Unpredictable Patterns #17: On disagreements
On why disagreements are the basic unit of analysis in politics, on weberian taxonomies and on why dialogues are the best discovery mechanisms
Dear reader,
This week’s note is written, again, on the island. The weather has shifted though and we got snow today! A bit of a backlash, but spring is winning the battle, I think - and that is beautiful. On a personal level I found out that the cold I noted in #15 was Covid, so I am now recovering from that - and I had a very mild version and so am not at all sick, but it is a peculiar feeling to have had it. And you will laugh at me taking two different tests for antibodies from different manufacturers because last week’s note was about statistics and the idea of false positives figured largely in my think. I am not only a hypocondriac, I am a statistically nervous hypocondriac! Next week’s note will find me back in the mountains if all goes well and I am looking forward to spending some time in the cabin there. The pandemic has made me a cabin dweller, and I am enormously privileged to be able to be one, and am getting to like it a lot. This week we will speak about disagreements, and why I think they are a much better way to think about politics and policy than arguments, positions or views. Let’s see if you agree…
On disagreement
One of the most important, and misunderstood, social phenomena we work with in public policy and government affairs is disagreement. In order to understand where we are and what we can really do, we need to really understand what disagreement is and how it works - and why it is not simple to resolve.
Uncovering the points of disagreement between yourself and other actors is, in fact, the only way to change views and the way we live together.
But we need to start with a few basic points and definitions before we dive into techniques and methods for mapping a disagreement - in order to understand the phenomenon itself more deeply. In order to do so we can develop a few different dimensions of disagreement, and look at how they can show us things about public discourse.
We will begin by looking at disagreement from a Weberian perspective. With Weber we will not that a disagreement is a social action and that there are, according to Weber, four kinds of social actions that are useful also for understanding disagreements: value-based actions, instrumental actions, affective actions and traditional actions.
The value disagreement is often overlooked, and when we are engaged in a value disagreement there is usually no clean way to resolve it - the values we hold are held almost axiomatically - but even recognizing that there is a disagreement about values is important, as these values can then be examined more closely and the value clash recognized.
The instrumental disagreement is simply a disagreement about what the world looks like and how to best accomplish something. This kind of disagreement can be resolved with facts and numbers and is usually centered on a common objective or goal. If you can reduce a complex disagreement to an instrumental disagreement, a lot suggests that it can be resolved.
The affective disagreement is the most difficult one - this is a disagreement that is not based on values, nor seeks an outcome - it merely is a disagreement based on emotions. Now, these disagreements are not unimportant at all, and they are quite common, but recognizing that you are in an affective disagreement also means that you need to recognize that there are few paths to resolution, unless you can bracket the emotions and seek values or common goals for instrumental disagreements.
The traditional disagreement seems a weird category, but in fact underpins a lot of political discourse. The disagreement has been hashed out over the centuries and is one where each party feels at home in the disagreement and knows how it is built. Examples include the question of a big or small state and questions about musical taste (Tommy Steele or The Beatles) or sports rankings. Traditional disagreements show us that a lot of shared social action derives value from disagreeing, and disagreement is not the break down of social action but one of its many, legitimate and productive forms.
The Weberian model helps us understand the kinds of disagreements we are studying and also helps us map out possible paths from the different kinds of disagreements towards instrumental disagreements. But it also shows us that some disagreements will persist.
This is an important point. A lot of philosophy is centered on the idea that disagreement can be resolved through rational debate. This is, as far as I can see, often wrong. Disagreements are not puzzles to solve, but rather a special form of relationship, a way of interacting and participating in society.
This also means that in order to disagree, we need to have some common ground. The outlines or contours of a disagreement can be found by seeking the lowest common denominator between different parties in a disagreement. If you fail in finding any such common ground you are not disagreeing - all communication has broken down and no relationship is possible.
Some debaters take this to the extreme and deny their interlocutors the right to disagree with them, often by asserting that the motivations of the counterpart are devious or reckless — and there is a keystone test here: unless we agree that both parties, in good faith, want to solve the problem we are disagreeing about there is no disagreement. There is not even a value disagreement, but simply a lack of any possible relationship.
Disagreement requires an investment in the other party, and a willingness to believe that they are seeking a solution of some kind.
This may seem a surprisingly high bar - and you could argue that one problem, then, with our society is that polarization has driven us to a point where there is no space left for good faith disagreements - but I find that too pessimistic a point. I believe that if we require good faith we will at least be able to start understanding what the other party is basing their assumption of the lack of such good faith on.
This also means that if you disagree with someone you need to be able and ready to change your own mind. Disagreement is not possible for those whose positions are locked down and set in stone.
