3.2 Disagreement
Disagreements can be good. Productive disagreements force us to test out and weigh our reasoning, and to justify our beliefs. Disagreements tend to be most productive when both sides are able to disagree respectfully, when they allow for the possibility of justified exceptions to general rules, and when they work from shared assumptions.
On the other hand, attacks on someone’s character, or refusals to work from shared common ground, tend to turn disagreements into power struggles. Insisting that no exceptions to a general rule can ever be justified, as well as insisting that an exception is special and doesn’t need to be justified, can also make disagreements unproductive. Learning to have productive disagreements that are not sidetracked into power struggles is a useful skill to develop.
Table of Contents
3.2.1 Disagreeing Respectfully
Mutual respect makes it easier to work through disagreements.
“The function of civility . . . is to communicate basic moral attitudes of respect, tolerance, and considerateness. We can successfully communicate these basic moral attitudes to others only by following socially conventional rules for [their] expression.”
Cheshire Calhoun, “The Virtue of Civility” (2000)
Civility
When someone is disrespectful or inconsiderate towards you, or can’t even tolerate you, there is little hope of having a useful conversation with them. They are unlikely to give much thought to what you have to say, and they are likely getting into a disagreement with you not because they want to know whether their reasons are persuasive to you, but rather as a way to make themselves seem more powerful. There is little point for you to continue the conversation. For a disagreement to be productive, both sides of the disagreement must be respectful, tolerant, and considerate towards one another. They must show that they do this by being polite and communicating in a socially appropriate manner, displaying the virtue of civility.
Civility does not require avoiding conflict or having to deny that you think you are right. Politeness should not push someone into the fallacy of appeal to moderation or false compromise, which assumes that whenever two people disagree, the answer must be somewhere in the middle.
Civility does mean not intentionally inflating conflicts or giving in arguments over mere words. More importantly, civility means treating the person you are arguing with as a rational person, capable of understanding you and having thoughts and reasons of their own, with some sort of conscience. After all, if you really thought the person who are arguing with was completely irrational and had no conscience at all, you wouldn’t keep trying to persuade them . . . you would run away as quickly as you could!
Ad Hominem
The Phrase Ad Hominem means “to the man”, and it refers to an act of desperation that people often take when they are losing an argument: they attack their opponent personally. Instead of explaining why their opponent is wrong, perhaps because they don’t think they can, they resort to insulting their opponent or trying to show either that their opponent is corrupt or their opponent’s position is in some way corrupted by association. An ad hominem fallacy results from a lack of civility.
It is legitimate to criticize someone’s reliability if they are asking us to accept something on their own testimony. For instance, if someone claims to be a witness to a car accident, it is not an ad hominem to argue that the person is a liar or someone who tends to exaggerate the truth. Likewise, if someone appeals to their own judgment (e.g., they say that we should trust them on who to hire), it’s not an ad hominem to attack the reliability of their judgment (e.g., if the last three people they’ve hired have been terrible at their jobs). If someone is not appealing to their own reliability in an argument, however, then a personal attack is irrelevant and not an objection to their argument. For example, the following are ad hominem objections:
Heinrich is wrong about the cost of gasoline, because his friends are unsavory characters.
Heinrich is wrong about who won the baseball game, because he cheated on his taxes.
Heinrich is wrong about the boiling point of water, because he liked the Communist party on Facebook.
Heinrich is wrong about foreign policy, because he is the most promiscuous person in history.
Even if all of these things are true of Heinrich, they are irrelevant to the truth of what Heinrich is saying. Someone who is not civil towards Heinrich shows that their goal in the debate is not in persuading Heinrich that he is wrong through reasoning, but instead in trying to appear more powerful than him.
3.2.2 Working from Shared Assumptions
“Laying all your cards on the table” helps a conversation progress through shared assumptions.
Presuppositions
Disagreements tend to be most efficient with both sides have at least some shared assumptions, whatever the assumptions are. With some underlying common ground, the presuppositions of the conversation, each side can focus on trying to locate the source of the disagreement.
A presupposition in a conversation is an assumption made for the purposes of the conversation that is not explicitly stated. Many of the things we say make sense only against the background of certain presuppositions. For instance, consider the question:
Have you stopped working for that lying scumbag?
This question presupposes that a person has been working for someone, and that the person they have been working for is a lying scumbag. If someone were to answer the question with “no”, then this would seem to imply that they are still working for the lying scumbag. Someone who was never employed by someone else, or who didn’t think their employer was a liar or a scumbag, would neither be able to say “yes” or “no” in response to this question. They would have to challenge the presuppositions, or background assumptions, of the question. Consider two more examples:
Every student who signed up for the course met the prerequisites.
All Jeff’s ferrets are stinky.
These sentences do not explicitly say that any students signed up for the course, or that Jeff has any ferrets. In fact, if no students signed up for the course it would still be true that all of them (that is, all of nobody) met the prerequisites; if Jeff had no ferrets, it would still be true that all of his ferrets were stinky (and that none of them were stinky). They presuppose that students did sign up for the course, and that Jeff has ferrets.
Uses of Presupposition
We use presuppositions to settle common ground and to determine what is and is not open for discussion. Presuppositions help make our conversations more efficient, since we don’t need to repeat the assumptions we share every time the conversation begins, so we can focus on where we disagree. When someone constantly challenges the presuppositions of the conversation, it is difficult to have a productive disagreement with that person.
