The Person Who Disagrees With You

Every semester I watch it happen. Two students, both bright, both prepared, both arguing in good faith, reach opposite conclusions about the same text. And then one of them makes the mistake almost everyone makes: she concludes that her opponent must be defective in some way. Confused, biased, insufficiently careful. The alternative, that she herself might be wrong, does not appear on her list of options.

Philosophers call this the problem of peer disagreement, and it is harder than it looks. Suppose someone has all the evidence you have, thinks as carefully as you do, and disagrees. There seem to be three responses. You can hold fast: I was right before I met this person and nothing has changed. You can split the difference: my confidence should drop toward theirs. Or you can split the difference in your favor: we are peers on most days, but today I am better positioned.

Each response has defenders, and each has a cost. Hold fast, and you have declared yourself infallible in this instance, which is a strange thing to claim about a question hard enough to divide two careful people. Split evenly, and you get a strange result: if everyone conciliates, and the disagreement is public, opinions converge to the average, which is not truth-tracking but merely arithmetic. The third option is the most popular and the least honest, because it lets everyone believe they are the exception.

But the puzzle runs deeper than these technical disputes. Ask what the disagreement is evidence of. When a thermometer reads differently than expected, I suspect the thermometer. But a person who disagrees with me is not a broken instrument; they are another reading of the same world from a different position. Their dissent is data about how the evidence can look from inside an honest mind. That is information I did not have before.

Here is where I think most people go wrong. They treat disagreement as noise, an obstacle between them and the truth. But consider what agreement actually is. If everyone I respect agreed with me on every serious question, that would not confirm my beliefs; it would suggest my circle was too narrow to test them. Disagreement is not the failure of an epistemic community. It is the sign that one is functioning.

I learned this late, and partly by losing arguments. In graduate school I held a position in ethics with real confidence. A colleague, no sharper than I, dismantled it over coffee in twenty minutes. Not because he was smarter but because he had started from different assumptions I had never examined, because they were mine. The uncomfortable lesson was not that he was right. It was that my confidence had been tracking familiarity, not evidence. I had confused thinking hard about a view with thinking hard against it.

There is a discipline here that goes beyond epistemology. When you disagree with someone, you face a choice about what to make of their mind. You can demote them: fool, ideologue, victim of persuasion. This is efficient and nearly always available. Or you can take them at full strength: a person like me, with reasons like mine, who weighs things differently. The second path is slower and more dangerous, because if you take an opponent seriously and still disagree, you must now say something true about why. Demotion requires no argument. Respect demands one.

Notice, though, that respect for disagreeing persons does not mean surrender. Some views are wrong, and some disagreements are not between peers; one side may simply have done the homework. The conciliationists sometimes write as if all dissent deserves equal weight, and this flatters our politeness while insulting the evidence. The nurse who doubts my self-diagnosis is not my peer on this question; she is my superior, and I should adjust accordingly. The skill is telling the difference, and the honest answer is that we systematically overestimate our own position in every comparison.

My father used to say that history without philosophy is blind. He might have added that philosophy without opponents is empty. Every position worth holding has survived contact with its best critics, and if yours has never met one, you cannot yet know what you think. You know only what you feel, and feelings are cheap.

So the better question is not "how do I win this disagreement?" or even "how much should I concede?" It is: what work is this person's dissent doing for me? Have I let it examine my reasons, or only my patience? Can I state their position so they would accept the statement? And if I cannot, whose understanding is really incomplete?

— Theodoro Collinsky_
Humanari Specialist in Philosophy and Etics, Arcosmia Philosophy