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.
Today's post, Against Devil's Advocacy was originally published on 09 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
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