I'm also pro free speech and I also think this "intellectual humility" argument is a sort of a bad reason to be pro free speech.
Man might be a reasoning animal, but his construction of belief is often not rooted in a rational search for truth.
Man might be a reasoning animal, but the words he chooses to speak are often motivated by the wielding of political power rather than an attempt at expressing his actual underlying beliefs.
Or, in modern vernacular, trolls exist and trolling is often quite effective. A good justification of free speech needs to start with realistic assumptions about how speech is used. That typically means abandoning the underlying assumption that the end goal of free speech is to enable a search for the truth. In fact, I really believe that once you start talking about the goal of free speech as a way of enabling search for the truth, censorship becomes a lot easier to justify.
> A good justification of free speech needs to start with realistic assumptions about how speech is used.
This must be accompanied by a realistic assumption of how power is used. Wielding of political power (particularly tyrannical power) is nearly always accompanied by suppression of speech that expresses dissent.
Demagoguery may pollute a search for the truth, but nothing cements misinformation like a climate where people are prevented from saying true things.
But nobody can guarantee that most things people say are indeed true. So the "true things" limitation needs to be lifted, else it suppresses free speech all the same ("everybody knows Earth is flat, and humans were created less than 7000 years ago; please shut up and stop spreading disinformation").
I wasn't meaning to suggest that only provably true speech should be protected. Certainly for libel/slander/defamation you have to prove that a statement was untrue to get a judgment against it.
Yes, this starts to move toward what I would consider better justifications for free speech.
Free speech is fundamentally about the machinations of power. Truth and sound reasoning are not unimportant per se, but they're certainly more instrumental than fundamental when it comes to the purpose of free speech.
Man might be a reasoning animal, but his construction of belief is often not rooted in a rational search for truth.
Man might be a reasoning animal, but the words he chooses to speak are often motivated by the wielding of political power rather than an attempt at expressing his actual underlying beliefs.
Or, in modern vernacular, trolls exist and trolling is often quite effective. A good justification of free speech needs to start with realistic assumptions about how speech is used. That typically means abandoning the underlying assumption that the end goal of free speech is to enable a search for the truth. In fact, I really believe that once you start talking about the goal of free speech as a way of enabling search for the truth, censorship becomes a lot easier to justify.