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The Methodological Usefulness
of Deep Disagreement
La inutilidad metodológica del desacuerdo profundo
Steven Patterson
Department of Philosophy, Marygrove College, Detroit, United States
spatterson@marygrove.edu
Received: 28-11-2014. Accepted: 20-12-2014.
Abstract: In this paper I begin by examining Fogelin’s account of deep disagreement.
My contention is that this account is so deeply lawed as to cast doubt on the possibility that such deep disagreements actually happen. Nevertheless, I contend that
the notion of deep disagreement itself is a useful theoretical foil for thinking about
argumentation. The second part of this paper makes this case by showing how thinking about deep disagreements from the perspective of rhetoric, Walton- style argumentation theory, computation, and normative pragmatics can all yield insights that
are useful no matter what one’s orientation within the study of argument. Thus, I conclude that deep disagreement–even if it were to turn out that there are no real-world
occurrences of it to which we can point–is useful for theorists of argumentation. In
this wise, deep disagreement poses a theoretical (and not, as is widely thought, a
practical) challenge for argumentation theory not unlike that posed by radical skepticism for traditional epistemology.
Keywords: Deep disagreement, Fogelin, argumentation, Wittgenstein.
Resumen: En este trabajo comienzo examinando la perspectiva de Fogelin sobre
el desacuerdo profundo. Mi alegato es tanto que esta perspectiva es profundamente
defectuosa como sembrar dudas sobre la posibilidad de que tales desacuerdos profundos realmente sucedan. Sin embargo, mantengo que la noción de desacuerdo profundo en sí misma es una herramienta teórica útil para pensar la argumentación. La
segunda parte de este trabajo argumenta por esto mostrando cómo pensar los desacuerdos profundos desde las perspectivas retórica, al estilo de la teoría de la argumentación de Walton, la computación, y la pragmática normativa, arrojando luz útil
todos estos campos sin importar la orientación que uno tenga dentro del estudio de
la argumentación. De este modo, concluyo que el desacuerdo profundo –incluso en el
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caso que nos demos cuenta que no hay en el mundo ocurrencias reales a las que podamos señalar– es teóricamente útil para los teóricos de la argumentación. En esta vena,
el desacuerdo profundo instala un desafío teórico (y no, como se piensa ampliamente,
uno práctico) para la teoría de la argumentación sin diferencia al que se instala por el
escepticismo radical en la epistemología tradicional.
Palabras clave: Desaceurdo profundo, Fogelin, argumentación, Wittgenstein.
1. Introduction
The last ten years have seen what many interpret to be an unprecedented
intensiication of divisiveness in both domestic and international political
rhetoric. Internationally, the clash between fundamentalist visions of Islam
and the largely secular ideologies of much of the West seems intractable.
In the US and Europe, the discourse between left-leaning and right-leaning
political parties and their representatives in the media frequently borders
on the apoplectic. It is perhaps no surprise then, that recent years have
seen a renewed interest in deep disagreement among students of informal
logic and argumentation theory.
In this paper, I shall argue that much of this attention is perhaps misplaced. Deep disagreement, though no doubt a phenomenon of some interest and importance, is nowhere near as troubling a prospect as has often
been assumed. I will show this in three steps. First I will begin with an analysis of Fogelin-type deep disagreement, offering several arguments to show
that the line of argument that irst introduced deep disagreement into the
literature is based on questionable assumptions. Second, I will argue that
even if we allow that deep disagreement of a profound sort exists (as I believe
that we should), the philosophy of argument provides us with completely
adequate resources for dealing with it. Lastly, I will conclude the paper by
arguing that even though this is the case, the idea of deep disagreement can
still play a useful methodological role for theorists of argumentation.
2. Fogelin’s Case for Deep Disagreement
It will be helpful to have a rough sketch of Fogelin’s argument in hand. The
following summary is drawn from Fogelin (1985).
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1. Any disagreement is resolved only when all parties are rationally convinced of the position of one of the parties.
2. Argumentation is the primary means by which such resolutions take
place.
3. A deep disagreement is a clash not between individual propositions
or arguments, nor is it simply the failure of one or more parties to
sincerely engage the dialectic (i.e. “pig-headedness”) but between incommensurable forms of life—deeply rooted frameworks of grounding assumptions, values, and practices.
4. If two forms of life are incommensurable then there is no way of reconciling them by rational means.
5. The notion of “forms of life” includes such things as standards of
argumentation.
6. This means that argumentation is powerless in the face of deep disagreements; it effects nothing.
7. Therefore deep disagreements must be approached through nonrational persuasion.
8. That such an important class of disagreements cannot be handled by
rational means suggests troubling limits to the eficacy of argument.
In what follows I will offer some reasons to doubt key premises of this
argument, particularly its irst, fourth, and ifth premises. My focus on these
premises is not meant to indicate that the others are uncontroversial. Indeed,
nearly every premise of the argument has met with substantial challenge at
some point.1 I simply will not be challenging them in order to focus on what I
take to be more important points. It is to these points that I now turn.
3. Some Criticisms of Fogelin’s Argument
3.1. Fogelin’s Premise 1: Victory as the Proper Aim of Argument
The irst dificulty with Fogelin’s argument is that it fundamentally misconstrues the aim of argument. Fogelin’s assumption is that we argue to
1
An excellent overview of the literature around this argument is contained in a paper
given in Finocchiaro (2011).
