How to Humbly Disagree

Ken Taylor
Should you cling to your beliefs even when others disagree?

Josh Landy
Or should you reconsider them when they’re challenged?

Ken Taylor
Is it possible to disagree without being disagreeable?

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy, we’re here at the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Ken Taylor
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers quarter on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy and Josh directs the philosophy and literature initiative.

Josh Landy
Today, it’s how to disagree humbly, another episode in our ongoing series on intellectual humility.

Ken Taylor
I think this is a vitally urgent topic, Josh, because these days, people too often try to shut up or shout down those who disagree with them.

Josh Landy
Okay. But I think it’s always been that way can I mean, I think about Cain and Abel, right. I mean, they disagree over some silly sacrifice, that they forget to go to family therapy and disaster in Syria.

Ken Taylor
I take your point, but that just shows the continuing importance of learning to disagree, agreeably, otherwise, yeah, we’ll end up like Cain and Abel killing each other.

Josh Landy
Well, nonetheless, come on diversity of thought and opinion are good things, aren’t they? And look, you can’t force people to agree. So disagreements just going to remain a part of human

Ken Taylor
life? Well, okay. I agree with that, too. But I just shows that there’s all the more reason we need better ways of dealing with disagreement, since it’s a primitive fact of life. Well,

Josh Landy
so what kind of ways do you have a mind?

Ken Taylor
Let’s just start out with something pretty simple, maybe obvious, like when other people disagree with you, you should at least consider the possibility, however briefly, that maybe you’re the one who’s got it wrong.

Josh Landy
Come on. Can you believe in the theory of evolution done?

Ken Taylor
Yeah. Oh, well, of course, I do like that as well.

Josh Landy
So what happens when you hear a creationist rejecting that theory? I mean, do you really start considering the possibility that maybe you’re the one who’s wrong? Of course not. So what does

Ken Taylor
that make you a hypocrite? No, Josh, you’re taking it what I was saying in the wrong way. I’m not saying that you should question your beliefs whenever some random No, nothing disagrees. I’m talking about the disagreements among reasonable well informed people that we should pay attention.

Josh Landy
Okay. And by reasonable and well informed, you mean, people who agree with you?

Ken Taylor
Come on. No, that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about, you know, people who have their beliefs base their beliefs on like evidence, who care about things like truth who, who aren’t prone to wishful thinking, who think logically, you know, people like you and me.

Josh Landy
Alright, so people don’t have to say your beliefs. No, but apparently, they have to share your habits of mind. That’s not very humble of you.

Ken Taylor
At all. I don’t see anything wrong with that. Josh, what’s wrong with that?

Josh Landy
Well, look, here’s the problem. I mean, you seem to think that you can determine in advance whose beliefs are worth taking seriously, and who’s not. That’s intellectual snobbery,

Ken Taylor
intellectual snobbery. I mean, if you’re totally unwilling to divide people into the reasonable and the unreasonable, how are you ever going to avoid having to listen to every time or Tina with a dissenting opinion?

Josh Landy
I just think you’re having to have it both ways. Can I you know, be willing to reconsider in the face of disagreement, but don’t listen to anybody who comes along? Well, you

Ken Taylor
got a better idea. Yeah, I

Josh Landy
do. Don’t be so wishy washy. Stick to your guns, stick to your guns, regardless what other people think regardless who they are. You can’t be serious. Well, look, I mean, I totally agree that you should take time and care making up your mind on something, right. And while you’re doing that, you should weigh all the evidence you can get your hands on and Sure. That’s going to involve exposing yourself to different points of view. Exactly.

Ken Taylor
We’re on the same page, then, but but once you’ve made

Josh Landy
up your mind, then you can’t go around changing it every time somebody disagrees with you.

Ken Taylor
Oh, wait a minute, just wait, wait a minute. Suppose somebody takes just as much time and care as you did, maybe even more time and care. And they come to a different conclusion. I mean, come on, even you just should you give at least that gives you at least a little bit of bought.

