Productive Disagreement

### Definition

The goal of this article is to outline what tools are required for what I coin as Productive Disagreement. When two people hold conflicting beliefs, what goals can we accomplish by discussing them? Many people think that the only productive result is for one person to convince the other person’s mind, but that is not what I will be arguing for here. In this case, it will be productive disagreement if:

1. Person A understands Person B’s position more than they did before.
2. Person A understands their own position more than they did before.
3. Person A and Person B realize they never actually disagreed.
4. Person A is left with something to consider about their own belief.
5. Person A and Person B better understand why they disagree.
6. Person A becomes agnostic towards their own position and Person B’s position.
7. Person A is convinced by Person B’s position.

These goals are only productive under the conditions that:

1. No one used lies or manipulation or other rhetoric to achieve them
2. They are not pressured into one of these states by outside values (e.g., social pressure).

I do not think that you have to have the goals outlined above, and what is productive to you may be completely different. I am stipulating an understanding of productive disagreement, and if you find these goals agreeable, then we can talk about what tools would achieve them.

### Productive Disagreement Tools

In this article, I will simply talk very broadly about three categories of tools without going into detail about them, merely so we can set the stage for further discussion.

Our three categories are:

1. Semantics
2. Logic
3. Premise generation (epistemology)

We may also consider this a 4th category, or a meta-category, but it is the skill and approaches we develop to find out which of these 3 categories our disagreement exists in. However, this 4th possible category only exists once you have an idea about these initial three, since you need to be able to recognize problems when they exist. This category might include things like temperament (not getting overly angry, staying focused, counter-rhetoric).

### Semantics

Semantics is the field of the meaning of terms. One of the ways in which disagreements go wrong is semantic issues. For most words we tend to have identical usage. If you and I went around pointing at objects in the world, with the task of identifying “Dog” and “Not Dog” and “Maybe Dog”, chances are, we are going to be operating around 99%+ of the same use.

Many words, however, can pose challenges. Take a word like ‘justice’. Socrates was known for going around asking people what they mean by ‘justice’. He found that no one had a good understanding of this word, despite the fact that everyone used it. Additionally, people disagreed what it meant for something to be just. ‘Justice’, unlike ‘dog’ cannot be straight forwardly pointed at, so it’s not as easy to resolve.

The main issue here is that we often mean different things by the same word, or some of us don’t have a clear understanding of a word we use. If I say “I think action X is just” and you agree with me, we may not really be agreeing, because we both mean something different. In order to productively disagree with someone, we must understand what they mean and they know what we mean, lest we simply talk past one another.

Semantics, as a category of productive disagreement is how we resolve these issues. Whether that means deciding whose usage of a term is correct, or it means agreeing on definitions temporarily, or other available options will be discussed later in more detail.

### Logic

Logic is the understanding of relationships between beliefs (called ‘inferences’). When we have a set of beliefs we hold to be true, logic is the field that lets us know what must follow from them, what can’t follow them and what remains possible. Logic also gives us tools for questioning whether someone’s set of beliefs can all be held at once.

As an example, take the two following beliefs to be true:

1. It is raining.

1. If it’s raining, then it is wet outside.

From the study of logic, we would know the following:

1. ‘It is wet outside’ must be true.
2. ‘It is not wet outside’ must be false.
3. ‘It is Tuesday’ could be true or false.

In disagreement, logic can help us narrow down the possibilities, identify contradictions in a set of beliefs, or show that something someone says must be the case is only possibly the case. Keep in mind that logic is not a study of what is initially true or false, it does not tell us what beliefs we should start with, it only deals with the relationships between different beliefs.

### Premise generation

By this, I mean how we get our initial beliefs or whether we should continue to hold the things we initially believe in. These serve as our foundational premises for further arguments. This is a huge study in philosophy and has more disagreement than the other two categories. One of the things we may do during disagreement with others is question how someone came to a belief or why they continue to hold onto it. This involves questions of justification and what truth is.

Common methods of disagreement in this area are to look at studies that make empirical claims, or question justification methods of coming to a belief. For instance, if someone flips a coin to decide whether to believe something, we may think this is a poorer method of belief than something like observation.

### Conclusion

Any problem found in disagreement between two parties should reasonably fit under one of these categories and having a good sense of the different methods found in each category will help reach the goals we have outlined. Later articles will discuss these methods in detail so that we can have more productive disagreement.