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achieve a victory for our point of view, and that an issue is resolved only
when the dispute is settled in favor of one or the other thesis. This assumption views dialectical exchange in far too lat a way. As I have argued elsewhere (Patterson, 2011) and as many others have said before me, including, most recently Johnson (2009) and especially Pinto (2010), and (well
before all of us if in a slightly different way) Jacobs (1987) to name just a
few, the point of argument has at least as much–and perhaps even more–to
do with coordinative purposes than competitive ones. This is evident in the
very common experience of an exchange of ideas resulting in the production of new ideas and positions that represent that consensus or coordination. Rather than one party emerging as the victor and another the loser,
it may well turn out that everyone wins (if a mutual understanding can
be reached over a “third way”) or that everyone loses (if, for example the
parties simply squander time and good will talking past one another). This
is especially true of practical deliberations, where the view that achieves
consensus is very often not one advocated from the start by some party,
but a compromise position that is acceptable to all, even if it wasn’t what
anyone had in mind at the beginning of the deliberations. If it is true that
dialectical exchange frequently enough results in convergence on such
“third alternatives” then it seems reasonable to doubt that the resolution
of a dispute always–or even most of the time–means the triumph of one
party’s standpoint or thesis over that of the other participants.2 There are
other alternatives too. It may be, for example, that the parties discover in
exchange that their differences are merely verbal, or that new facts render
their difference of opinion moot. Hence the irst premise of Fogelin’s argument seems doubtful.
3.2. Fogelin’s Premises 4 and 5: The Incommensurability
Premises
Fogelin’s fourth premise is that there can be no rational way of reconciling two incommensurable forms of life. In essence, Fogelin’s reasoning is
that incommensurability between two positions in a dispute is a product
2
Indeed, it isn’t clear that such a mindset is even a desirable one with which to enter
into argumentation in the irst place, but more on this later.
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of the positions of the parties being derived from two antecedent (also
incommensurable) frameworks. Since it seems clear that there disputes
where the points of view are incommensurable, it follows that there are
deep, incommensurable frameworks too. This line of reasoning deserves
careful scrutiny. All hangs on whether or not there are plausible alternative explanations of incommensurability between positions besides deeply
incommensurable frameworks. As one might think of the requisite incommensurability either from the perspective of the individual or from that of
the group to which she might belong, I address both sorts in order to show
that this premise, for all it’s apparent “common-sense” appeal, must fall
short of the mark.
3.2.1. Incompetent Epistemic Agency and Rational
Incommensurability
Though Fogelin doesn’t make such a claim, it should be clear that the point
made in this premise is a close cousin to the position in moral philosophy
that the existence of sustained disagreement over time establishes some
or other skeptical position with regard to moral realism. Thus, it calls for a
particularly full-blooded reply. Let us begin this reply with a brief look at
a highly effective response to the problem of disagreement in ethics, that
offered by David Brink.
Brink’s principle concern is to respond to the moral skepticism of John
Mackie by way of answering Mackie’s charge that the realist bears the burden of proving that actual moral disagreements are at least in-principle resolvable. Brink agrees that the moral realist bears this burden. His strategy
for discharging it involves three principal avenues of response. The irst of
these involves clarifying the nature and scope of Mackie’s charge. The second rests on a closer analysis of the details of actual moral disagreements,
and the third addresses what Brink refers to as the “diachronic” nature of
Mackie’s charge–that element that focuses on the endurance of moral disagreement over large stretches of time. Of these three aspects of Brink’s
response, only the second two are really relevant to the present discussion.
This is because, unlike Mackie’s stance regarding moral disagreements, Fogelin’s does not involve commitment to the position that no disagreements
of any sort are ever rationally resolved. Fogelin’s position concern is with
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only a limited subset of disagreements that are beset by the property of being unresolvable. Thus Brink’s irst strategy, which relies on showing that
Mackie is wrong to think that all moral disagreements are of a piece in being unresolvable by rational means, is somewhat idle here.
The second of Brink’s strategies is not idle, however, as it counsels special care in looking at the iner details of moral disagreements. If we look
hard enough, Brink argues, we will see that a number of possibilities account for the recalcitrance of the disagreement that have little or nothing
to do with the fact that they are moral disagreements. Instead, they have to
do with the nonmoral facts attendant to the situation. We can simplify his
position by classifying these possibilities into two categories: those relating
to agents and those relating to underlying factual considerations. In both
cases, the failure to achieve agreement is not due to the fact of the dispute’s
being a moral one, but due to failings of the agents or dificulties that beset
the circumstances in which they must exercise their rational powers. With
respect to the irst category, which Brink describes as an agent’s being culpably ignorant of information that would make resolution possible, he has
this to say:
Often, at least one disputant culpably fails to assess the nonmoral
facts correctly by being insuficiently imaginative in weighing the consequences for various people of different actions or policies. Culpable
failure to be suficiently imaginative may result from negligence (e.g.
laziness), prejudice, self-interest, or social ideology. Brink (1989, pp.
198-209)
Now, Fogelin does address something like this concern when he dismisses
from the category of deep disagreement those disagreements that are the
product of one or both parties being merely “pig-headed”. To this much I
think, Brink and Fogelin would agree. Brink’s point is larger in scope, however, as he goes on to address cases of non-culpable ignorance that result
in moral disagreement (my emphasis):
Other genuine moral disputes depend on reasonable (non-culpable) but
nonetheless resolvable disagreements over the non-moral facts. The
correct answers to controversial moral questions often turn on nonmoral issues about which reasonable disagreement is possible and to which
no one may know the answer. (ibid.)
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The emphasized portion of this sentence is key. Just because the relevant nonmoral facts may not be known at the time of the disputants’ clash
in viewpoints, this is no reason to conclude that they could not, in time,
come to be known with suficient generality as to render the moral disagreement moot. Still other possibilities are that the agents lack the capacity to understand the relevant non-moral facts, or that these facts are so
complex and so numerous as to confound even a well-meaning and otherwise bright epistemic agents. Still again, it may be that the agents’ failure
to understand the nonmoral facts is due to their non-culpable adherence to
the best scientiic theories available to them under conditions that will later
be discovered to be systematically misleading with respect to the subject
matter of their debate (e.g. vociferous disagreement about the movement
of phlogiston prior to the discovery of chemical catalysts). In such cases
the parties may simply be doing the best they can on the strength of their
intuitions and whatever partial understanding of the non-moral facts they
can manage. Resilient disagreement under such conditions would hardly
be a surprise. Note, however, that in cases like these the failure to achieve
resolution for a long-standing disagreement, though it would still be due
primarily to the shortcomings of the agents, would not involve “pig-headedness” in Fogelin’s sense. In such a case we would be wrong to infer from
any apparent incommensurability in the agents’ points of view any conclusions about the prospects for inding a rational resolution to their disagreement. We would be similarly wrong to dismiss their disagreement as not
posing a counterexample to the idea of deep disagreement too.
