Episode 120 - Disagreement

Transcript

Ellie: 0:04

Hello and welcome to Overthink.

David: 0:16

The podcast where two experts on disagreeing, that is, philosophers, tell you what we and others think about big and important topics.

Ellie: 0:25

I'm Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:26

And I'm David Peña Guzman. Ellie, one of our listeners favorite things is when you and I disagree. They find our disagreements really productive and we often get comments asking for more of that.

Ellie: 0:42

Absolutely. And it's so funny because we have found over the four years of doing this podcast that we actually find it pretty hard to disagree on the topics that we choose. Like, we agree on a lot of things, which I guess is unsurprising because we're longtime friends. We went through the same philosophical training. I think a lot of our commitments and values are similar, a lot of what we believe to be true is similar. So we're often looking for things we disagree about when we're thinking about our episode topics and trying to find ways that we diverge on particular ideas.

David: 1:16

Yeah, especially on substantive issues, which did happen when our difference became obvious over regret, like the ethics of regret, and also our debate, our infamous debate over cancel culture.

Ellie: 1:29

I think it's only infamous for us, but I do think the biggest disagreement that's come up between us, which is related to our old cancel culture episode, at least the biggest disagreement between us philosophically speaking, is whether you can separate the art from the artist. And we were recently asked to host an online event on philosophical disagreement, and I had the, might I say, brilliant idea to actually stage a debate between us and then have us pick it apart together in front of the audience afterward to see what moves we had made in the debate. Right? So to have a debate and then to reflect on the debate and kind of what happened in it. But we decided not to do it because we thought to ourselves, well, the best thing to argue about would be whether you can separate the art from the artist because I believe you can, and you believe you cannot. But we decided not to do it because we had this phone conversation where we were talking about like how we would actually stage this debate. And it led us to so strongly disagree that it became an hour long argument. And we decided that we couldn't stage this debate at all because it was like not a fun disagreement.

David: 2:38

Yeah, this was a long disagreement, and honestly, nobody should be subjected to that. I found our disagreement to be almost intractable, and that's rarely a position that we find ourselves in. But I also felt like we were occasionally not quite grasping the other person's motivation for holding their different positions. And so anyways, we decided not to do that and do something else instead.

Ellie: 3:03

Well, yeah, because then we were figuring out what we would use, like how we would structure the debate, right, and what we would use within it without talking about what our specific moves would be because we wanted the disagreement to be organic. And then you got really upset when I said I wanted to show an artwork and then have us analyze it and then think about whether we needed information about the artist in order to determine the value of that work. And you were so annoyed that I suggested actually looking at artwork, which, by the way, was because I felt like we needed a visual example. You know, you're doing a public lecture, you want to have a visual example that you felt, but you somehow felt like us showing an example of an artwork and analyzing it was already stacking the deck in my favor. And I was like, I found that to be such a bad faith argument that I was like, so mad at you. And it was definitely, and you were really mad at me too, even though I was definitely justified and you were not.

David: 3:54

No, I was absolutely right and you were absolutely wrong because the debate about the artists from the artwork is about whether you can separate them. And so when you just put up an artwork and say, let's analyze it in a vacuum, you've already separated it. So you have already presupposed the conclusion.

Ellie: 4:12

Yeah, whereas my view was that actually we were going to be showing the art and then talking about the artist and seeing whether we could disentangle them or not. And so I felt like we were doing both art and Yeah artist.

David: 4:23

So you were not clear about that.

Ellie: 4:25

Girl, I was. I was super clear about it. Maybe you thought I was saying one thing and then you couldn't hear me afterward, but you were just like, I feel like it's really important to have an object lesson. And I felt like you just wanted to have a conversation about the artist in absence of the art. And so it was like, you thought I was talking about art in a vacuum, and I thought you were talking about the artist in a vacuum. Actually, hey, I mean, the event's now over. We decided to talk about something else, but this could have been maybe a more tractable disagreement. We were just in a bad mood when we had it, which is interesting in of itself.

David: 4:57

Yeah, we're just like actually really bad debaters going for bad faith arguments and trying to win.

Ellie: 5:04

No, no, I mean, you're totally right that it felt like a pretty intractable argument, which is not unheard of for us, but is pretty unusual. I think we usually have like good communication styles for working through disagreements.

David: 5:16

And a shared starting point. Yeah.

Ellie: 5:18

Yeah, I was driving home from campus, so it might have been before dinner. I wonder if we were both hangry before dinner.

David: 5:24

Yeah, you were experiencing road rage and you channeled all of that onto me.

Ellie: 5:29

Okay, guys, I just want to point out what just happened. I said that both David and I perhaps were not our best selves, and David put it on me. Classic case in point. There's an ad hominem for you.

David: 5:40

Did you just say like a minute ago, I am completely justified and you were completely unjustified?

Ellie: 5:46

I'm talking about argument. That's not an ad hominem attack.

David: 5:52

Today, we are talking about disagreement.

Ellie: 5:55

Why are disagreements so frequently dissatisfying or frustrating?

David: 6:00

How does disagreement relate to personal belief and expert testimony?

Ellie: 6:05

And how do philosophers, who are experts on disagreement, think about this topic? David, as much as you and I might have been dissatisfied by our phone conversation about how to structure a hypothetical debate about separating the art from the artist, I think that frustration or dissatisfaction was still nothing compared to how unsatisfying I find most disagreements to be online. At least we were talking over the phone, at least we know each other. Online, people just say things. It's horrendous. I mean, like, Twitter was always this way, but of course, as many have remarked upon, it's gotten especially bad post Musk takeover. It's just a complete cesspool of totally unproductive disagreements. And it doesn't usually lead people to change their minds. Like, I do think it can in some cases, certainly disagreements online, but it doesn't usually lead people to change their minds. And there's this farce of, oh, we're engaging in a good faith argument, when in fact, you don't actually know the person at the other end. It could be a bot. It could be a troll. And you just don't really know whether they're arguing in good faith. And so kind of what's the point?

