradictory bundles of beliefs “water is entering and that’s OK” or “water is entering and we must do X about it”, with a bunch of different Xs. Beware motte-and-bailey in such arguments.
For political arguments, you also have to factor in that “accept” means “give power to your opponents”. When you find yourself in situations where https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Arguments_as_soldiers applies, you need to work on the next level of epistemic agreement (agreeing that you’re looking for cruxes and shared truth agreement on individual points) before you can expect any agreement on object-level statements.
I’m not familiar with a “doctrine of acceptance”, and a quick search talks only about contract law. Do you have a description of what exactly you’re objecting to? It would be instructive (but probably not doable here, as it’s likely political topics that provide good examples) to dissect the cases that the doctrine comprises. My suspicion is that the formulation as a doctrine is cover for certain positions, rather than being a useful generalization.
To the boat analogy, “acceptance” can mean either “acknowledgement that water is entering the hull”, or one of the contradictory bundles of beliefs “water is entering and that’s OK” or “water is entering and we must do X about it”, with a bunch of different Xs. Beware motte-and-bailey in such arguments.
For political arguments, you also have to factor in that “accept” means “give power to your opponents”. When you find yourself in situations where https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Arguments_as_soldiers applies, you need to work on the next level of epistemic agreement (agreeing that you’re looking for cruxes and shared truth agreement on individual points) before you can expect any agreement on object-level statements.