If the forgoing is sensible, then we should have some reason to doubt
that apparent incommensurability between the points of view of persons
entails that their attempts to resolve those disputes using rational means
are doomed to failure. On the contrary, it may simply be that the incommensurability of their points of view is a temporary condition imposed on
them by the epistemic circumstances of their difference of opinion. But
what of differences of opinion that are the product not of disputes tied to
poorly understood facts, but of clashes between “life-worlds” or ways of
living we associate with the term “culture” and its cognates? Surely these
will seem to many to be better candidates for generators of actual deep disagreements as adherence to one’s cultural values and ways of being seems,
on some level, to be relexive; not the subject of rational relection. Perhaps
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then cultural differences generate the kind of incommensurability that renders our rational faculties powerless?
3.2.2. Cultural or Group Difference and Rational
Incommensurability
It would seem that cultural differences do not render us powerless. We
learn from Liu (1999), for instance, that different cultures or “forms of life”
may not just hypothetically understand each-other’s reasoning but can
and actually do take on each other’s modes of reasoning when dealing with
questions of value. This point is conirmed independently in Suzuki (2008)
and in Harpine (1993). This lies in the face of Fogelin’s contention that
different forms of life contain different standards of argumentation, a key
point in his argument for deep disagreement. If Liu, Suzuki, and Harpine
are correct then standards of argumentation are not wholly creatures of antecedent cultural or ideological frameworks.3 This should not be a surprise,
as a diverse array of empirical research programs in cognitive science and
psychology suggest the same thing.4 Surely then at least some skepticism
as to Fogelin’s assumption that one’s standards of argumentation are products of one’s “life-world” is warranted.
Even if one were inclined to generosity on this score, however, Fogelin’s
view would not escape the further problem that individuals and groups, simultaneously inhabit more than one “way of life”. To put the point another
way, no one is only a Muslim, or just Canadian. The social and cultural vectors that bear on individual and collective self-image and beliefs are many,
and are interrelated and interwoven in complex ways. These take the form
of social roles (father, police oficer, daughter, etc.), genders, linguistic
communities, historically-deined groupings (WWII-era Russian Jews),
memberships in various projects (those concerned about saving Tiger Stadium in Detroit, those advocating for women’s rights in Chile), as well as
3
Note that this need not be seen as a claim that such standards are universal. That
claim is not made in any of the three essays cited here. It has, however, been advanced in
Hanna (2006).
4
For a classic sampling of these see Kahneman/Tversky (2000), Gentner/Kokinov
(2001), and most recently Mercier/Sperber (2011).
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the sort of communities of belief that Fogelin envisions in his examples of
abortion and afirmative action. All such “life-worlds” overlap and form a
tangle of inluences that bear on who a person conceives herself to be, what
she believes and how she argues. The point here is that there are no strict
divides between persons, no ideological gulfs so wide that no points of commonality exist that could be leveraged in order to make rational appeals to
persons who do not share our views. Simply because persons may belong to
different cultures or classes of person does not necessarily mean that their
views are going to be incommensurable. In fact, we often do argue outside
of our own social set of descriptors, or leverage one descriptor above others to make a point. One can imagine the sort of questions that would arise
in Fogelin’s abortion example as a case in point. Suppose Alva is against
abortion and Britt thinks it should be legal. Would we be surprised to hear
Britt appeal to social roles deined outside of their positions on abortion to
make her arguments? “What if it was your sister, or your daughter?” she
might ask, hoping to show that Alva’s ideological commitment is inconsistent with commitments he might have in his role as brother or father. If
such questions can be legitimate–if they can be rational, as I believe that
they can– then I think that they suggest that a more textured view of how
“forms of life” shape our arguing practices is in order than the one implicit
in Fogelin’s argument.
3.3. Fogelin’s Wittgensteinian Grounds for Rational
Incommensurability
With so many contra-indications to the idea that incommensurable positions
signal the presence of deep, incommensurable frameworks or “life-worlds”
it is worth asking what the grounds are on which Fogelin advances it in the
irst place. Those who know the essay well know that his grounds ostensibly
are Wittgensteinian. The upshot of Fogelin’s Wittgensteinian case is that the
bedrock commitments of one’s own “life-world” behave in much the same
way that the “hinge propositions” of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty would–
they so anchor the moral dimensions of Alva’s and Britt’s life- world that to
think otherwise appears to miss something not just blindingly obvious but
foundationally important to any adequate understanding of–and certainly
any reasonably proicient use of language about–this aspect of the world.
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But can there be “private” hinge propositions like this? It seems a deeply
problematic interpretation of Wittgenstein, especially when Wittgenstein’s
ambivalence about the idea of hinge propositions is so well known and so
clearly evident in On Certainty.5 Though this is not the place for such an
investigation, it seems to me for various reasons that there could not be, on
pain of accepting deeply problematic forms of philosophical intuitionism in
ethics. One has to bear in mind that for Wittgenstein there is a rather important difference between a proposition’s being the case, its seeming to be
the case, and its being impossible for one to imagine that it is not the case.
With hinge propositions, we not only ind ourselves closest to the latter
situation, we simply cannot speak sensibly to our linguistic fellows without
committing ourselves to them to at least some degree. This is manifestly
not the case with moral controversies like the one over abortion, no matter
how deeply felt. It’s not that Alva and Britt cannot understand one another.
