What to Do When People Talk #$!!~#
The importance of meaningful disagreement
Can two people’s experiences and outlooks on life be so different that meaningful communication between them is impossible? Recent events suggest so; from the incredulity of those in Britain voting to remain in the EU that anyone might have voted to leave, to the shock many Democrats experience when realising that some women did, in fact, support Trump. It is easy to get the impression that we are shouting at each other across a great divide scarred by our disagreement over what ‘fairness’ or ‘justice’ or ‘equality’ mean. Despite this, philosopher Donald Davidson gives us good reasons why this distance need not inhibit constructive discussion and provides us with the tools to argue well.
Conceptual relativism
Conceptual relativism is the idea that different groups of people have genuinely different ways of seeing the world; so much so that we might think of them as living in different worlds to our own. Examples include cultures that are supposed to have entirely different concepts to our own; it remains a matter of debate whether the Hopi, a Native American tribe, have a concept of time. But issues of conceptual relativism also arise when people use the same words, but with radically different meanings, as is the case when people on both sides of the abortion debate use the word ‘murder’.
Davidson’s first move is to suggest that if conceptual schemes differ then so do languages, because we express ourselves in language. While this might sound complicated, it needn’t be. Many languages do reveal differences in the way people think about the world. For example, the Japanese word ao denotes a colour that includes what we call blue and green. We can also include non-verbal communication if we want to take a wider interpretation of ‘language’. The problem of making sense of different conceptual schemes is therefore a problem of translation. If conceptual schemes are relative, translation should be impossible. Our words, even if we use the same ones, literally mean different things.
One of the main ways in which Davidson tries to refute this view is to begin with the idea that language organises the world and our experiences of it. He notes that the world, and our experiences of it, contain many things and some of these things will be common to us both. A language that includes feet, hands, food, and heat, must share many terms with our own. By virtue of the fact that we are human, these categories will be important. Sure, there may be some un-translatable terms, but this does not make a language untranslatable.
This appears unsatisfactory because we began with disagreements about ‘justice’ and ended up agreeing that we all have hands. Agreeing on the second gets us no closer to agreeing on the first. Davidson is right though- even if we have vastly different ways of seeing the world, we do share a variety of basic needs, wants, and experiences. This makes it difficult to believe that two people’s ways of seeing the world can be totally different, or have no common points of reference. They may be difficult to reconcile; but this is not conceptual relativism. How do we get from this insight to something useful?
The principle of charity
Once Davidson has satisfied himself (and some of his readers) that no total failure of translation is possible, he tackles partial failures. What he is after is a way of translating that makes no assumptions about people’s shared meanings, or concepts, or beliefs. We cannot avoid making any assumptions, so we should make just one- that a speaker believes that what they are saying is true. This is the principle of charity. When someone says something to us, we should begin by just assuming that they believe what they are saying is true, and grant them a minimal level of rationality. This doesn’t mean that what they say is true. However, if we assume otherwise, our translation gets nowhere.
How does this work in practice? When someone says something we think is crazy, or obviously wrong, or immoral, we should pause and consider that the person saying this believes it to be true. This means we don’t respond with things like, ‘How can you possibly think that?’ or, ‘That’s clearly nonsense!’ despite our temptation to do so. Our response should be to ask for their reasons for believing this outrageous thing.
Arguments often take the following form:
Person A: We need to raise taxes to reduce inequality.
Person B: Higher taxes are a disincentive to work. We should leave them where they are.
Person A: But inequality is rising. It’s the only fair thing.
Person B: It’s not fair to take more of people’s money; they’ve worked really hard for it.
Person A: Lots of people have more than enough though.
…
This conversation is going nowhere because neither person is really engaging with the opinions of the other; they are merely taking turns to state opposing positions. The first benefit of using the principle of charity is that it slows down the conversation. The focus is on understanding someone’s process of reasoning, any facts on which they base their opinion, or something in their background that allows us to understand their point of view more broadly. We might ask how this opinion fits in with their other views, what they make of standard counter arguments, what values underpin their opinions.
The second benefit is that a conversation following Davidson’s suggestions is less likely to become combative. Just as differing conceptual schemes agree about the importance of food and warmth, at some point, on some level, there will be something we agree on. Whether it be something as generic as the importance of families, or that no one should lack the basic necessities of life, there will be something. This agreement is the basis on which we can build our counter-argument; from common ground, however small. I can explain that although we both hold some things in common, they lead me in a different direction, for various reasons.
Applying the principle of charity doesn’t mean that we succeed in changing people’s minds. It doesn’t mean that they change ours either. However, it does decrease our likelihood of seeing other people as caricatures — less intelligent than ourselves, or irrationally tied to something clearly wrong. Their views may seem wrong or immoral to us, but if we believe people to be irrational we give up the possibility of dialogue. Understanding another’s point of view also highlights that there often is no clear-cut answer in a debate. Arguing combatively implies that there is, and that we have privileged access to the truth, which none of us do.
Some people do lie though, so assuming that people believe what they say to be true may sometimes be wrong. This is not a reason to reject the principle of charity. Being charitable can help to uncover lies, and the reasons people have for lying. Going along with a lie often leads to contradiction. Of course, there is no guarantee that falsehoods will be discovered- some of us are just very good at lying. But we stand no greater chance of uncovering lies by shouting at each other, and at the very least we will know our opponent very well.
Worthy though it is, being charitable is hard work, and takes time. Not all disagreements are worth it. It also takes discipline to stay calm and not dismiss the views of people strange to us, or who we dislike. But we can all make progress, one small disagreement at a time. As Davidson says, the goal of all of this is not agreement, but to make meaningful disagreement possible. Meaningful disagreement is often what is missing from public and private discourse. Even if charity doesn’t lead to agreement it is the first, and necessary, step in that direction.
Other resources on argumentation
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong: Think Again. How to Reason and Argue.
“Our personal and political worlds are rife with arguments and disagreements, some of them petty and vitriolic. The inability to compromise and understand the opposition is epidemic today...”
Amazon affiliate link. If you buy through this link, Daily Philosophy will get a small commission at no cost to you. Thanks!
◊ ◊ ◊