This is in part the problem with the tech-lash; many of the critics of the tech sector do not assume good faith on behalf of the tech companies, and so no disagreement is possible. Luckily, good faith can be built from either side in a disagreement, and taking your opponent seriously, assuming that they are acting in good faith and examining their position with great care is a move that in the long term forces them to enter the disagreement as well or seem fanatical and irrational.
For the tech industry it would be a great win to disagree with its critics, even if it is a value disagreement.
Reasonable disagreements
Disagreements do not resolve, or do not need to be resolved. They are forms of social interaction and they allow for the formation of a common change in both parties. For them to do this, the disagreements need to be reasonable.
The idea of ”reasonable disagreement” was put forward by the political philosopher Charles Larmore, and he suggests that we should expect all good polities to be built on reasonable disagreements where we disagree on the basis of the paths we have taken to come to the preset moment.
Larmore’s genealogical approach to disagreement is interesting, and suggests that something that helps us understand disagreement is exploring the path that the other party has taken to the disagreement we are in — that path can legitimize the disagreement as reasonable if we understand it well enough.
Take tech critic Evgeny Morozov - his path is one the starts in the Soviet Union and goes through university in Bulgaria, living in Berlin and then traveling to the US and Stanford. His technology skepticism is centered on the question of if technology can really support democracy, and with his roots in the Soviet Union he seems more inclined to think that new technologies will support mass surveillance — and that what is needed is active citizens. Although he has expressed doubts recently about the entire project of tech criticism, his disagreement with the thesis that technology in itself and autonomously is a force for good is not hard to understand.
On the other side, technologists in Silicon Valley come from a view of technology as a force for change and openness - the dreams of Barlowian cyberspace and an Internet that makes access to knowledge a human right, with roots in the Whole Earth-catalogue and the Well community - an ideology that now is found with the Long Now foundation - the technologist assumes that the technological project is a democratization project, a way to give us the tools to change the world.
The resultant disagreement is, in Larmore’s sense, reasonable - and can be explored. Morozov would probably agree that a more robust democracy is a good thing, as would the technologist. So where do you go from there? What looks like a value disagreement (technology good / bad) can be resolved into a more instrumental disagreement by tracing the genealogy of the parties - and then moving on to possible new disagreements.
Larmore’s point is true even if we do not center the analysis on individuals - we can, in fact, use Weberian ideal types: the technologist, the concerned citizen, the journalist, the academic…and give idealized genealogies for how they ended up where they are. There will be some that are not open to disagreement - both types and individuals - but knowing that allows us to prioritize others in the web of disagreement.
That is another important thing to keep in mind: disagreements are n-person games. They involve several different people and actors, organizations and decision makers. The balance of the disagreement depends on all of the people who participate in it.
Mapping out the stakeholders in a disagreement is often a good first step to understand the shape of the disagreement. Next, we can try to map out the contours of the disagreement and common ground around the disagreement and then we start looking at the structure of the disagreement itself.
Tools for mapping disagreements
In the history of human thinking we have seen disagreement as key to progress - and so we have spent quite some time thinking about how to disagree, and do so formally with formal techniques. Two key such techniques are the dialogue and the disputation.
The dialogue - the original Socratic elenchus - is in fact a superior method for mapping out a disagreement in detail. We no longer write dialogues - it feels contrived and a bit pretentious - but in not doing so we have lost one of the greatest tools we have to understand a disagreement in detail. The platonic dialogues are excellent maps of disagreement, and they are exemplary in that they - at least the early ones - do not end in agreement, but in the aporias, the new disagreements. Plato understood clearly that the value of disagreeing lay in the map of knowledge, values and positions that you can unearth, in a sort of archaeology of the human condition, not in solutions or solving problems.
This suggests a method that some will find preposterous, but that I find increasingly valuable: write a dialogue to explore the disagreement you are in. Add as many voices as you need, but add types not people, and examine their positions in detail. Make their positions as strong as possible - force yourself not to write a winner, but seek aporias, unresolved maps of an argument.
The result - the dialogue you write - will not just deepen your understanding of the disagreement, it will suggests points where your opponents may agree with you and where you may make progress. If you work on this in a small team you can take turns writing and then criticizing the dialogues on the basis of where they make it too easy for someone to get away with a shoddy argument - and you will understand the argument a lot better.
Now, this work is not just for admiring the problem - in fact, it is the best possible preparation for a more in-depth interview, podcast or on stage discussion where you want to showcase the disagreement and try to recruit more people to your view. The dialogue is excellent prep for any public appearance, and if you do it well you will be able to perform different pieces of the dialogue in public, possible winning the audience.
And, of course, that was what the original dialogues were live - Socrates is not a written persona, but what the platonic writings give us are, at their heart, transcripts of live disagreements played out in the public sphere.
So, leg go of the feeling of pretentiousness and explore your arguments.
