People do not know how to disagree well. People need to get better at disagreeing because many people are wrong. I am sympathetic to why people do not know how to disagree well because I see no discipline teaching the full suite of skills needed to do so.
Skilled awareness in three areas is needed to get good at disagreeing: informal logic, felt senses, and meta-communication. There is no course I know of that teaches all three of these things, and most people need to improve in all of these areas, not to mention all three simultaneously.
Informal logic, best learned through argument mapping1, allows one to dispassionately map another argument accurately with the “principle of charity,” aka providing the most reasonable interpretation of their argument. Most people do not have arguments: premises leading to a conclusion. Instead, they have mere opinions: conclusions without premises. In these cases, one has to consider their premises for them.
The better one gets at informal logic, the better at mapping other arguments one will be, especially when fallacies abound, disorienting emotions are expressed, and hidden agendas are in play. Most people, especially those with a pretense of reasonableness, do not respect their interlocutor's arguments. Philosopher Peter Suber calls this disrespect "logical rudeness," people who consciously or unconsciously avoid addressing their interlocutor's arguments.
Understanding and giving voice to the felt senses is a deeper skill to learn, pointing to why logical rudeness exists. Philosopher Eugene Gendlin, developer of the psychotherapeutic technique Focusing, described a “felt sense” as an all-encompassing, pre-linguistic bodily awareness that contains useful personal information that is not readily clear.
‘A felt sense is an internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about the given subject at a given time–encompasses it and communicates it to you all at once rather than detail by detail.’ – Eugene Gendlin
Learning to understand the felt senses gives one greater access to what their “subpersonalities” are trying to communicate. In the psychotherapeutic literature, a person’s personality is not a unified whole but made of semi-autonomous subpersonalities or “parts” at odds with one another. The psychotherapy project is to integrate these parts, aka become “individuated.” The more one becomes intimate with one's felt senses, the more they become intimate with one's subpersonalities, leading to greater individuation.
Another positive consequence of such integration is the capacity to discern the felt senses in other bodies, especially those not given a voice; one can then “see” a subpersonality being reified by a person, dominating their entire communication style. One explanation for logical rudeness is most people do not know what is happening within their own bodies or what subpersonality is speaking through them.
Meta-communication, communicating about what is happening within a conversation, is a high-leverage social skill. It is also one of the most difficult to learn and teach. Various interpersonal practices, such as Dale Carnegie Training, Nonviolent Communication, and Verbal Aikido, help communicate better about communication. Also, having a theoretical grounding, ranging from social exchange theory, politeness theory, and conversational analysis, provides one with greater communicative sophistication.
People who engage in meta-communication at the right time, in the right way, and with the right intent can course-correct a conversation heading into “bad faith” territory. Someone engaging in bad faith is not oriented toward the good in a conversational exchange. Instead, they have a surface pretense of being concerned with the truth but are oriented towards something other than the good, such as being right, winning an argument, saving face, and gaining status or power. If logical rudeness is present, a subpersonality usually dominates a person and, subsequently, a social exchange, leading to bad faith.
Many people are wrong and need to be disagreed with. However, most people do not actually disagree with one another. Disagreeing is not happening in the culture war; what is happening is insulting, signaling, shaming, canceling, censoring, trolling, harassing, and gaslighting. I do not think we should be naive and assume people addicted to social media, trying to win in the attention economy through culture war hot takes, and being unwittingly steered by various PsyOps will be interested in disagreeing well.
However, we are interested in disagreeing well. Those of us interested in being a friend of virtue, which is to say, being a person who orientates another person to the good, are concerned with disagreeing well. If our friends are wrong about many things, we do them a disservice by pretending otherwise. Let's start practicing by disagreeing with our friends and getting good at doing so; then, with a cabal of virtuous friends, we’ll venture into the culture war and actually disagree with less foolishness.
I see three approaches to friendly disagreeing, ranked from less foolish to more foolish, each with its strengths and weaknesses, evoking a bodily state. They are:
The Charitable Approach
The Direct Approach
The Slippery Approach
The Charitable Approach
When one senses a disagreement is present and wants to engage in a good faith exchange, this is the proper formula:
Understand. Ensure your friend thinks and feels understood. The former requires good reasoning comprehension, becoming intimate with the contours of their logical space, and articulating their propositions in a language they would use. However, if you do this with the wrong tonality, that gives off the impression of superiority or lack of interest, then that will prevent the person from feeling understood.2
Find the signal. Before disagreeing with your friend, find the areas where you think there is a signal in what they said. Even if you think your friend only has a nibble of truth, upregulate its signal and shine a light on it, honoring it fully and authentically.3 Again, you'll need to do this with proper tonality, or else your friend might suspect a hidden agenda, even when there isn't one. Very few people are "fractally wrong," aka wrong about everything. Moreover, you are not called to be someone's friend in the first place if they were. Take the following quote from Integral philosopher Ken Wilber to heart: "No one is smart enough to be 100% wrong."
Disagree with guarded premises. Lastly, you disagree with your friend, but you do so by guarding your premises4—purposely making your propositions weaker by adding words such as “could” or “may.” For example, instead of saying, “You're wrong because [gives reason],” you say, “I could be wrong; however, my current thinking is this: [gives reason].” If you have a modicum of intellectual humility, you’ll want to signal this to your friends, encouraging them to have the courage to be wrong and allowing them to save face if they are.
What state is evoked by this approach?
Accordance.
Accordance is the state of agreeableness that permeates the conversational space without necessarily agreeing propositionally. You want to aspire to agree with your friend because you want them to be oriented toward the good, speaking what they believe to be true and allowing their actions to unfold from the truth. However, allowing agreeableness to bleed into agreeing without believing what they say is true is deeply foolish and does more harm than good.