In fact they understand each other perfectly well. It is this very fact that
brings about their disagreement in the irst place!6 If the difference between Alva and Britt rested on their having competing sets of hinge propositions, then there would be no controversy between them. They would not
understand each other well enough to know how their views differed, or if
indeed they did at all. It would be as though they actually spoke radically
different, non-translatable languages–as though one of them communicated only by emitting certain scents from a special gland, and the other spoke
the language represented by Greek Linear B. For us to cast moral disagreements such as the hypothetical one between Alva and Britt as being like this
is tempting, but involves us in problematic hyperbole. To know that one
has a difference of moral opinion with another presupposes some sort of
mutual understanding of the basic terms of the other’s moral vocabulary.7
5
See for example Wellman (1959) for an excellent argument that ties together Wittgensteinian concerns about the possibility of a private language and the kind of semantic
egocentrism that would be entailed by “private” hinge propositions. On Wittgenstein’s ambivalence regarding hinge propositions and a very interesting suggestion that it signals a
deep problem in his thinking about them see Wolgast (1987).
6
Fogelin’s reading here is simply strange. The more orthodox, objective status assigned
to hinge propositions in Miller (1995), for example, supports anything but Fogelin’s reading of the concept of “hinge propositions”.
7
This point is also made in Morawetz (1980).
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That we might share such a vocabulary, among other non-trivial things underwrites the criticism in Phillips (2008). There, Phillips suggests that the
shared background for argument is far greater than it might at irst appear.
If she is right about this, as I believe that she is, then argumentation is far
from hopeless even in cases of apparently deep disagreement.
This does not mean that argumentation will always succeed given suficient time and effort. No such guarantee is necessary to redeem the usefulness of argumentation in cases of deep disagreement. (I will have more
to say on this below.) As the present focus is on Fogelin’s diagnosis of deep
disagreement, it is more pertinent to observe that the fact that direct argument fails in a range of cases does not entail, as he seems to think, that
there is a single cause of the failure that explains them all—not even for
the same discussants dealing with the same issue. Fogelin’s case for deep
disagreement is therefore somewhat question-begging in the end. The only
way to establish that argumentation will always fail in cases where worldviews clash is to assume beforehand that world-views are rationally incommensurable. But as argumentation is a rational method of reaching an accommodation between two different points of view (be they world-views or
viewpoints of a more pedestrian kind), it follows only trivially that among
the other things it might mean, incommensurability involves a foreclosure
on argumentation.8
In order for Fogelin’s case to get off the ground in a non-trivial way,
he needs to demonstrate not that there are arguments that people presently cannot solve through argumentation but that there are disputes that
in principle could not be resolved by argumentation, i.e. that there are disputes so fractious that there is no possible world in which argumentation
can move them forward. He does not do this. It’s hard to see how anyone
could do it. For when we look at the worst disputes we have, we have no
problem forming judgments about the possible conditions under which the
8
This picture of incommensurability in itself is troubling, as it involves what Pinto
(1995) calls “lat-out epistemic relativism”–a view with several features that make it worthy of our avoidance. If it is a Wittgensteinian brand of moral relativism that is supposed
to be on offer things go no better. Strangely enough it seems that Wittgenstein himself did
not endorse such a relativism. For an overview of Wittgenstein’s moral thought see Rhees
(1965). For his own words see Wittgenstein (1965).
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parties might move forward. Nor do we have any problem at all making
judgments about what the “real causes” of their inability to make progress
are. This should increase our overall doubt about Fogelin’s picture.
A inal consideration in this vein should give us additional pause about
Fogelin’s ifth premise too. In addition to the dificulties I have raised here
about individuating the “forms of life” at issue in a deep disagreement, we
do well to recall Adams worry that even if we could settle this matter we still
might not be able to tell when a disagreement was “deep” enough to license
the abandonment of argument:
More generally, the logic of deep disagreement makes it impossible to
specify a priori conditions such that, for any disagreement, satisfaction
of just those conditions would be necessary and suficient epistemically
to conclude that the disagreement is deep. The only way for the parties
to know whether such a state of affairs obtains is by continuing to work
through an attempt at rational discourse, and this because the question
of whether a given disagreement is deep can only be settled by exhausting the possible resources of normal discourse. All of this means that the
only way for the parties to establish that their disagreement is deep is to
reject the very path of non-rational persuasion recommended by Fogelin and concentrate instead on their collective efforts at mutual persuasion by reasons. The only way, in other words, to come to know whether
discourse is normal is to proceed as if it is. Adams (2005, p. 76)
This brings us to the sixth premise of Fogelin’s argument. If the foregoing
considerations are correct, then Fogelin-style deep disagreements simply
don’t happen. Importantly, they do not happen because they are not possible, and they are not possible because there are no such things as private
“hinge propositions”. Where human beings are capable of understanding
each other’s speech, there always exists at least the potential for the reasoned resolution of any disagreement.
4. The Methodological Usefulness of Deep Disagreement
If the considerations are correct, then the likelihood of encountering the
sort of incommensurability needed for Fogelin-style deep disagreements
is vanishingly small. Why then, should we bother talking about “deep dis-
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agreements” at all? This is far from an idle question as it may seem to be
in our best interest–at least from a practical point of view–to banish the
language of deep disagreement from our vocabulary. This is because such
language has the potential to be practically counter-productive: Simply declare a disagreement to be “deep”, and we absolve ourselves of any moral
or rational obligations we may be under to continue to struggle with it. We
can see the rhetorical effect of such declarations in the American political
context, where each side declares the other to be so far away from a reasonable point of view that dialectical engagement is not only seen as impossible, but as a kind of betrayal in that it might encourage the perception
that the enemy’s point of view is to some degree reasonable. The opinion
seems to be that rather than pursue rational dialectic it is better just to
declare the disagreement “deep” and urge idelity to “our way” of seeing
things among those who already follow that way. Giving up rational means
is easy, even satisfying in some instances. But very often our unwillingness
to argue has little or nothing to do with the real (or supposed) “depth” of
a disagreement. This is not to say that there are no serious disagreements.