In doing so, it is worthwhile noting that the way we think about disagreements has evolved since Socrates. Where the finest possible move in the dialogue was to get your opponent to contradict himself, we no longer see that as a win or even as a very interesting move. The more interesting method to employ is what this evolved into - the reductio ad absurdum: finding a case or a story that shows why the positions held by the opponents lead to an untenable state of affairs, and then explore how the different parties can get out of those dead ends.
A simple example would be someone who argues that all data collection should be prohibited, and is shown that this leads to no progress in the medical sciences - and this is an outcome all agree is not desirable - so how does the person advocating the position get out of this?
Disputation as game
If the dialogue is a live mapping exercise that really gives you a sense of the flow of a disagreement, the disputation is a much more formal method and it has - for that reason - fallen into disuse. It does, however, allow for a very granular examination of a disagreement and can serve some use.
In the medieval disputation we find something that more or less reminds us of the disagreement as a game. Every party has moves they can make and the moves then sum up to a protocol over the disagreement.
The surprising simplicity of the game is instructive - the aim was to really make a disagreement into something that could be resolved, and here the disputation differs from the dialogue, and is, in my view, the lesser of the tools.
So what were the moves? The game was played roughly this way: one person advocated a view and then started building that view up with simple statements, by using what was called positio. The opponent then had three choice - to agree with the statement (concedo), deny it as false (nego) or introduce a distinction in the concepts used (distinguo). Originally this third move was more powerful and was called dubito and consisted in labelling the statement put forward as unproven / empirically not evidenced. As this changed into make a distinction the nature of the disputation changed towards being more about conceptual clarity, which can be helpful.
So why would someone be interested in this arcane and complicated method for mapping a disagreement today? One reason is the extreme granularity that it introduces. Here the disagreement is mapped out on a statement level in a way that the dialogue may not capture and it helps you really understand where in the disagreement the main points of contention are. ,
That said, the better way to use this method is sparingly to examine and remember to make, distinctions - and perhaps only when an argument is complex enough to need unpacking at this level of resolution.
Second order effects of focusing on disagreements
Real world disagreements will be a lot more complicated, and in a sense what we are describing here is how to model arguments, rather than resolve them. Reaching consensus is not the goal - the goal is to get to a well-formulated disagreement.
One reason this has value is that this makes the disagreement much easier to communicate and show others. We should not underestimate the value of being able to show what a disagreement looks like, and in doing so actually win over those that had assume that the disagreement was about something else.
Being able to walk someone through a disagreement is a powerful advocacy technique, because it shows you understand your opponents argument, and that the problem is that you disagree on a number of well-formulated points.
Much advocacy starts from stating your view and the arguments for your view - which seems logical, but ends up leaving the disagreement implicit, and in the worst case with the person you are talking to believing that you just don’t get it.
If, as Aristotle suggests, all rhetoric starts from character, there are much worse character traits than carefully examining the opponents arguments and the nature of a disagreement - we often find the people who have taken the time to do this quite thoughtful.
It is not just about that old moniker - disagreeing without being disagreeable - or agreeing to disagree, no - it is about caring enough about the outcome to understand the disagreement, to map it and move about in it.
So what?
So what, then? I would suggest that there are three take-aways from this discussion that are worth considering as you develop your own policy work or explore a business problem.
First, focus on the disagreement, not on your own arguments. Your arguments are secondary to the disagreement. The disagreement is the right unit of analysis of any policy work and the key to advancing a position or changing minds. A good policy map should chart key disagreements and the parties that participate in the disagreement, the degree to which they are movable and the overall balance of the disagreement. In a sense a disagreement is a vote - with the participants setting the course of the issue you disagree over according to how they vote on the points of contention.
Second, map the disagreement carefully. Don’t shy away from the classical tools, and especially not from the dialogue. Use dialogue to elicit the points of contention and make them as strong as possible - remember DC Dennett’s first rule of argument: you should make the opponents argument so robustly for him or her that they say ”thank you, I wish I had thought of formulating that way” before engaging with their point. A set of dialogues will help you in public presentations, in finding the right PR-messaging and in working through an issue. The dialogue is, in itself, a discovery mechanism of tremendous power - both written and spoken.
Third, don’t aim to win arguments, aim to change disagreements. This is key to how human society works - and we could exaggerate and say that society is the sum of our disagreements (rather than discontents). There are better and worse disagreements to have, and even just getting to a point where we agree to disagree is an accomplishment in many cases. An important question to ask yourself is this: ”which disagreements would I like for us to have around our issues, organization or business?”.
Thank you for reading, as always, and let me know if you have any thoughts or ideas or comments or — anything really. I love hearing from you, to know if these notes are helpful and interesting. The feedback so far seems promising and so I am grateful to those of you who have already reached out.
Take care and hope to speak soon,
Nicklas