David: 7:20

Well, what's the point? Because you don't know who the other person is or what their motivations are, what brought them on to the debate in the first place. But I also think part of the problem is the brevity of expression that a lot of social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram or Twitter make available to us. So one of the benefits that we have, for example, in a podcast like ours is that when we disagree, we can really tease ideas apart. We can develop we can ask questions and wait for answers, but the brevity of online messaging makes a lot of disagreements take on an almost staccato tenor, where it's just like little blitz of information that feel disconnected. And that because they are short, often end up being expressed in the most forceful language available to the speaker as a way of conveying the degree of conviction that they want to convey. And that is experienced as being basically getting yelled at by the people on the other end of that conversation. So for me, the format and the platforms are largely to blame.

Ellie: 8:28

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. But I have to say for me, it's actually even more that I don't even want to converse. with these people online to begin with. I don't think it's the best way to argue or disagree and I don't think that anonymous strangers on corporately owned platforms owe each other their opinions and so I'm just actually not that interested in disagreeing online at all, especially over text based platforms.

David: 8:55

Yeah, I agree with you, but let's unpack this a little bit more because why is it that arguing online is particularly obnoxious? One reason for me is that online fora are generally public, right? Like say Twitter or the comment section on TikTok. Everybody can chime in no matter who they are.

Ellie: 9:14

Yeah, and let me just specify that's what I mean when I say online. I'm not talking about in publications or something like that. I mean social media. I should have been specific about that.

David: 9:21

Okay, yeah, so let's say public and online. And because of the way these platforms work, you also cannot control the order of comments. So, for example, think about platforms where I might post something, and then you post something disagreeing with my original claim. Then before I have a chance to respond, a bunch of other people have already started screaming and like putting their noses in, and by the time I actually write my rebuttal, it becomes really difficult to follow the thread of any one conversation. So you have to really battle a lot of noise to pick out the signal because all of the comments are often out of order and out of time, even when they get nestled into threads. And so The disagreements often become what the philosopher Byung Chul Han calls a shitstorm. They are this chaos with force, but without inner organization.

Ellie: 10:19

I love that there's a philosopher acquainting a technical term, shitstorm. He's just claiming it for us philosophers.

David: 10:28

Yeah, and for Byung Chul Han, the term also has to do with the lack of sovereignty in online spaces. You know, when you have a debate in the family or with friends or with neighbors, at some point, one person will just say, Look, Let's stop the conversation because it's not working anymore and people sort of stop and move on with their lives. But online, we don't really have the sense that anybody has the power to call a shitstorm a shitstorm. And so the result is that we just feel trapped in this swarm of chaos that is experienced by everybody as frustrating and alienating.

Ellie: 11:03

Yeah, and there's obviously so much to say about this, but one that comes to mind is that there's not an exchange there, right? This idea of a shitstorm or of just like opinions swarming about is really different from the way that disagreement is traditionally thought of as an exchange, at least when we're talking about a disagreement of belief. And philosophical disagreements, generally speaking, have historically been about exchanges. You can think about Socratic dialogue or medieval disputations, or the early modern practice of writing letters. So I want to talk about each of these in turn a bit here at the beginning of the episode.

David: 11:40

Yeah, no, I think that's great. So, let's talk about Socratic dialogue first. Socrates was the master of the kind of disagreement that we call dialectics, where you point out problems with your interlocutor's position, usually by grilling them as Socrates did in ancient Athens, with tough questions that expose the lacuna in the interlocutor's knowledge, right? So, you let somebody put forth an opinion, or typically a definition, like a definition of justice, or a definition of the good, and then you poke holes in it as a way of showing that the people who claim to know things actually know a lot less than they really do. And we see this kind of dialogic, social reasoning enterprise staged in the Platonic dialogues, where Socrates, of course, appears as the main character, where it's a discussion back and forth, not always between two people. Often there are other characters that get involved. But what defines it is the continuation of a call and response over a long period of time following the thread of a particular idea.

Ellie: 12:47

And this Socratic tradition is a precursor to something that then happens in the Middle Ages in European universities where we get the rise of what are known as disputations. And I want to shout out our friend and longtime Overthink listener Becca Longton who asked us to talk about disputations when I said what should we talk about in an episode on disagreement. And disputations are a tradition of debate that in a sense can be traced all the way back to ancient Sumeria's disputation poems. And these disputations involve scholars basically debating one another on given topics. And I read in a book called The Medieval Culture of Disputation that scholastic disputation arose in the late 11th century, and developed systematically, mainly starting in France and Italy, to become an essential practice in the scholastic culture of medieval Europe, including extending out beyond the bounds of the university and into public life. Some of the most notable disputes were those between Christian theologians and Jewish theologians. So it was really important debates about the nature of God, the nature of morality, coming from that rich scholastic tradition of theology.

David: 13:57

Yeah. And often the disputations, at least the ones that we receive in the form of writing, are structured with a question that organizes a debate at the top and then a back and forth, kind of like in a modern day debate where the different speakers would cite evidence for their position. And it's one of the defining characteristics of this scholastic philosophical tradition of the high medieval period that often relied on this kind of disputation format, that they would often just cite Aristotle as the single authority that would arbitrate or referee many of these disputes. And so often it was a question of , What does Aristotle really say about this question and who can claim him onto his side? But it's from there that we also have a lot of influence for contemporary academic practices of debate, which, as you know, Ellie, and we've mentioned before, I was a debater all through high school. And then that's how I financed my way through college at a state university. It was a debate scholarship. And so I, myself, I'm kind of like a child of this disputation approach to philosophy that I no longer particularly embrace.

