Conversation, Pretend

Definition: As used herein, a Pretend Conversation is a defective Conversation in this narrow sense: The interlocutors Pretend that one or more of its Premises are True in the hope of making progress towards the Truth of the matter at hand. For example, two friends, a nihilistic man and a moral man who know one another well, observe one day a third man severely beating a child. The incident is profoundly disturbing. After the police have come and the disturbing situation has been removed from their sight, the nihilist says to his friend, "That man beating the child was horrifically cruel." The moral man asks, "If by cruel you mean wrong in his conduct, how can you know that? As a nihilist, you have no standard to appeal to? Are you not merely saying that you do not like what you observed while that man did like what he was doing?" The implicit premise of the moral man's questions is that objective moral standards exist independent of persons. The nihilist understands that that is his friend's premise but in all their prior friendly debates, the nihilist was content to gamely deny even the possibility of its truthfulness. Disturbed by the cruelty he has just observed, however, the nihilist agrees to pretend that objective moral standards may exist so that he can explore the answer to the question - "Why am I so disturbed by what I just witnessed?"