Have you tried walking in "someone else's shoes" as an intellectual experiment in debate?

[Johny111]

Are you able to see things from the perspective of those with whom you disagree on an issue? Can you walk in someone else's shoes, and are you able to do so in order to better understand their point of view? For the sake of practice, I sometimes advocate positions in a debate that I otherwise intimately disagree with. In such situations, I stimulate my intellectual creativity by advocating something I do not believe in, looking for arguments, and putting them in a logical and concise order. Do you sometimes do this?

 

[Xenophon]

Are you able to see things from the perspective of those with whom you disagree on an issue? Can you walk in someone else's shoes, and are you able to do so in order to better understand their point of view? For the sake of practice, I sometimes advocate positions in a debate that I otherwise intimately disagree with. In such situations, I stimulate my intellectual creativity by advocating something I do not believe in, looking for arguments, and putting them in a logical and concise order. Do you sometimes do this?

Averroes/Ibn Rushd extolled the practice. John Milton's famed "secret advocacy" of Lucifer probably was just a case of the notoriously fair-minded pamphleteer carrying this over into his poetry. David Myatt (or Anton Long or whoever was actually authoring the stuff) did this a lot in early O9A writings. He suggested living "insight roles" that one was NOT comfortable in. This for terms of a year or more. Me? Ummm...maybe not so much.