Inquisitorial and adversarial ways of seeking truth

Some legal systems are inquisitorial, which means the judge—the inquisitor—is involved in investigating the facts of a case, and some are adversarial, which means the judge is meant to remain impartial while opposing sides—the adversaries—each work to present the strongest case for themselves.

Scenarios, people, and systems can be classified as more inquisitorial or more adversarial. In an inquisitorial system, a single individual or team wades into the mess, sorts through evidence, handles both pro and con, both argument and counterargument, and finally hands down a finished truth. In an adversarial system, a single individual or team is not responsible for the whole final conclusion, but rather is often part of a side whose goal is to make the best possible case for or against a proposition while still playing within the rules of the game.To be fair, the boundary is quite blurred: for instance, juries and judges decide culpability and punishment in systems like that of the US; though the defense and prosecution are adversaries, the jury’s task is to synthesize the two sides and deliver a verdict. In this sense, the jury is acting inquisitorially (as per my terminology, though not necessarily the strict legal usage of it). But the reader of an adversarial collaboration, then, is also acting inquisitorially, and the terms become confused—it remains useful to talk about “adversarial collaborations” because the key element of the process is its adversariality.

Far toward the adversarial end of the spectrum, we have adversarial collaborations, originating from the scientific sphere; in such collaborations, researchers with opposing views work together to produce a conclusion which both of them can agree on. The advantage here is that each researcher, being motivated to make the strongest possible case for eir side, will challenge the other’s arguments and identify as many errors and flaws as possible, making the final product stronger (whereas researchers who share the same beliefs might all be reluctant to poke holes in conclusions they support, and/or might not optimally defend claims they disagree with).

Many truth-seeking in-person conversations are also more adversarial in a sense that could be seen as (but should not invoke the moral judgment of) “lazy”, in that, rather than having the final conclusion ready and in hand, one expects one’s interlocutor to fight back against anything ey doesn’t agree with, and in some cases tends toward sharing unfinished speculations which will hopefully be refined later in the conversation.

The more longform something gets, and the more formal effort is put into it, the more it becomes inquisitorial—publicly posted essays are likely to be more inquisitorial than private conversations, and more of the work is claimed to have been done “behind the scenes”.

When someone says ey “wasn’t looking for feedback”, perhaps it’s because ey was operating in an inquisitorial mode where the work ey shared was more of a final product. But also, if you’re operating in a more inquisitorial mode, it’s possible you don’t trust or expect your audience to adequately push back against what you’re saying—which might be a problem you could address. In conversation, I often make unpolished statements with the expectation that my interlocutor(s) will dialectically respond in ways that will polish the claims into a better-formed final product, and to the extent that they don’t, I risk miscommunication and having my initial inchoate claims taken as final decrees. With more awareness and understanding of these modes, hopefully one will be able to better make decisions about how to operate in different situations.