“In principle, devil’s advocates allow us to combine the goal of figuring things out together with the goal of commitment to the truth—and they do this by functioning as a check on group consensus.”
“Thinking together is riddled with pitfalls, but we can’t really claim to live together without doing it. That is why we need devil’s advocates: they safeguard group-deliberation from the inside. The devil’s advocate defends faith and justice by being in the group but not of it: by keeping the group divided against itself, she holds a space for truth against the pressure of consensus. A devil’s advocate is, for instance, well set up to hunt for as-yet unshared information, since for her the sharing of information is never an attempt to be on the same page as other people.”
Article: The Devil’s Advocate’s Advocate