Ellie: 15:05

Well, so then, David, you're the perfect person to clarify what logical fallacy it is when we say things in debates like, well, according to Aristotle, X, and use that as evidence.

David: 15:17

I don't like, I'm having to go back to like logic 101, informal logic 101 the appeal to authority.

Ellie: 15:23

Appeal to authority, cha ching, da ding, I don't know what that bell money noise was. Anyway, one thing I also learned in this research is that Descartes wrote his meditations in the 1600s, so post medieval period, as an alternative to the tradition of disputations. Descartes said in writing Meditations rather than Disputations, I wanted to make clear that I would have nothing to do with anyone who was not willing to join me in meditating and giving the subject attentive consideration. And what I take from that claim is that Descartes thought the culture of disputatio was quite combative and antagonistic, of course, and so he wanted to actually invite his readers to come along, almost not even invite them, but be like, I'm only writing for those people who are willing to go along with me. And granted, Descartes did not invent the genre of meditations. That was already an existing tradition in the Middle Ages. For instance, Anselm did both meditations and disputations. But this wouldn't be the only time that Descartes takes credit for the work of Anselm and other philosophers from the Middle Ages, his theory of the cogito and arguments for God.

David: 16:34

I didn't know that Descartes specifically opposes meditation to disputation, which is A, kind of obvious, but B, also really, really interesting because it means that he is rejecting that combative, almost belligerent approach to argumentation that you really do see in the High Medieval period. But I'm working on a project, where I argue that it is with Descartes, and now this is connected to this, that we see the rise of a new model of philosophical cognitive labor in the history of philosophy, which is the notion of philosophy as monologue, where The philosopher, recedes into this private sphere of the mind in order to generate ideas that they've been inspired to bring into existence through like a pure act of will. And now that I'm thinking about this, this would be a really interesting place to articulate potentially a critique of Descartes, because yeah, he might be rejecting the combativeness of the medievals, but he's also at the same time moving away from their dialogic collaborative framework for doing philosophy, which you see in the dialogues of the ancients and in the disputations of the medievals.

Ellie: 17:44

Yeah, but, how amazing is that this is a moment of disagreement, David? I would say that Descartes is by no means the person to originate that monological form of philosophy. We see it already in Boethius in ancient philosophy, in Marcus Aurelius, and a lot of the work of the Stoics. We see it too in Augustine and a lot of the Middle Ages philosophers. So I would encourage you to rethink the thesis that it's starting with Descartes that we get this monological view, because I think it goes back further than that. Although Descartes would love that you're attributing it to him.

David: 18:10

Well, and also like Descartes did his own kind of collaborative philosophy in his own way, especially given his practice of writing letters to

Ellie: 18:19

other philosophers. Yes. Okay. Yes. I'm so glad you mentioned this because I was thinking about this as well. This is now us perfectly organically moving from go from Socratic dialogue to medieval disputation to early modern letter writing. A lot of the early modern philosophers had incredible correspondences. I mean, you'll often even see their correspondences being published alongside their major works, like whether it's Leibniz or Descartes or

David: 18:45

Spinoza

Ellie: 18:47

Berkeley, any number of philosophers from this period. And I personally find especially interesting the letters that Descartes exchanged with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, because I feel like they give us a sense of how early modern philosophers were disagreeing from a rhetorical standpoint. So, I want to just read the beginning of one of Descartes letters to the princess. Madame, the favour with which your highness has honoured me in granting me receive her commands in writing, surpasses anything I had ever dared hope for, and it compensates for my flaws better than would that I which passionately desired to receive, okay, what, those commands from your lips, had I been able to be admitted to the honor of paying you reverence and of offering you my very humble services when I was last at the Hague. For I would have had too many marvels to admire at the same time. Okay, I'm just going to stop there because there's like two more paragraphs of this. But what kills me about this is that Descartes is just hardcore fangirling over Princess Elizabeth and acting so obsequious. And I think it's fair to say, especially because they have really substantive philosophical disagreements, that a lot of this is just norms of formal politeness in the day. In comparison to something that we experience a lot today, which is the way that tone can get lost over text. And so I I think it's fair to say that letter writing requires a maximal form of politeness because you can't see the other person, so you can't know their tone. And in that sense, it's sort of like texting. So Descartes writing to Princess Elizabeth has to include all of these really flowery, kind things before then getting into, I disagree with you on XYZ point, even though he still does that quite politely, almost as a way of being like, oh, there's goodwill here because it's so easy to misinterpret people's words when they're not standing in front of you.

David: 20:40

Yeah, and I mean, aside from the fact that there are norms of politeness that are guiding this, I would say it's also an attempt at establishing a philosophical friendship, right? An intellectual equality between the sender and the receiver, because many of these letters are not just about personal affairs, it's a combination of personal affairs and also the development of intellectual ideas. So, Princess Elizabeth and Descartes this also applies to for example, like Leibniz and Newton and Spinoza, they're working out theories, philosophical concepts in the sending of these letters. And so they want to do so with somebody that they consider their friend and their equal. And so that's what you see this kind of obsequiousness also in the epistolary tradition of the early modern period. But I have to say, I really think we should just bring back early modern politeness online. And also in academia, maybe. Can you imagine if we just started our contemporary disagreements on Twitter in this way? Like, Dear Madam.