There surely are. That said, we do well to resist, as far as we are able, the
temptation to draw the conclusion that we have arrived at such a pass until
it is beyond the shadow of a doubt that we have. (And even then, argumentation may still be better of the alternatives before us!)
It is clear then, that there is a practical price to pay for retaining the notion of deep disagreement. Is that price worth paying? I want to suggest in
the remainder of this paper that it is. The principal reason for holding onto
the idea of deep disagreement is not that there are or might be such things
in the real world. It is because the idea of deep disagreement can serve a
useful methodological purpose akin to that played by Cartesian skepticism
in epistemology. In order to see how, it will be necessary to re-conceptualize what it is for a disagreement to be “deep” in terminology other than that
given in Fogelin’s problematic analysis.
5. Deep Disagreement Reconceived
Fogelin’s idea of deep disagreement, as we have seen, is subject to a large
number of highly substantial objections. This does not, however, invalidate
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the intuition that some disagreements are far more serious than others.
This sensible intuition is often conirmed in our experience, as we often
ind ourselves in conlicts with others that resist easy dialectical resolution.
For those who want to develop a theory of argumentation that can respond
to these dificult cases, it will prove a useful theoretical exercise to imagine
features of disagreement that make the prospect of successful argumentation diminishingly small. This exercise must be pursued with care, for like
Descartes’ evil demon case it is likely to be misunderstood. We are here
seeking after the hypothetical limit of argumentation. The task is one of
identifying those conditions under which it might seem that argument is
as close to impossible as it can be. The point of the task is to see what, if
anything, of argumentation might endure in such cases. Some or all of the
following characteristics, or characteristics like them, seem to it the bill:
1. Duration: The dispute is not resolvable in a short span of time.
2. Intensity: The parties to the disagreement exhibit a more powerful
motivation to hang onto their positions than to seek a resolution to
the disagreement.
3. Opposition: The dispute would involve clear, diametrical opposition
between what seem to be inconsistent propositions.
4. Zero-summed-ness: The parties would see their gains as the losses of
the other side, and vice-versa.
5. Affect: The dispute would seep into the ways the parties see themselves, others, and the world, and the ways in which they respond to
persons and conditions quite outside the scope of the disagreement.
6. Polarization: The continued deliberation of the parties would tend
to entrench them deeper in their own positions rather than opening
them up to new positions.
7. Fragility: The parties would exhibit a greater than usual readiness to
engage in intentional behavior that derails the dialogue (e.g. namecalling, straw-man attacks, etc.).
8. Mistrust: The parties would not trust each other to judge objectively,
but expect them to seek their own advantage at all times, using any
means available to them including fallacious means.
9. Indeterminateness: There would be no external principles, criteria,
judgments or authoritative igures acceptable to all parties to whom
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appeal can be made for uncontroversially just resolution of the disagreement.
While this list makes no pretense at being a complete account, it does sum
up some of the central features that together make a disagreement deep in
the sense of reducing considerably the chance for successful episodes of
argumentation. A brief look at each of these characteristics, with the help
of a few examples, will help us get clearer as to the nature of the proposal.
5.1. The Characteristics of Deep Disagreement
5.1.1. Duration
Most of the disagreements human beings experience are resolved within the
space of no more than a handful of conversations. In a deep disagreement,
however, there seems to be no end to the process of mulling over the clashing positions. Neither side will admit defeat nor give concessions that it sees
as leading to defeat. As the making of concessions is typically the engine that
drives a dialectical exchange to its close, deep disagreements are prolonged
beyond the usual lifespan of differences of opinion. The public debate over
abortion in the United States is one such disagreement. While most of the
world has reached a social settlement regarding the question of whether or
not abortion should be legally permitted, the debate in the US, now well
over forty years old, shows no sign of impending resolution. This dispute
also illustrates the kind of thing that people often have in mind when they
characterize a debate as “interminable”. In point of fact this is not something that can be known. What can be said is that a debate has gone on for a
very long time, and that is all the property of duration is meant to pick out.
5.1.2. Intensity
The intensity of a deep disagreement is marked by the resistance to downward revision of the participants’ levels of conidence in their standpoints
despite being bombarded with counter-arguments and evidence to the
contrary. Indeed, there are cases where the resolution of a difference of
opinion is clear but neither side will follow the path to it out of blind adher-
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ence to their own position. It is worth noting in this connection the familiar
point from the logic of belief revision that an agent who never revises his
levels of conidence is irrational in particularly problematic way. Nevertheless, that is what seems to happen in debates like the abortion debate. On
both the pro and contra sides, positions become so entrenched as to make
their proponents appear to be oblivious to rational criticism.
5.1.3. Opposition
That opposition should be a hallmark of deep disagreement should not be
surprising, so we may pass over it with little comment. Sufice it to say
that typically the parties to a deep disagreement hold positions that are so
opposed that they straightforwardly entail the falsehood of their opposite
number. Deep disagreements by deinition are not situations where one
party is undecided, or simply playing the “devil’s advocate.”
5.1.4. Zero-summed-ness
It is because of the intensity and the opposition of the views of the parties
that the dialectic takes on the character of a zero-sum game wherein one
party’s loss is the gain of the other and vice-versa. There are, of course, models of dialectic on offer wherein every argued exchange is like this, but here I
wish to hold something different.9 In an ordinary round of argumentation it
is possible for all of the parties to come closer together in at least some way,
to wind up with better coordinated sets of commitments than they otherwise would were they to forego argumentation for some other communicative choice. Hence zero-summed-ness is a very special property indeed.