The internet has made it possible for us to see that, for nearly any claim a group of people might agree is obvious and certainly true, there is some other group of people out there who think the claim is controversial, doubtful, or false. There comes a time when groups must agree to disagree with one another so that each group can move its own conversation forward. Presupposition can help guard against letting a conversation be carried away or hijacked by someone who isn’t cooperative, like an opponent who will never be satisfied with any answer or whose real aim is to annoy or ridicule the group (sometimes known as “trolling”).
Presupposition can also help avoid a group lending false legitimacy to an opposing view which the group regards as entirely discredited. We would not expect a geologist to repeat at the start of every geological convention an explanation of the evidence that the earth is not flat, nor would we expect hydrologists to present their recommendations for flood control projects by starting with an explanation of why they think water is H2O.
Abuses of Presupposition
At the same time, presupposition can be abused to exclude people from a conversation whom it would be better to include. For instance, a conversation can presuppose that everyone in a group knows or believes something, when in fact a large portion of the group don’t believe it. A conversation can also presuppose that a debate is closed or over, when a majority in the group still think the debate is open. Presuppositions can cause people who disagree to leave the conversation, when it would be better if they were part of it. Presupposition can be used to silence the opposition out of fear of losing the argument, by pretending the opposition doesn’t exist. The abuse of presupposition can lead people to confuse social control for agreement.
Presuppositions can also allow unstated assumptions to go unquestioned, when there are better ideas that no one has yet considered. For instance, a conversation between co-workers about where to go out for lunch together might presuppose that the co-workers are going out to lunch; but in fact, the better option, which no one feels comfortable bringing up, might be to have food delivered so that they can save time spent driving. Similarly, a political debate about how long prison sentences for marijuana possession should be might presuppose that there should be prison sentences for marijuana possession, or a debate about whether to raise the minimum wage might presuppose that there should be a minimum wage, or a debate about how much to fund more technology in classrooms might presuppose that more technology in classrooms is a good thing. Perhaps these assumptions are right, perhaps not, but sometimes it might be better if everyone who is part of the conversation knows that they are being assumed, and why.
A good principle to follow is not to presuppose something in a conversation unless it seems likely that nearly everyone in the conversation could, if they were asked, give an explanation for why it is being presupposed.
3.2.3 Allowing Exceptions to the Rule
Mudskippers are fish which walk on land.
Special Cases
Disagreeing in a civil and respectful way means sometimes being willing to allow for “special cases”, or possible exceptions to a general rule. One person might be right that something is true in general, even if the other person is also right that there are some exceptions.
Many claims about our world are generally true but not universally true. For instance, it is generally true that birds fly, that fish don’t walk, that cats have tails, and that mammals don’t lay eggs. These are general truths even though there are exceptions: ostriches don’t fly, mudskippers walk, Manx cats don’t have tails, and the platypus lays eggs. These are “special cases”. They make it false that all birds fly, that no fish walk, that every cat has tails, that there are not any mammals which lay eggs. But even though it’s not true for all or every case, it may still be true for most cases, in general.
Many introductory logic students confuse the existence of special cases with subjectivity. A claim is subjective when whether it is true or false depends on the experiences of the person (“subject”) who is making it. For instance, whether “broccoli is tasty” is true or not is subjective, or relative to whose tastes we’re talking about. It is not subjective that birds fly, fish don’t walk, cats have tails, or mammals don’t lay eggs, on the other hand.
The fallacy of subjectivism happens when someone believes that either a rule has no exceptions, or else the rule is entirely subjective and a matter of preference. For instance, consider the moral rule that stealing is wrong. It is surely not true that whether stealing is wrong is a matter of preference or entirely in the eye of the beholder. The fact that someone likes stealing should not make it morally acceptable for them to steal whenever they like. But it also isn’t true that the rule not to steal has no exceptions whatsoever. There are special cases: someone who steals medicine in order to save a life that couldn’t be saved otherwise, for instance. We can allow special cases or exceptions without concluding that all generalizations are subjective.
Special Pleading
“Special Pleading” is the fallacy of holding a “double standard”, making an exception to a standard for oneself or one’s own view, while holding others to the standard. For example, someone who believes that taxi drivers should have to be licensed, but that they shouldn’t have to be licensed just to drive people around for a fee using a phone app, might be accused of double standards. Similarly, someone who holds that immigration should be tightly restricted, except for a few of their best friends, might be accused of special pleading. Someone who thinks that we should not rely on the news media for information, but then defends their own citation of a news article, also is engaged in a kind of special pleading.
There is no clear-cut rule for distinguishing special cases (justified exceptions), from special pleading (unjustified exceptions). No one engaged in special pleading ever thinks that they are engaged in special pleading: they think theirs is a special case! Every claim to be an exception to a general rule has to be evaluated on its own merits. Are there good reasons to think that this case is different from the others?
The best way to avoid special pleading is try to be aware of how the exceptions we might want to make would look from another perspective. Often, we tend to set our own expectations up as the standard or default. We define whether something is beneficial or harmful in terms of whether it is better or worse than what we ourselves would expect, but others may have different expectations. We define who in a debate bears the “burden of proof” by what seems to us like the “obvious” or “default” position, but others may be starting from a different position. Special pleading happens when we grant special privileges to ourselves, our expectations for the world, or our own “default” or “obvious” views about the world.
Submodule 3.2 Quiz
Licenses and Attributions
Key Sources:
- Watson, Jeffrey (2019). Introduction to Logic. Licensed under: (CC BY-SA).
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