Ellie: 21:43

I would have had too many marvels to admire at the same time.

David: 21:48

Actually, there are not enough characters in Twitter to even get through the politeness.

Ellie: 21:53

Not even Blue Sky, which is a lot friendlier, has that, has as many characters as we would need for that.

David: 21:58

Well, at least in academia we have the space, we just don't have the politeness. I don't want anybody to review my book that is not addressing me as madam. Like, that's my new honorific, rather than doctor. But staying with the topic of Descartes and Elizabeth, I do wonder about the role of power differentials here, because Descartes is writing a letter to literal royalty, so there might be a sense of also like needing to defer to her highness. Because even though he might have some social power, being a man and a well known philosopher that she doesn't have, she certainly has power that he doesn't have, tied to her royal status. And for me, this brings up the broader question of power differentials in arguments. And it might be a way for us to connect this back to your comments about online disagreements. Because one of the cool things that online disagreement offers is a way to cut through the power differentials, right? Because anybody is allowed to join into the shitstorm, it really functions as a kind of equalizer. And so any old person can respond to any powerful person online without being automatically dismissed as not having the right to do so or the proper status that would justify their discourse.

Ellie: 23:23

And this is one of my biggest frustrations with discourse online. There's this illusion of a level playing field where, oh, I have an opinion, so it's worth being shared. It's worth people listening to it. And so you find yourself in this weird situation where complete uneducated randoms are arguing with an expert in their field online. And I find that to be extremely annoying, not because I'm an elitist, but because I really take expertise and education seriously. And I don't think that everyone's opinions on every matter have equal weight. I certainly apply that to myself. I don't think people should take me seriously when it comes say public health considerations,

David: 24:08

The art and the artist, the art and the artist. Ellie: That's the case. Because even though I don't publish on philosophy of art, that's not my research specialization. I do teach philosophy of art regularly. I'm very well read on that topic. I do have a PhD in philosophy, which is a discipline where this comes out. And so I would say like, when it comes to the art and artist one, I already have a sense of the literature. I have a sense of what kind of evidence we're using for these claims as opposed to, you know, when it comes to immunology where both Nobody should listen to me on that point. Why would I even share my opinions on that point? And I definitely find myself sometimes online, especially when it comes to YouTube comments, like we'll have these, I'll have a lecture videos on philosophers that I regularly teach and somebody will just say something like, actually, why don't we just pull one up here? Okay, like a recent one on Butler's theory of performativity and gender. These philosophical theorists are all detached from biological reality. Gender expression is influenced, blah, blah, blah. So this person's going on. Anyway, it's just like a random commenter on our YouTube channel sharing their views of gender. And so I'm just kind of like, okay, and why should I take this opinion seriously? And I feel like that's such an unattractive response to have because it's so easy to be like, Oh, well, wow, that's such an elitist or snobby, frustrating position. But I actually think the idea that we deserve to take anyone's opinion seriously on anything is quite destructive to public discourse and not actually a key feature of the kind of democracy that I'm interested in or the kind of socialism that I'm interested in. So I agree that not every person in the plane should get to go in the cockpit and actually maneuver the plane. Not everybody can be a pilot. And so I would differentiate here because I do want to leave room for some benefits for that equalization, because I think one of the things that that equalization has done is that it has given an average person the ability to prompt a response from political leaders, right? Like you could, in theory, tweet at Biden or Kamala Harris or AOC and get a response, which is something that is fundamentally new in political history.

Ellie: 26:22

Totally, David, but in that case, you're not necessarily getting a response then because you're sharing your opinion. You're asking for something or demanding something as a citizen. That's very different, right?

David: 26:31

Well yes, and that's my point that there, but because you said it doesn't have much to do with democratic life, that's where I kind of disagree.

Ellie: 26:38

But I'm talking about sharing opinions. I think if you're tweeting at somebody like, we want gun control, that's based in an opinion that gun control is good, but it's itself not expressing an opinion and leaving it at that, right? It's expressing a desire for action and in as much as a representative democracy involves its citizens sharing their desires to their representatives, like that to me is a separate issue.

David: 27:04

Maybe because I'm not sure I would hold on to that distinction, right? You could say like, Hey, this is my belief, and I don't think you're living up to it. So it is still like a call for some kind of action or recognition. But the point being that that allows a certain kind of political agency that is unmatched from, let's say, the lower strata of society for a very long period in history. Of course, when we switch the discussion to epistemology, and now we're talking about expertise, I agree with you. And you know, like I've had my like, share of those YouTube comments that are like, why does he say that he doesn't know what he's talking about? And it's like, who are you? you don't know what you're talking about.

Ellie: 27:43

Yeah, no, this happened recently

David: 27:45

so out of your depth that you can't even tell.

Ellie: 27:46

Exactly, like some somebody just like wrote a random comment recently being like, what is David talking about in the extinction episode when it comes to animals? And then I literally linked your book and two other episodes where we've talked about your expertise in animals. Because I was just like, this is so frustrating. So I think that's a perfect example. And so yeah, I definitely think there's so many beautiful things about the internet. I think that it has a lot of liberatory potential, even though it's gotten quite captured by corporate interests. And I think what is really frustrating about these disagreements of belief is that it's difficult for people to know whether the people they're talking to are actually their peers or not. And so within the epistemology of disagreement in the discipline of philosophy, there are generally recognized to be four types of people with whom you can disagree. First is superiors. An immunologist is a superior to me when it comes to the question of immunology. Second is inferiors, the guy commenting on your YouTube post about your work on animals. Peers, I would say the two of us in this conversation right now. And fourth, unknowns, somebody who could be a superior, an inferior, or a peer, and you really have no clue which they are. And I think that latter point, this idea that online, the default, is that these people are unknown, is what I find particularly troubling about online disagreements.

