Advocatus Diaboli

Lat. “devil’s advocate”. A legitimate rhetorical technique in which a discussant takes an opposing position in order to test and sharpen arguments in debate.

Unlike the straw man argument, the advocatus diaboli does not take a weaker or easily attackable position, but on the contrary, argues as solidly as possible.

The term “advocatus diaboli ” originally comes from eccle­si­asti­cal law and refers to a party in a process for can­oni­za­tion whose task is to argue against the evi­dence pre­sented by the Church (whose re­pre­sen­ta­tive is the “advo­catus dei ”).

It is an experience that every­body must have made at some point, that an argu­ment, which seemed to be com­pletely clear and plau­sible to one­self or to peers who were of the same opinion anyway, sud­denly becomes much less con­vinc­ing when one is actually con­fronted with counter-arguments.

It there­fore helps to sharpen the argument if someone takes on the role of the opponent in a (friendly) argument and helps to question one’s own position – for example, to prepare answers to expected counter-arguments and possibly also to modify one’s position to one that is easier to defend.

For this type of role-playing, it is important that the advocatus diaboli  argues pro­verbi­ally “tough but fair“, i.e., does not spare the oppo­nents, but also does not use unfair tricks (unless one wants to practice precisely how to respond to unfair rhetorical tricks).

In many groups of people, some form of con­sensus is estab­lished about cer­tain ways of think­ing and basic as­sump­tions that can no longer be questioned (group­think). In this situation, an “advocatus diaboli ” can help to question these basic assumptions and ensure that they remain grounded in reality.

A kind of “inner” advocatus diaboli, i.e. a self-critical re­flection on possible counter­argu­ments, can help to avoid certain forms of fallacious thinking and cog­ni­tive bias­ses (e.g. confirmation or overconfidence biasses).

• Groupthink
• Cognitive biasses

• Devil’s advocate on Wikipedia