Deep Disagreements, the Method of Elimination, and Swimming in Logical Space
Tomorrow’s events:
Live Journaling w/ Peter Limberg. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Verbal Aikido: Mini-Practicum w/ Luke Archer. May 24th @ 1:00 PM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
An event to (maybe) get excited about:
Intuition and Anticipation in Navigating Complexity w/ Dave Snowden. May 31st @ 3:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Dave Snowden makes his return to The Stoa to discuss the importance of having a good intuition game during the deliciously complex moment we are in.
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May 23rd, 2021
I am pretty groggy this morning. Last night Camille and I had a few drinks, then we went out to hunt for some pizza slices, which seemed like a good Friday night thing to do.
I have an espresso now, the Pixies are playing, and it is so fucking lovely outside. The breeze is touching my face in the right way. The kind of way that conveys everything is going to be okay. I am also in a “Live Journaling” session with a bunch of Stoans at The Stoa.
There are good vibes in these sessions. We are silently journaling together now, which is to say we are silently philosophizing together, and philosophizing together is an intimate thing to do. There is a sensual energy here because of this, or perhaps this sensual energy is here because of the breeze, as the breeze is flirting with me hard right now.
Okay, now that the grogginess has settled, I will continue with my musings on reasoning, and I want this to be my second last entry on the matter, so I will try my best to drop some wisdom bombs for today’s entry. Before the wisdom bombing occurs, I’ll recap what has been covered so far in the reasoning series …
A distinction between opinions and arguments was made, which is good to know to spot when you or others are simply spouting mere opinions without any considered thinking. A series of fallacies stemming from the straw man fallacy were then introduced, along with conversational heuristics stemming from the steel man heuristic. Knowing these will help us filter out the noise and boost the signal.
The importance of guarding our premises was next. Doing this is good to maintain our commitment to truthfulness and to guard ourselves against any bad faith interlocutors. This was followed with an entry that made the distinction between rationality and reasoning, which sees the former as ‘training wheels’ to allow for the latter to be rewilded, aka tapping into that daemonic intelligence.
Yesterday I wrote about the failure modes of learning the metalanguage of reasoning, and today I want to write about the puzzle of “deep disagreements.” This is the term that comes from a legend in the reasoning game, Robert Fogelin, who was the PhD supervisor of Walter-Sinnot Armstrong.
Deep disagreements are of great interest to me. According to Fogelin, deep disagreements are disagreements that “cannot be resolved through the use of argument, for they undercut the conditions essential to arguing.” Instead, he argues we need to engage in non-argumentative means to resolve the dispute. He offers the following argument for this claim ...
1. Successful argument is possible only if participants share a background of beliefs, values, and resolution procedures.
2. Deep disagreements are disagreements wherein participants have no such shared background.
3. Therefore a successful argument is not possible in deep disagreement cases.
4. In disagreements needing urgent resolutions that also do not admit argumentative resolution, one should use non-argumentative means to resolve the dispute.
5. Therefore, in urgent deep disagreements, one should use non-argumentative means to resolve the dispute.
Spotting deep disagreements in the conversational wild is a useful skill to develop, because it will afford discernment of when to pivot to more Dale Carnegie-esque tactics, instead of getting tangled up in some Gordian argumentative weeds. I would recommend two reasoning moves before this pivot though, one is called the “method of elimination” and the other is what I will call swimming in logical space.
Before turning on the face-saving and fight-or-flight mitigating charm that Dale Carnegie’s “elephant whispering” methods afford, it would be good to attempt the technique that the philosopher David Chalmers suggests first. A helpful reasoning mental model is what he calls “verbal disputes,” which he describes as …
Intuitively, a dispute between two parties is verbal when the two parties agree on the relevant facts about a domain of concern and just disagree about the language used to describe that domain. In such a case, one has the sense that the two parties are “not really disagreeing”: that is, they are not really disagreeing about the domain of concern and are disagreeing only over linguistic matters.
Verbal disputes can be contrasted to “factual disputes,” disagreeing about the facts of a matter. Factual disputes can be complex, especially when it comes to disagreements in the hard sciences or with conspiracy theories (or “coincidence theories”), but for most conversations in the wild, resolving factual disputes is simply a matter of looking something up on Wikipedia.
When different definitions are flying around in a conversation, like the word racism, then things get messy. Some words also carry different connotations with different memetic tribes, so their triggering effects differ from tribe to tribe.
In these cases, when there is a sense that a verbal dispute exists, then you can follow the Chalmers method of elimination. Let’s say there is a disagreement over a statement (S), and there is a chance that it is simply due to the meaning of a term (T) being used, you then can engage in these three steps suggested by Chalmers in his paper called “Verbal Disputes” ...