David: 29:08

One of the central ideas out of that literature in analytic epistemology that you're mentioning, Ellie, is that when we engage in disagreement, we have to ascertain our epistemic status relative to our interlocutors. In other words, we have to ask which of us is in a better position to know so that we can settle the disagreement and we can defer to the right person in making a decision. And of course, the only way to do that is to figure out who is epistemically superior, who is epistemically inferior, who is my peer, and who is just this floating question mark that I cannot assess. And the way in which we go about determining our epistemic status is by looking at what are called disagreement factors. So these are basically criteria that help us determine who knows more or less. For example, does my interlocutor have evidence that they're bringing to the debate and citing for their position? Do they have the relevant background knowledge? Are they attentive or inattentive in the context of the debate? Do they have intellectual virtues that maybe I should respect and potentially use as a reason to defer to them? And so all these are ways of trying to figure out who should fold.

Ellie: 30:27

And I think that way of framing it though is potentially limited in the sense that not all disagreements are ones where somebody has to defer to another. In fact, I think there are a lot of disagreements where it's not about deferring to somebody else's opinions, but about working out your own opinion or persuading the other person that your view is correct. I think we can use some of these disagreement factors to get to that point as well, right? So if we say, I have this view about the safety of fluoride, and it's based on a single study, and then a toxicologist comes at me with tons of relevant background knowledge, 50 studies, and they're responding point by point to my argument, then it's less about me deferring to them and more about, oh wow, maybe they're actually convincing me. And of course that's somewhat idealized because I think, unfortunately, we know that people are often less convinced by reasons than they think they are. But I don't think you and I would be in our profession, David, if we didn't think that people can be convinced through reason as well, right? So there's this issue of deference and then there's also this issue of how are we convincing each other? How are we moving past disagreements and coming to consensus? Whether it's by adopting the view of one of the interlocutors or another, or coming to a different conclusion altogether.

David: 31:43

Or if you're Socrates, coming to absolutely no conclusion at the end and just resting in an aphoretic state of confusion.

Ellie: 31:51

Overthink is a self supporting, independent podcast that relies on your generosity. By joining our Patreon, you can gain access to our online community, extended episodes, and monthly zooms. If you'd prefer to make a one time tax deductible donation, you can learn more at our website, overthinkpodcast. com. Your support helps cover key production costs and allows us to pay student assistants a fair wage. As I was looking into the philosophy of disagreement for this episode, shout out to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on disagreement because this is not an area that I'm super familiar with, I found that there is broadly a distinction between two kinds of disagreements. Belief disagreements and action disagreements. We've been talking about belief disagreements so far. A belief disagreement is where you disagree about whether or not a claim is true. You either assent to a claim, you believe it, you reject a claim, you disbelieve it, or you suspend judgment on it. You say, I don't know either way. You neither disbelieve nor believe it. So there are three options when it comes to belief disagreements.. When it comes to action disagreements, however, we're thinking about what we should do. Should we do X or not? And so there are two possibilities for action disagreements. There's not a third option, right? The way that there is with belief disagreements. You can't suspend judgment on whether to do something or not because suspending judgment is just not doing it. And the author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on this topic has this like great example of a couple named Jop and Dop.

David: 33:31

What are they called?

Ellie: 33:32

Jop and Dop. J O P and D O P. Yeah, excellent names. I'm loving them here. And so when I read this, I was like, we have to talk about Jop and Dop in the episode because the example that the author gives is Jop and Dop have two disagreements. For one, they disagree about whether it's harder to get top grades in philosophy or economics classes. And second, should they move in together this summer? And that's an action disagreement, right? So they have a belief disagreement and an action disagreement.

David: 33:59

Well, when it comes to belief, disagreement, I wish more people would just suspend judgment. That's a very rare practice. You know, like even philosophers, we tend to dig in our heels on our position and only withhold judgment when we are kind of forced to.

Ellie: 34:14

See, I actually disagree. Oh my God. I didn't mean to do that here,

David: 34:18

See, you just dug your heels,

. Ellie: 34:20

I want to talk about another feature of this though, which is the idea of confidence levels, because that's also something that came out in the same article. We tend to think about disagreements primarily as being about doxastic attitudes, doxa being the ancient Greek word for opinions, right, our attitudes around certain opinions. But there's also an important part of disagreement, which is How much confidence are we bringing to a particular opinion? So you and I might agree about something, David, but have very different levels of confidence about how strongly we believe in that thing. And confidence levels, I think we can say, can be justified, better or worse, right? Like it's more reasonable for an actual immunology expert to have an opinion on vaccines than it is for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to have one. That confidence level is really unjustified, as is most of the cabinets. But I think there are ways that we can also see this not only in terms of whose voice is louder because they have more confidence, but also who's more justified in having confidence about certain things. And in thinking about this, I'm reminded of something that happened a number of years ago, back when we were in grad school, between me and my friend Roshni, who I've mentioned on the podcast before, which was we were disagreeing about who wrote Catch 22. Roshni was like, oh, it's Joseph Heller. And I was like, no, it's Kurt Vonnegut. And Roshni goes, well, Ellie, I have a lot of confidence that it is Joseph Heller who wrote this. And you have a lot of confidence that it's Kurt Vonnegut. But in general, you tend to have higher confidence levels than I do around your beliefs. And so like, basically, you should defer to me, because I'm as confident in my answer as you are. And you're, yeah, I'm like, this confident. Yeah, I was being overconfident, basically. And of course, she was totally right. And it was Joseph Heller.