5.1.5. Affect
Just as intensity and opposition drive zero-summed-ness, duration together
with these three drives affect. The affect of a deep disagreement is measured
9
Some hold that this is Krabbe’s view as result of misinterpretations of remarks in
works of his like Krabbe (2008). I believe his view is more nuanced, as can be seen in
Krabbe (2009).
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The Methodological Usefulness of Deep Disagreement / s. Patterson
by the degree to which the participants come to see themselves in terms of
their position vis a vis the disagreement, and the social world they inhabit as
demarcated by those on their side and those on the wrong side. The term ’affect’ is chosen for this characteristic because it appropriately captures the degree to which commitment to a side in a deep disagreement slips the bounds
of the straightforwardly cognitive and blends into the more straightforwardly emotional. No phenomenon better captures the idea of effect than that of
the single-issue voter, whose only political allegiance is to the person or party
most likely to advocate for what she sees as the correct side of some social
debate. Indeed, such voters often let the whole of their political outlook be
driven in such ways.10 In Europe examples in which single-issue voting might
be found would be environmental issues, or perhaps those of immigration.
In North America single- issue voting abounds, and many persons can be
found who openly profess to voting only based on their concerns about abortion, gun control, or (increasingly) free market economic policy.
5.1.6. Polarization
Polarization, according to Cass Sunstein, is the tendency of “members of a
deliberating group [to] predictably move toward a more extreme point in
the direction indicated by the members’ pre-deliberation tendencies.” (Sunstein 2003, 81) It is a well-documented intra-group phenomenon that occurs
not just in contentious deliberations but in deliberations in general, across a
multiplicity of contexts. It is well within the bounds of the research to claim
polarization as a deining property of deep disagreements. This is because it
is reasonable to think that disagreements that exhibit the properties of affect and intensity will almost certainly be the sort that lead agents to take
more extreme versions of their viewpoints. Let us be clear, however, that
“extreme” here does not mean necessarily that one is in the grip of a particular ideology, only that one holds an outlying position of particular force on
the issue in question. For example, a party to the disagreement over whether
professional athletes should make so much more money than teachers who
claimed, independently of her other views, that professional athletes should
10
See the account in Baron (2009) for a good description of the empirical research
around this phenomenon.
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be paid nothing could rightly be seen as embracing an “extreme” position
in the requisite sense regardless of what her other commitments were. The
extremity of her view, if maintained forcefully enough in the deliberations of
her group, would (in theory) be enough to trigger a polarizing effect.
5.1.7. Fragility
If polarization means that intra-group deliberations become more and
more extreme, then it should stand to reason that as the group’s position
becomes more and more polarized it’s inter-group activities become more
and more deeply affected. The result of polarization then, is an increasing openness to dialectical tactics that are likely to derail a dialogue, such
as straw-man and fallacious ad hominem attacks. Examples of this sort of
state of affairs are so numerous that the reader will surely be able to call
to mind a half-dozen examples of his or her own. To take a silly example,
however, one might point to the readiness with which pundits and elected
oficials in America draw comparisons between their opponents and Adolf
Hitler. Of course we dismiss these comparisons as hyperbole or just plain
silliness, but the signal they send is clear: “We are willing to say anything
to discredit our opponents.” As such, they make any dialogue that might be
possible between the parties incredibly fragile.
5.1.8. Mistrust
While their causes are many and varied, situations of mistrust are exactly
what they sound like–situations in which neither party trusts the other to
refrain from the kind of measures that would provoke a derailment. It is
important to keep in mind that mistrust can exist not just in cases where
the parties know each other, but in cases where they do not. There are also
cases where mistrust is provoked by the louting of conventions surrounding the type of dialogue that the parties are supposed to have, e.g. standing
to speak, conventions of civility, etc.
5.1.9. Indeterminateness
The indeterminateness of deep disagreements lies in the fact that there is
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no party who is recognized by those in the disagreement as a legitimate
authority to which appeal might be made in order to settle the difference
between them. If one or the other party sees it’s view as licensed by the
deliverances of such an authority, that authority will inevitably be rejected
by the other parties to the disagreement. Since there are no agreed-upon
judges the parties ind themselves in the dialectical equivalent of a Lockean
state of nature, with all its attendant disadvantages: partiality, susceptibility to overreaches due to passionate attachment to their own causes, and an
ensuing state of “confusion and disorder”. (Locke, 1988)
5.2. Evaluating the Proposed Model of Deep Disagreement
Is the model of deep disagreement based on factors like the above-mentioned eight an improvement on Fogelin’s model? It seems to me that there
are several reasons to think so.
Notice immediately that these factors do not include considerations
about causes of the disagreement. It is not assumed that the parties cannot speak intelligibly to each other, or that they do not share standards of
reason, rationality or argument. This is in part due to the fact that it is not
assumed that the parties inhabit radically different life-worlds or entertain
different “framework” propositions. This is intentional, as a cogent account
of disagreement should be able to admit of many possible causes, including that the parties have been mislead into thinking that their disagreement is deep when it really isn’t, that the disagreement might be based on
mutual misunderstandings, or that circumstances are such that no party
really has suficient evidence to conclusively establish it’s point of view. To
be maximally useful such an account should also be able to apply along a
continuum of more and less serious cases. The view of deep disagreement
sketched by the eight properties above can be used in this way.
In addition to being neutral as to the causes, an adequate account should
contain within its ambit the possibility of intra-group (or intra-framework)
deep disagreement. This is an advantage of the view I am proposing and
serious oversight in Fogelin’s view, as some of the most costly and lasting and otherwise “deep” disagreements in history have had their roots in
intra-group disagreements wherein all the participants shared precisely
the same world-view, framework propositions, etc. The rise of Protestant-
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ism and the subsequent four centuries of religious warfare that followed in
Europe is a particularly telling case of this phenomenon. If such cases must
be accounted for, then any theory of deep disagreement must capture them
if it aspires to account for the phenomenon in anything like a complete
sense. The model on offer here can accommodate them. Though the parties
began as members of the same group—arguably the same “life-world”--the
schism between Protestants and Catholics involved nearly all eight factors
by the time open war was happening. It would take this paper too far aield
of its purpose to give a detailed account of the evolution of the deep disagreement between the parties, but it does seems as though properties like
those described here could be used for such a purpose. Fogelin’s model
could not be used in this way, and so is less powerful.
