Challenge Perspectives : L6
Language Use at L6
: Accumulating and organising shared awarenesses as beliefs and appreciating their impact in use.
Identifying and challenging the relevant diverse perspectives increases awareness about beliefs, often ideological, that bear on the handling of an institutional issue.
Essence of the Work
To enable representatives of diverse perspectives relevant to an institutional issue to present, explain and defend their position in public fora.
As explained earlier, institutions contain camps or factions and, in a democratic society, these need to be publicly identified. Every factional camp will have a distinct perspective leading to a particular position on the issue that affects lobbying, policies and choices.
Representatives of these camps need to be subjected to on-the-spot demands to explain themselves and must accept they will be challenged. This is why the most powerful frequently refuse to respond or send a written bland and defensive statement.
Challenges may be provided by an impartial interviewer or may occur as part of a panel event in which debate amongst representatives can be orchestrated. Current affairs programs offer an alternative to a multi-person debate if they are fronted by an interviewer teasing out interviewee’s positions and confronting them with implications and alternative viewpoints.
Such interviews and round-tables may be presented via television or online media or in public conferences. The panel of speakers often works best in the presence of an audience with experience of the issue and the institution.
Who Does the Work
Public figures, opinion-formers, society-oriented experts, relevant academics, activist-leaders, senior politicians, industry representatives, and institution-based leaders are the usual participants. Senior journalists are the typical interviewers and chair-persons.
The interviewer is ideally unbiased fluent and with sufficient familiarity with the issue to ask penetrating questions, evoke explanations and challenge arguments—all with the goal of getting clarification for the public.
Any factional representative will try to modify or shape the thinking of the audience, even hoping to convert them to their way of thinking. That involves clarity and logical argument in the service of persuasion.
While disagreement, sometimes intense, must be anticipated and accepted, ad hominem arguments and irrelevant attacks or abuse should be strictly forbidden. Logical fallacies , empty emotive rhetoric, and misrepresentation of alternative viewpoints, as commonly used by politicians, should be confronted and blocked.
Cf. Polarized Partisan Debates
Panel discussions can be characterized as political debates because different positions will mean differential benefits for groups in society. However, as the goal is to expose issues and explain ideas, they do not focus on defeating an opponent. In this way, they are unlike typical partisan debates.
Partisan debates are polarized—for or against, right wing v left wing, government v opposition. Such interactions are win-lose propositions reflecting the binary black-or-white fallacy.
Such adversarial contests are more like rowdy arguments where there is no moderation, and rationality is noticeably absent. Arbitrary selection of facts, distortions and even lying are common. A panoply of logical fallacies are used, and attacks on the personality and motivation of those on the other side are common.
Plotting the Work
Challenges and questioning are developed on the fly and must be responded to authoritatively and constructively. So both the interviewers and the representatives of require a detailed knowledge of the institution and mastery of the issue. This means that the is very high on the Y-axis.
The various are intrinsically diverse and potentially divisive. Each factional camp knows that their particular position is not the consensus and panel discussions are set up with minimal expectations of consensus beyond a common awareness of public concern. So this work is placed very low on the X-axis.
We therefore place in the upper left corner of the upper left quadrant as shown in the diagram: as expected for t6/L6.
Factional debates open up the forces of division and doubt in society and these may need to be reconciled.
- Continue to the 7th level/type of work: demanding transparency.
Originally posted: 14-Oct-2022. Last updated 30-Jun-2023.