David: 36:13

But I mean, to me, this is a really, really fascinating aspect of the epistemology of disagreement when you start getting not just to the beliefs themselves, but then to the second order beliefs about how certain am I that I actually know the thing that I'm talking about, right? Which is something that we encounter all the time. Whenever anybody puts pressure on our beliefs, we then have to do that second order step of establishing a confidence interval. And there is some. psychological research that indicate that we're actually really, really bad at ascertaining our own confidence level because we are not always able to distinguish between confidence and conviction. So if I have a really strong conviction about something, the phenomenology of conviction might register to my own mind as a high Confidence interval, right? Like, because I feel it strongly, I think that I'm more likely to be right. And so we make a lot of mistakes in our own self monitoring around these percentages.

Ellie: 37:15

Can you explain the distinction between conviction and confidence here? I think I'm not totally getting it.

David: 37:20

Yeah, so by conviction, I just mean the feeling of being right,

Ellie: 37:24

And as opposed to confidence, which is

David: 37:25

Which would be a rational assessment of a probability of my information being correct or being true.

Ellie: 37:32

Oh how weird, I would have thought it was the opposite. I don't necessarily associate confidence with a rational level of assessment.

David: 37:38

Uh, Yeah, I mean, that's what it is. It's a percentage, right? You have to assess how much evidence you have and that gives you a percentage, like I'm 50/50 or I'm like 70 percent sure. So it's a rational process.

Ellie: 37:47

This how philosophers talk about confidence, apparently.

David: 37:50

Oh, I know Oh my God, girl, the thing I really hated about a lot of this literature is that it's all, presuming that we are these rational agents that have percentages for our beliefs and are running calculations every time we interact with one another.

Ellie: 38:06

Sometimes I do feel that way though. I mean, that's basically what Roshni was saying to me. I actually think she might have put in percentages. I think she might have been like, what percent sure are you of this? And I was like, 90. And she was like, I'm also 90 percent, but I don't usually think I'm 90 percent about things and you always do.

David: 38:22

That's your baseline. Actually, that's your average 90%.

Ellie: 38:26

Hopefully I've learned from that. That's why that was such an iconic moment in our friendship. Anyway.

David: 38:30

No, but another point I want to make here is that I also found this article by Kathleen Kennedy from Princeton University called, When Disagreement Gets Ugly, Perceptions of Bias and the Escalation of Conflict. And Kennedy points out that one of the problems that we face when we enter into disagreement, that prevent disagreement from following that kind of rational path of assessing our confidence and then making a rational decision about who should change their perspective is that not only do we overestimate our own confidence, but we often perceive other people's high confidence, as a bias. And, according to Kennedy, this sets in motion what she calls a spiral, where I judge you to be disagreeing with me significantly. Therefore, I come to the conclusion that you must be highly biased. Once I have that conclusion in place, I feel licensed to start acting in increasingly conflictual ways toward you. And then because I'm being conflictual toward you, you start adopting the same perspective toward me, and that gets a spiral going. Which ultimately leads to catastrophe, where we're just yelling at each other, probably on Twitter, unable to actually have a meeting of the minds.

Ellie: 39:50

Whoa, but David, I'm fascinated by this point that we tend to interpret high levels of confidence as bias because I feel like that is a really interesting potential explanation for why anti vaxxers just won't listen to scientists, right? They interpret scientists confidence as bias, which is,

David: 40:08

Like those assholes over there thinking that they know.

Ellie: 40:11

yeah, it's like, well, no, like,we do

David: 40:14

They do.

Ellie: 40:14

or at least like we know better than you. Oh my god.

David: 40:19

Yes. In this case of the anti vaxxers, I think brings into focus the really important zone of overlap between epistemology. and ethics when it comes to disagreement. Because we've been primarily talking about the epistemology. How do I know? How do I know that I know? So on and so forth. But the philosopher Catherine Elgin has written a lot about the ethics of disagreement. How do we go about disagreeing with others in an ethical manner? How do I behave in the face of a lack of consensus? And she argues that one way to do that is to move away from this whole discussion that disagreement is about belief. Like what do you really believe? And instead, she calls on us to move toward the notion of acceptance. What am I willing to accept for the time being without necessarily having to believe it all the way down, you know, to the marrow of my bones? And the benefit of that is that it allows us to make better assessments of each other's competence, and it also allows us to be a lot more conscientious in the context of a disagreement. And she uses, very interestingly, scientists as a kind of model for this. For example, when a scientist is doing physics, you know, like the physics of how a basketball moves through the air, they're going to be using Newtonian mechanics. They're going to be using Newtonian physics. Now, do physicists believe in Newtonian physics? Well, in a way, yes, But also in a way, no, because we know that Newtonian physics is not appropriate given quantum mechanics. And so the question is not, do they really believe this, but are we accepting these beliefs for a particular purpose in a particular setting? And once you shift your frame of thinking from belief to acceptance, then you're able to apply a principle of charity when you find yourself disagreeing with somebody, whether in real life or online.

Ellie: 42:21

And that might go some way towards ameliorating the viciousness of some of these conversations online, but I also think it's not going to resolve them all because a lot of people, understandably, take issues with each other's worldviews, right? A lot of disagreements, especially in politics, are dependent on really fundamentally different views about what the government should do, whether there is a god, what the role of the citizen is.