When is this approach wise to use?
When trust must be established with an emerging friendship or reestablished in an existing one—a sense of trust between friends should not be considered fixed, as personalities change when subpersonalities become integrated.
When is this approach foolish to use?
The foolish areas are threefold:
When enough trust is established in a friendship, specifically trust in your friend's sensemaking and intentions, engaging in the charitable approach is condescending and inefficient.
When engaging in goal-orientated pursuits together, and time is of the essence, the direct approach is preferred.
When your friend slips into a manipulative relational schema, aka unconsciously engaging in the slippery approach, direct meta-communicative interventions are needed to course-correct the conversation into a good faith relational exchange before attempting to resolve any disagreements.
The Direct Approach
This approach involves disagreeing directly and forthrightly:
“I do not agree with this because…”
Being very clear on what proposition you disagree with and providing clear counter-propositions is needed to avoid being logically rude.
What state is evoked by this approach?
Agitation.
The internal evocation of the fight response. This evocation is not necessarily a bad thing. Many people, especially men, enjoy fighting, and fighting, especially with propositions, can be fun. It also has multiple benefits:
May get to the truth faster.
Sharpens one’s reasoning prowess.
Develops thicker skin, preparing your friend for an unfriendly encounter.
However, there is a threshold of agitation that, once passed, becomes foolish—leading to needless debates, nasty personal exchanges, and physical confrontations, depending on the testosterone levels in the exchange.
When is this approach wise to use?
When a baseline of trust exists in a friendship, commitment to the friendship is equally shared, or time-sensitivity is present due to the pursuit of mutual goals.
When is this approach foolish to use?
If agitation can turn to anger without the proper space, time, and capacities to resolve it, then it may be best to avoid the disagreement altogether.
The Slippery Approach
This approach happens when someone does not seek to understand their friend, find the signal, or disagree directly with or without guarded premises. Instead, they approach the inquiry with a nitpicking essence, like a lawyer trying to win a court case, weaponizing Socratic inquiry, endlessly challenging definitions or wordings of propositions, and undermining their friend's sensemaking confidence in the process.
The first two approaches disagree through the front door, one in a gentle way and the other not-so-gently. The third approach tries to disagree through the back door, engaging in what I refer to as the “infinite regress defense.” Infinite regress is a philosophical concept that refers to a situation where a problem or question generates an endless chain of further problems or questions, each arising from trying to address the previous one. In essence, it's a form of argumentation that doesn't lead to a satisfactory conclusion because it keeps looping back into itself infinitely.
One reason "philosophy as a way of life"5 requires non-propositional ways of knowing is that propositions in logical space have the opening to be challenged endlessly, and no definition can be conclusively defined. When someone engages in the infinite regress defense, a technique of unconscious gaslighting,6 they ask endless questions, leveraging infinite regress as a roundabout way to disagree, slipping their premises through the back door.
The conversational experience with someone adopting this strategy is akin to wrestling a slippery pig, hard to grasp because their propositions are loosely alluded to but remain unstated while nitpicking away at others’ clearly stated claims.
What state is evoked by this approach?
Annoyance.
Socrates was annoying. Plato's dialogues were not realistic exchanges. Most people would have swatted the gadfly away. However, depending on the circumstances, one can play an annoying gadfly less foolishly.
When is this approach wise to use?
When someone approaches a conversation with too much aggression and lacks intellectual humility, aka is in culture war mode, engaging in some slippery moves is an excellent strategy to throw an interlocutor off guard. A good example is when political commentator Briahna Joy Gray threw off an anti-woke pundit by politely asking them to define “woke.”
When is this approach foolish to use?
When you regard someone as your friend of virtue, no needless slipperiness should be used.
***
One lexical definition of disagreement is "have or express a different opinion." Nobody disagrees, especially with a friend, entirely. Likewise, unless they belong to a cult, no friends agree with one another entirely. We all have different opinions, which is to say we have different conclusions, some with robust premises backed by intuitions, others only backed by intuitions or the undue influence of a dominant subpersonality.
True friends disagree and disagree often, considerately, aiming for mutual less foolishness.
I will host an in-person workshop in Toronto this September at OCAD’s Design with Dialogue and a social event at Danu Social House. Both sessions will be on power literacy. You can RSVP below:
Discovering Wisdom: Entangling Status and Power @ OCAD’s Design with Dialogue. September 19th, 6:30 - 9 pm EDT. $10.75. RSVP here.
The Living Question Game: Discussing Power @ Danu Social House. September 28th, starting at 8 pm EDT. Free. RSVP here.
To get the most out of attending, read one of the recent pieces I’ve written on power literacy:
Argument mapping visually reveals how premises support conclusions, exposing hidden structures and disagreements caused by implicit assumptions. You can watch The Stoa session we had on argument mapping here.
The practice of Empathy Circles is excellent for understanding. Also, philosopher Jacob Needleman describes a similar technique when substantial disagreements are present.
“To change the premise from “all” to “many” (or “most”) or “some” or from “definitely” to “possibly” or “significant chance” (or “probably” or “likely”) is to guard the premise. Other ways to guard premises include self-description, as in “I believe” (or think or suspect or fear)...” - Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Think Again: How to Reason and Argue
This phrase is from Pierre Hadot’s book Philosophy as a Way of Life. Hadot viewed ancient philosophers as treating philosophy as a way of being in the world and not merely an abstract discipline done in university or when getting high with friends.
An unconscious gaslighter erodes another's sensemaking, subtly asserting their supposed superior view of the world.