There is one further general advantage of the account on offer here that
bears notice. This advantage is a logical one: The proffered analysis of deep
disagreement does not necessitate that such disagreements are by nature
insoluble. This prevents the criticisms of circularity, or question-begging
to which Fogelin’s view is prone. To put it another way, ’deep’ here is a
synonym for dificult, not for ’impossible’.
In the aforementioned ways, then, it seems as though the account of
deep disagreement put forward in this paper does have some advantages
over that put forward by Fogelin. For all that, it might still be wondered
whether or not we’ve really put our inger on anything that picks out a
unique property of “depth” here at all. My conclusion is that we have not.
For all that the analysis may give us, it only really gives us a cluster of conditions under which reaching an agreement is very hard to do. Whether
we call controversies thus aflicted “deep disagreements” or not is a matter of art. Really there are only just disagreements, and some of them are
tougher nuts to crack than others. This is not to say, however, that thinking in terms of deep disagreement may not have some serious theoretical or methodological beneits. In the inal section of this paper I want to
argue that deep disagreement poses a limiting case for the theory of argumentation in much the same way that the Cartesian demon case poses a
limiting case for traditional epistemology. If this contention is right, then
I believe we should see that thinking about how to address worries about
deep disagreements spurs us to interesting conclusions about the uses of
argument.
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6. Deep Disagreement and Argumentation at the Limit
Let us suppose that it seems as though Alva and Britt cannot resolve their
disagreement over abortion by arguing about abortion. What argumentative strategies might work? What is required of the parties in order to make
them work? If we reject Fogelin’s contention that disagreement’s being
deep means a fortiori that it is impossible to resolve by argumentation,
we can approach these questions in much the same way that Descartes approaches the question of what he can know even if he lives in a universe
dominated by an omnipotent deceiver. While we will not ind our results
quite so earth-shaking as he does, the methodological parallel holds: We
are asking about argumentation at the limit, in other words, about the uses
of argumentation in those situations in which the circumstances for its eficacy (perhaps even its possibility) are least in evidence.
We can group the strategies into four generalized families of approach:
rhetorical strategies, those I will call “emergent solution” approaches, negotiation dialogue, and incompletely theorized agreements. As these are
not hard and fast categories but only “familial” groupings there will be
some overlap between them. This, I think, is apt, because in any given case
of deep disagreement one would not be surprised to see them used (whether consciously or not) in concert with one another.
My inclusion of rhetorical approaches indicates another point of departure from Fogelin’s thesis that needs to be made explicit. In saying that
deep disagreements require us to abandon argument in favor of persuasion, Fogelin seems to indicate that the techniques of persuasion i.e. rhetorical techniques) are non-rational. I do not accept the narrow vision of
rationality that Fogelin’s dichotomy implies. It would take this paper too
far aield of its purpose to make the case for the rationality of rhetoric, but
I believe that careful students of the discipline will have no problem seeing
how such a case would be made.11
11
Those who are not satisied by my hand-waving on this score might consult Godden and Brenner (2011) in this journal. The chapters on rhetoric in Frans H. van Eemeren
(1996), the essay by David Zarefsky I refer to in section 6.1 below, and Kauffeld (2007)
also give good reason to doubt that there is something irrational per se about rhetorical
methods of persuasion.
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6.1. Rhetorical Approaches
Zarefsky (2010) suggests several rhetorical approaches to dealing with
deep disagreement that maneuver around the participants’ unwillingness
to engage in direct argumentation. These include appeals to time constraints or a sense of emergency, a shared sense of exhaustion in living
with the problem, attempts to repackage the dispute as being fundamentally about something with respect to which the participants have no problematic commitments, and uncovering inconsistencies or latent hypocrisy
in one party’s position. Though Zarefsky does not use the concept of deep
disagreement sketched here as the limiting case, it is easy to see how his
suggestions are aimed at factors that do occur in the present conception.
Appeals to time constraints attack deep disagreements at the level of duration, the sense of exhaustion appeals to considerations of affect, and
repackaging is a maneuver designed to skirt the problems of opposition
and zero-summed-ness. One could even see the appeals to inconsistency
as aimed at invoking principles of logic that are ostensibly acceptable to all
parties in order to reduce the scope of the indeterminateness affecting the
dispute. All of these, it is safe to say, would involve a fairly sustained and
intensive level of argumentative exchange even if those arguments were
not explicitly directed to the problematic difference of opinion.
In the case of Alva and Britt, one might imagine them beginning from a
recognition that abortion’s dominance as an issue makes it dificult to deal
with other, equally pressing problems, and drawing from this recognition
the cognitive and emotional reserves necessary to keep their argumentative
dialogue going in the hope of reaching a settlement. This would be something akin to Zarefsky’s time-based strategy. Though (sadly) these seldom
make into the broader social discussion of the issue, the philosophical literature on abortion is rife with attempts to repackage the problem in ways
that do not invoke the opposition of women’s rights and the sanctity of the
life of the fetus. The only limits to a repackaging strategy are the creativity
and patience of the arguers.12 Thus the failure of such strategies to produce
12
Lugg (1986), following Dewey, makes a similar point though he draws a far different
lesson from it than I do here.
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The Methodological Usefulness of Deep Disagreement / s. Patterson
argued agreements may say more about them than about the usefulness of
argument in such situations. Clearly, at least, there is a set of options to be
tried along these lines before giving up. Of course, to resist the temptation
to give up requires a certain amount of good faith. Britt and Alva have to
believe in each other’s integrity as arguers and that continued argumentation offers the hope of resolution as well. This sort of hope igures prominently in the next family of approaches: the emergent solution approaches.