Josh Landy
There’s always going to be people who disagree. I just don’t think you can give in to them. Look, if you start down that path, where’s it gonna stop

Ken Taylor
judge but if you’re so intellectually stubborn, that you never listen to anybody who disagrees with you, you’re gonna get stuck in a rut of falsehood, I think

Josh Landy
and if you’re so intellectually wishy washy, that you always listen to those who disagree. You’ll never have any convictions.

Ken Taylor
Josh, you know, I think we’ve gotten ourselves into something of a pickle here.

Josh Landy
No, I know, just the person to help us. That would be our roving philosophical reporter, Liza veal. We sent her out to investigate an intense disagreement sparked by a philosophy article or things in an article that turned out to be anything but academic. She files this report.

Liza Veale
You may remember when Rachel Dolezal was in the news called white woman who manipulated her appearance. to pass as African American for years. You might also remember another controversy in the wake of the outrage and ridicule over goals. Here’s what happened. A philosophy professor named Rebecca Tuvel wrote an article for a feminist philosophy journal, questioning why someone like Dolezal can’t legitimately identify with a race other than her biological one. When we defend transgender people’s identification with a gender different from the one assigned to them at birth, Jesse Singal wrote about the controversy for the New York Times Magazine,

Jesse Singal
the article was met with a really fierce backlash from a combination of folks who saw themselves as advocating for trans people, including plenty of trans scholars themselves, as well as those who are offended that she would come anywhere close to defending trans racialism. And the journal ended up basically publishing an apology, which is incredibly unusual.

Liza Veale
Singal says there were two categories of critiques. Some academics attributed what they saw as errors into Bell scholarship to the fact that the field of philosophy is so homogenous, and its methodology so insular, that it ignores racial and gender theorists who are not strictly philosophers, in his article single contends with some of these arguments. But then there’s the response from the general public,

Jesse Singal
there were sort of more difficult to adjudicate claims about who should be writing about who and about whether a sis woman should be wading into this area all those sorts of claims about identity and who’s allowed to write what

Liza Veale
within hours of publication The author of the article Rebecca Tuvel heard the news that it was causing a dustup she got an email from a colleague advising her to retract the article. Here’s Tuvel herself.

Rebecca Tuvel
And at that point, I went online and saw the conversation surrounding my piece and you know, fellow feminists calling me a Becky and I was being accused of epistemic violence and trans misogynistic violence.

Liza Veale
If you’re unfamiliar with those terms. calling someone a Becky is like calling them

Rebecca Tuvel
a stupid ignorant, you know, white girl, and it is a gendered term.

Liza Veale
And epistemic violence means harming people through discourse. Epistemology is about knowledge. In this case, the potential harm is in D legitimizing trans identities by associating them with something widely ridiculed like trans racialism, or it’s in disrespecting the lived experiences of non white people by speculating that someone White could legitimately identify the same way they do. Real people live in these identities, the definitions of which 12 was contesting

Rebecca Tuvel
I absolutely was convinced that I had done something terrible in writing this article, and I felt humiliated and ashamed. And all the kinds of feelings that go along with, you know, a group of respected people telling you that you’ve done something really terrible.

Liza Veale
But to Jesse single, The New York Times Magazine reporter, to Bell was being unfairly punished. Whether her argument needed to be refined or not. He didn’t believe the line of inquiry itself was a non starter, he felt like instead of being intellectually humbled, her opponents immediately wrote it off as beyond the pale. These battle

Jesse Singal
lines were drawn as a perception was the only people who could possibly defend this article was transphobic. And the only people who would attack the article are pro trans and progressive and good.

Liza Veale
Single says there was an idea that the articles very existence caused harm. And therefore to bell as a person was beyond the bounds of respectful good faith disagreement.