“Step 1: Ban the term T temporarily from your vocabulary.
Step 2: Try to find a new sentence S’ in the restricted vocabulary such that the parties nonverbally disagree over S’ and this disagreement is part of the dispute over S.
Step 3: If there is such a sentence S’, then the dispute is not completely verbal, or at least there is a non-verbal dispute in the vicinity.”1
Our rationalist friends have a similar technique called the “rationalist taboo,” which they describe as: By prohibiting the use of a certain word and all the words synonymous to it, people are forced to elucidate the specific contextual meaning they want to express, thus removing ambiguity otherwise present in a single word.
Having the method of elimination or the rationalist taboo coupled with the intersubjective skillfulness of Luke Archer’s Verbal Aikido would be good. The great thing about Verbal Aikido is that it has a lot of these fancy philosophical methods already baked into the modality. Luke’s mini-practicum that is happening at The Stoa has been quite a delicious treat for us Stoans.
But despite one’s best efforts to double-click on the meaning of words, you may still be left with a deep disagreement. What does one do then? Well, if good faith is present, then you just shake hands, agree to disagree, and have a healthy respect for eachother. I love hearing stories of good friends who have a fundamental epistemic gap on their views of God or politics, but still can be besties.
I have another technique to deal with deep disagreements before trying the Dale Carnegie stuff or becoming epistemic gap besties though, and that technique is akin to going insane with reason. I call this technique swimming in logical space. Ludwig Wittgenstein was the guy who first dropped the term 'logical space' in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Logical space is the total sum of all possible states of affairs, which is a different thing from the actual state of affairs, aka things actually happening in the world. Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus that the “proposition determines a place in logical space,” hence a proposition (which can be a premise or a conclusion in an argument) serves as a coordinate in logical space.
The propositions you hold will shape your logical space in a certain way, and it will constrain the space as well. Here is a simple example:
I own only one cat and his name is Socrates.
Other propositions can now be teased out from this: I own an animal and my cat has the same name as a philosopher. Some propositions are now made impossible as well, such as the following: I own two cats and I have a cat named Nietzsche.
If you have strongly held propositions, and are very opinionated, then the logical space you are operating in will be very small. On the other hand, if you have a radical agnosticism à la Robert Anton Wilson, then you can play in a logical space that is infinitely large.
You need not be propositionally committed to radical agnosticism to have access to this expansive logical space though, as you can access it through being what I like to call a “performative agnostic.” This is having the capacity to “method act” a radical agnosticism.
If you can do that, especially in the conversational wild, then you can swim wildly in logical space, and deep disagreements will no longer be experienced as disagreements, they just feel like deep vibing. I wrote about the vibe diversity that this affords in the ‘Weird Stoicism’ entry.
The danger of swimming in logical space is going insane of course, which has happened to me multiple times. This is why I like Stoicism—at least in the way I hold it—because it is a minimum viable philosophy that not only affords sanity, or a “hypersanity” to use R.D. Laing’s term, but it also offers a lot of room to infinitely play.
We need ecology of practices to “see people through the other side” here, and for them to get into the right relationship with their fear of going insane, which is basically a fear of never being loved by anyone ever again. This of course is a great opportunity to practice Stoicism, and a chance to do some “I am never going to be loved by anyone ever again” negative visualizations.
Alright. So, there you have it. You now know how to handle deep disagreements. To recap, here is the algo ...
Get good at this metalanguage of reasoning thing so you can spot deep disagreements in the conversational wild. If you think you have encountered one, double check if a verbal dispute is present via enacting the method of elimination or using the rationalist taboo technique. If the disagreement is still deep, you can either engage in some Dale Carnegie-esque elephant whispering or become epistemic gap besties, assuming good faith is present. If you are ready for hard mode, you can swim in the entirety of logical space via method acting radical agnosticism, and transmute deep disagreements to deep vibing.
Cool. My next entry will probably be my last entry on reasoning. It will be about how to reason well, in the ‘philosophy as a way of life’ sort of way. I sense that the next entries after that will start fluttering down from the reasoning facet of third-person epistemics (objective) to the social dynamics facet of second-person epistemics (intersubjective).
I would like to tease out how to spot when people are operating in good faith or bad faith in conversation. I sense this is related to becoming sophisticated in ‘speaking’ the various invisible social languages at play (status, power, sexual marketplace, coolness, etc.).
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https://crucialconsiderations.org/philosophy/verbal-disputes-i/