I've written about freedom of speech extensively in all manner of forums, but the one thing that has become clear to me lately, is that people are genuinely uninterested in the philosophical underpinnings of freedom of speech. Today they would rather quote an XKCD comic, than John Stuart Mill's seminar work On Liberty.
Because of this, I've decided to try to reframe the original notion of freedom of speech, into a term I coined: Open Ideas.
Open Ideas is nothing more than what freedom of speech has always been historically: a philosophical declaration that the open contestation of ideas is the engine of progress that keeps moving society forward.
Today the tyranny of the majority believes freedom of speech is anything but that. They believe that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", despite the fact that such term came from nowhere, has no author, and in addition all great free speech thinkers argued precisely the opposite. The great thinkers argued that if people are afraid of expressing unpopular opinions, that is functionally the same as government censorship: ideas are suppressed, society stagnates, and progress is halted.
So far I have not yet heard any sound refutation of any of these ideas. All people do is repeat the aforementioned dogmatic slogan with zero philosophical foundation, or mention First Amendment details, which obviously is not equal to freedom of speech.
How is anything I've stated in any way an inaccurate assessment of what is happening?
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Notes -
Most of human communication operates through these sorts of assumptions. Why would they be unwarranted? Are books not inanimate objects? Are letters and the written words we assemble out of them not inanimate objects? When someone waves a rainbow flag or a hammer and sickle flag, Are they not specifically inviting everyone watching to infer their message? If not, why wave the flag? And sure, this can be abused by assuming a message that was not the signaler's actual intent... and yet, flags exist as a tool of communication because such malicious interpretation is orders of magnitude less effective than the primary signal.
If your standards of rigor are that communication should be happening with no assumptions being made either way, I'll note that no actual human communication works or has ever worked this way.
Can a book defend its ideas in open debate? I mean, sort of. It seems to me that a flag can as well. Who's invoking the message and its associations, and how?
I'm not assuming, I'm inferring. Inference is a necessary and irreducible part of human communication, which is necessarily lossy, compressed, and unreliable in the best of times.
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