David: 42:49

Correct. And that's where maybe we also need to be better at learning how to move from assessing the content of our beliefs to actually analyzing the epistemic contours of the disagreement. And that's that shift from what am I saying? And what are you saying? To the higher order debate where we're having a discussion about who actually is in a better position to answer the question in the first place. Because we tend to get caught in the first order disagreement without engaging in a reflection about all those disagreement factors that we mentioned a while ago.

Ellie: 43:24

I just worry that if we move the conversation though from the content to our identities, that's going to make the problem even more intractable and make people less open to persuasion.

David: 43:53

Philosophy is known for disagreement. We are the discipline of disagreement.

Ellie: 44:00

And this is partly why people find philosophers or philosophy majors annoying, because they're sort of devil's advocate stereotypes. But I will say this is something I really value about philosophy because I think what happens in philosophy is that disagreements are not seen as fights as something to be avoided. They're something to be seen as worth facing head on, worth having, and I think philosophers often tend to be able to get our egos out of the way and get to the heart of the matter, right? Through rational argumentation, which I think is the best way to settle disagreements, showing my cards as a philosopher.

David: 44:39

Yeah, but we also have to recognize that this emphasis on argument and debate can be experienced by some people as combative, even though philosophers themselves don't see it as that, which can make philosophy a little bit, you know, like an attractor for subjects who are into that.

Ellie: 44:58

the way I tend to think about it is that we're taking ego out of it. And I feel like that can be hard for non philosophers sometimes to understand. And certainly that doesn't mean that we all do that successfully all the time.

David: 45:08

Yeah. Well, and there's also a lot of ego in the idea that I can debate without combating and without feelings.

Ellie: 45:14

Yeah it's really a point about how what we're doing when we're disagreeing is we're appealing to evidence and we're appealing to reason rather than appealing to our own personal, undefended, or unjustifiable views, right? So there are a lot of ways of staging disagreement in philosophical arguments. One is appeals to the rules of logic. So informal logic is about pointing out argumentative moves that people make that are unjustified. We mentioned the appeal to authority earlier in the episode. You might also think about the bandwagon fallacy, this idea that, well, because most people believe this thing, What are a couple others we might think about? Oh, black and white fallacy or false dilemma. This idea that there are only two options when actually maybe the conversation that we're having admits more than two options. Sometimes philosophers also appeal to intuition, although that's something that I really try to avoid doing in my work and I don't think is a very good move. And the way you see this move show up is somebody makes an argument and then somebody responds by being like, well, that's not intuitive. And I'm just like, Okay, and, but this happens a lot in contemporary analytic philosophy. I think appealing to actual rules of informal logic is a lot more interesting, whether it's through pointing out logical fallacies in somebody's argument or other modes of logical argumentation, like reductio ad absurdum, which is a way of defending a claim by showing that the denial of that claim would lead to absurdity or contradiction.

David: 46:44

And now we're talking, you know, essentially about the moves that philosophers make in the context of an argument. And I feel like the two that you just mentioned, the focus on logic and then the appeals to intuition are quite common, as you said, among analytic philosophers. So I want to bring two that are maybe a little bit more common in continental philosophy. one of them is historicization, which is taking an idea and showing that that idea is not as objective as maybe it seems, because it is the result of a number of historical forces that have made it so. But if we look back through history, you'll see situations and circumstances where that idea either did not hold weight, as it does now, or did not exist in its contemporary form. So historicization is a way of relativizing certain things that we take to be self evident by turning toward the past. This is obviously something that we find in the historical schools of continental philosophy, especially the work of Michel Foucault. Now, a second one is imminent critique. Imminent critique refers to a style of criticizing an object not so much by rejecting it as much as by showing that it fails to live up to the standards that it sets for itself according to its own internal reasoning. And an example that I'll give that's coming to mind, only because I recently taught it to one of my classes, is Mark Fisher's book, Capitalist Realism. And this is a very short book about capitalism, where Fisher argues that capitalism promises us a bunch of things that it then fails to deliver. And by pointing out those contradictions, we can engage in a form of imminent critique of the capital relation. So, for example, capitalism promises us happiness, which it cannot do without maintaining nature, but at the same time, capitalism destroys nature, so it undermines its own conditions for success. Similarly, capitalism claims to give us absolute freedom by liberating us from, you know, non market forces. Yet, it also creates the conditions for the emergence, as we all know, of monopolies and hyper bureaucracies. And so the lives that we lead under capitalism are not at all good lives, even by capitalism's own standards. And so imminent critique is a way of critiquing somebody according to the bar that they have set for themselves.

Ellie: 49:18

I find this to be a particularly important form of arguing because, yeah, it's meeting somebody on their own ground and saying, hey, you're committed to this one view and you're also committed to this other thing, but that view and that thing are incompatible,

David: 49:32

Mm hmm. Yeah, no, that's right. And I, I mean, I also like imminent critique and it's one that I use in my work with science quite frequently, where the kind of move that I make is that scientists often draw certain conclusions, say about nature or about animals based on data that they have gathered.And so, what I can do to engage in a kind of imminent critique of scientific rationality is look at the data that scientists have generated and show that it actually leads to a different conclusion, to a different interpretation than the one that scientists have imposed upon it or derived from it, especially a conclusion that goes against received scientific wisdom. So it's essentially saying, look, your own data actually contradicts your conclusion. And I think the power of imminent critique, again, as this method for disagreement is that it forces those who are on the receiving end of the critique to really go back to their fundamental assumptions about what their own objectives are in light of the critique. And what about you, Ellie? Which of these methods do you use the most in your own research?