6.2. Emergent Solution Approaches
These approaches, exempliied by Adams (2005) are best characterized
as aimed at opposition and zero-summed-ness that (interestingly) bite
the bullet where duration is concerned. Adams contends that even if it is
not immediately productive of resolution, continued argumentation might
help to identify and isolate shared values that eventually lead to resolutions. This is the most optimistic of the approaches considered here, and
perhaps potentially the most problematic. No one has ininite patience for
conlict, even under ideal circumstances. It is for this reason that we have
phrases like “We simply must agree to disagree about this matter.” in our
toolkit. Be that as it may the valuable insight in Adams’ contention is that to
reach an impasse in one’s argumentation with others does not necessarily
foreclose on the possibility of ever reaching a resolution. Even in the deepest of disagreements it is important to keep the possibility of resolution
alive, and this is done in part by continued argumentation.
The beneit of doing so is that one avails oneself of the possibility for extended relection not just about one’s opponent’s position but about one’s
own. As anyone who thinks in this way will immediately recognize, this
process can be deeply revelatory of one’s own intuitions and commitments.
Once discovered, extended relection about these intuitions and commitments can provide the perspective needed for rational com- promise, or for
the realization of previously unseen resolutions. The salient point here is
that sustained argumentation, if perhaps not strictly necessary for such relection, is undoubtedly one of the best ways we know to stimulate it. Hence
Adams’s suggestion is not as naïve as one might initially imagine.
There are those instances however, when one inds it so dificult to enter
into imaginative sympathy with one’s interlocutors that extended relec-
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tion may not be a promising way to proceed. In such instances, when the
circumstances are pressing enough to warrant it, there are still the avenues
of negotiation dialogue and incompletely theorized agreements–both of
which yet make substantial use of argumentation.
6.3. Incompletely Theorized Agreements
If emergent solution approaches to dificult disagreements are perhaps
overly optimistic, Cass Sunstein’s notion of incompletely theorized agreements may provide us with a more realistic strategy. He describes agreements as “incompletely theorized”
in the sense that the relevant participants are clear on the result without
agreeing on the most general theory that accounts for it. Often they can
agree on an opinion or a rationale, usually offering low-level or midlevel principles. They may agree that a rule–reducing water pollution,
allowing workers to unionize–makes sense without entirely agreeing on
the foundations of their belief. They may accept an outcome–reafirming the right to have an abortion, protecting sexually explicit art–without understanding or converging on an ultimate ground for that acceptance. What accounts for the opinion, in terms of a full-scale theory of
the right or the good, is left unexplained. (Sunstein 1996, 5)
Here, clearly, arguments are not just required, but must be skillfully deployed if the disagreement at issue is to be resolved. Unlike bargaining,
incompletely theorized agreements need not be thought of as brute-force
struggles between camps of different interest groups. Like bargaining,
however, the parties do need to abandon any hope of total victory for their
“full-scale theory” of what ought to be done or believed. If incompletely
theorized agreements do allow us a reasonable path to solving apparently
deep disagreements, then it is clear that they belong in the playbook.
6.4. Negotiation Dialogues
One of the principal contributions of Walton (2008) and before it Walton/
Krabbe (1995) is the widening of the theory of dialogue to include multiple
types. Negotiation is one of these types. On pp. 6-7 of the more recent of the
two works just mentioned, Walton deines it as follows:
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The Methodological Usefulness of Deep Disagreement / s. Patterson
In negotiation dialogue the primary goal is self-interest, and the method
is to bargain. Bargaining makes no pretension to be an objective inquiry
into the truth of a matter. Indeed, negotiation, in contrast to persuasion
dialogue, need not involve commitment to the truth of propositions, or
conviction that ideals are based on strong arguments. In negotiation,
opinions about what is true, or convictions about what is believable, are
not centrally at stake, and may even be contravened by a good negotiator. The concessions in bargaining are not commitments in the same
sense as in the persuasion dialogue, but trade-offs that can be sacriiced
for gains else- where. The position now becomes a bargaining position.
Logical proof is not important in negotiation dialogue, for this type of
dialogue is strictly adversarial.
The important point here is that resolution occurs not as a result of logical proof that one’s position is true or the correct course of action, but as
a result of the parties reaching an accord they can live with under the circumstances. Even though argumentation by itself does not settle matters
in negotiation, it is dificult to imagine negotiations from which all species
of argument were entirely absent. For our purposes the salient point about
negotiation dialogue is that it assumes nearly all of the characteristics attributed to our Cartesian limiting case (the possible exception being duration–even though it is not unknown for negotiation dialogues to last far
longer than is expected or wished).
7. Conclusion
If the foregoing considerations are correct, then some form or other of argumentation is possible even in the limiting case of deep disagreement.
The idea of deep disagreement is useful then, because it helps us to think
about strategies for approaching dificult communicative situations where
we must reason together with others. Drawing on the extant literature I
have sketched some of these strategies here and shown how they answer
certain features of what I’ve called the limiting case of argumentation: the
Cartesian worst-case scenario for the prospect of successful argument. As
such, in order to be useful the limiting case need not be realized in any
actual encounter, it’s usefulness may be purely methodological. Thus, even
if there are no situations that conform to the criteria for the limiting case,
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it still serves argumentation theory well. In this wise it represents an improvement over Fogelin’s notion of deep disagreement, which is based on
questionable assumptions coupled with an equally questionable reading of
one text in the Wittgensteinian corpus. Perhaps the most important respect
in which the limiting case represents an improvement over Fogelin’s notion of deep disagreement is that it aims not to tell us when argumentation
is impossible, but how argumentation theorists can strategize to develop
stronger tools with which to improve the way go about dealing with the
most challenging disagreements we have.
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