Ellie: 50:43

It depends on the project. And to be honest, I actually find this kind of a weirdly hard question to answer because I think I'm more interested in constructing ideas than in pointing out problems with ideas and I don't know that, I don't necessarily say that with pride. I feel like I'm sometimes not doing enough work I think in my work to critique the views of others because I just want to say stuff that I think is cool and interesting that I've developed in tandem with others that I kind of disagree on or that I kind of agree with on different points. But one thing that I could say, I mean, I do think I use imminent critique and maybe some of these like informal logical moves, but I also think coming out of some of the traditions that we're schooled in, including phenomenology, I'm very interested in pointing out the way that people's views sometimes involve presuppositions that are unjustified. And so I'm thinking about the article that I wrote on consent a couple of years ago, where I argued that most of the analytic philosophy of sex that talked about sexual consent really overlooked the embodied, ambiguous, intersubjective character of sex. And once we pointed out that oversight, we could have a very different view of what sexual consent looks like. And, of course, what we've just mentioned, David, are only a few examples of the ways that philosophers can disagree. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but the implicit assumption behind all these ways of staging disagreement that we've been discussing is that we can persuade our interlocutors to abandon their perspective by giving them reasons to do so, right? And that's what I find particularly compelling about philosophy, but it can also lead to people being dissatisfied with philosophy, this emphasis on reason. And what motivates disagreement here is the hope that it will ultimately lead to agreement, that the process of reasoning will lead to an overcoming of the disagreement.

David: 52:47

Yeah, although even that might be called into question, right? Whether philosophy ever really leads to that coming together and singing Kumbaya at the end in a moment of consensus building. And the reason for that is that agreement can definitely be a regulative principle in philosophical discourse. It's not always the case that we can reach it. And here I want to bring the philosopher Wittgenstein into the discussion because in his book On Certainty, Wittgenstein says that there are some debates that are really intractable, not because some person doesn't know some key information or is uneducated or is misunderstanding the other person. Rather, the disagreement is over fundamental commitments. So it goes much deeper than just surface knowledge.

Ellie: 53:41

Okay, and is the idea there that those fundamental disagreements are intractable from the perspective of reason because they're, say, emotional or volitional or something else?

David: 53:52

Not quite. It's because they are about axioms and starting points. And let me give you the example that Wittgenstein gives in On Certainty, which is the example of the creation of the world. Is the world created by divine fiat? Yes or No.

Ellie: 54:10

seems pretty obvious to me.

David: 54:14

Well, an atheist like you, Ellie, and a religious person like somebody else would disagree on this point even if neither is biased or uneducated. Now, the question is why? Why can there be such a fundamental disagreement if both parties are committed to reason and are interested in learning about the evidence that is available for the debate? The answer is because they are playing, according to Wittgenstein, different language games. They abide by different rules of thinking. And the problem is that the choice over which game you play, over which rules you ultimately agree to abide by, That is not a rational choice. It is sort of axiomatic, right? We choose our starting points and then we try to stay within the parameters that they demarcate for us, but there is no reason to choose this set of axioms rather than another set of axioms and that's that. And so when you get to these disagreements like over the creation of the world or over like is morality objective or subjective, You are touching on something quite fundamental that you cannot reason your way out of. All you can try to do in those cases of deep disagreement, Wittgenstein says, is you try to persuade the other person by non rational means. You just sort of try to coax them to come over to your side of the debate, much in the same way that, let's say, a religious missionary, tries to convert a non believer to their worldview, or in the same way that I might try to convince, like, a Republican to switch over to the Democratic side of things. And that transition from one game to another is an irrational process.

Ellie: 56:06

I don't know how much I'm in line with the idea that we can apply this to Republican and Democrat given recent political situations. I wouldn't say there's, yeah, I would say like a lot of it's just like confusion. But I think in general, the point It's interesting, and it reminds me of what Thomas Kuhn says about scientific paradigms. He says that scientists who operate under different paradigms, like the geocentrism of the ancients versus the heliocentrism of the moderns, are not disagreeing about data. They're not even really speaking the same language because they're beginning from different axioms. And so when they try to talk to one another, they reach a point at which their views become incommensurable. They're just comparing apples to oranges, in a sense.

David: 56:50

Yeah, no, that's a really good comparison. And we might say the same about philosophical schools of thought. The philosopher Brian Ribeiro wrote an essay on this very problem, arguing that this kind of deep disagreement happens in philosophy all the time. So if you look at the major debates in the history of philosophy, like is beauty objective or subjective, objectivism versus relativism, so on and so forth, We're not dealing with people who disagree out of ignorance or a lack of training. Rather, what we're dealing with is people who have chosen different language games, different games of thought. And that leads  Ribeiro to a really tragic conclusion about the relationship between philosophy and reason, where he says, philosophy can never be rational. Because philosophers can never justify on rational grounds those starting points that lead them, say, to a correspondence theory of truth versus a coherence theory of truth. it's like choosing a belief system in religion. You just choose the one that speaks to you the most, but you can't really explain why. And once you admit, as he says, we have to, that disagreement is ineliminable in philosophical discourse, it means that philosophy can never overcome the problem of meta philosophical skepticism. That we have to be skeptical about which philosophical system is correct in the end because we'll never be in a position to know.

Ellie: 58:28

Well, I will say I suspend judgment on that point. I feel like that's something about which I'm an agnostic. I don't think I would want it to be a blanket skepticism where all philosophical theories are equally acceptable as long as you accept the rules of the language games. There are certainly some theories I would want to reject altogether like mind body dualism. But yeah, I would say with respect to the general question, I will suspend judgment.

David: 58:54

Here we have Ellie modeling the ethics of disagreement by suspending judgment. Come on!

Ellie: 59:00

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David: 59:16

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Ellie: 59:31

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan. Our production assistants, Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel P. K. Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.