Rebecca Tuvel
I was quite shocked, in fact, to see fellow feminists colleagues and fellow philosophers engaging in the personal attacks against me,

Liza Veale
the daily use of social media attacks took a while to recover from but she’s doubling down on the question of trans racialism and writing a book about it. Now, she says, ideas like these shouldn’t be outright condemned. They should be dealt with,

Rebecca Tuvel
because we need to be able to articulate, you know what we think is mistaken about that, right, that it’s really important that we discuss the strongest arguments on multiple sides of an issue.

Liza Veale
The problem is to balance angle both agree that there are areas of discourse that are beyond dignifying with civilized debate, single gives the example of eugenics or the pseudoscientific idea that there’s a biological racial hierarchy. He says, that’s something we can draw a circle around and not seriously engage.

Jesse Singal
But I think we want to draw those circles as small as possible. Just because these sorts of claims are made by people who claim to speak for marginalized groups, I still think we should be skeptical that except in cases where they are so clearly harmful, and so clearly wrong. And in this case, I don’t think toodles paper was either, you know that we should just exclude them right off the bat.

Liza Veale
But that’s a line drawn by somebody who’s not in harm’s way. On one side of the line, there’s discourse worth taking seriously. And on the other side, there’s a slippery slope to a dangerous idea on one side intellectual Humility is a virtue. And on the other side, it’s unscrupulous. For Philosophy Talk. I’m Liza Beale.

Ken Taylor
Thanks, I think was it for that searing piece on airing some philosophies dirty laundry. I’m Ken Taylor with me as my Stanford colleague, Josh Landy. And today we’re asking how to disagree. Humbly. We’re

Josh Landy
joined now by Nathan Ballantyne, who is professor of philosophy at Fordham University, author of the forthcoming book, knowing our limits. He’s joining us from the studios of KU CI in Irvine, California. Nathan, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Nathan Ballantyne
Thank you, Josh. And thank you, Ken, I’m delighted to be with both of you.

Ken Taylor
So Nathan, let’s start up I want to know what first got you interested. This is a great topic. But I want to know what first got you interested in the topic of disagreement, some argument with friend foe or family, your own very own Cain and Abel story or Rebecca Douville story? What got you interested at first?

Nathan Ballantyne
Well, I’ve been gripped by these issues. Since my childhood, I grew up in Canada in the 80s, and 90s. And I remember a recurring thought it’s basically an analogy and it struck me as a way to describe my life, I’d been given a kind of lottery ticket. I mean, you’re I was in Canada, where people believe in democracy and universal health care and United Nations peacekeeping. But that’s just one lottery ticket, I could have got different ones. And it’s bewildering to realize that your parents, your schools, and everything else would be completely different. Had you grown up elsewhere? If your lottery numbers had come up differently? And you come to think, well, not everybody gets a winning ticket. Some people, maybe most people have convictions that are just wrong. So is my ticket a winner? What’s really true here? Well, growing up this was a very persistent idea bothered me. Eventually, I figured out you could actually study this. You could think critically about these pictures and analogies. And this led me to a epistemology.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s interesting. I really like your metaphor of the of winning tickets and non winning tickets, which kind of brings us back to something that Ken and I were arguing about earlier. How do you how do you tell a difference? How do you distinguish between people who have opinions worth taking seriously people who don’t without kind of setting yourself up arrogantly as the arbiter of everything?

Ken Taylor
Can you do that at all? I mean, can you do that, right?

Nathan Ballantyne
Well, I think you can. What’s crucial to focus on is the evidence that we have concerning our own abilities to make judgments of other people, and the kind of evidence that’s going to be available to think about some topic. So Ken mentioned an example where he learns people deny science, and then he ends up rejecting them. Well, I think Ken can be in a perfectly strong position to recognize first of all, the scientific consensus is on his side, that there are some deep confusions and misconceptions that are driving the opponents of science. And knowing about these kinds of facts can put you in a position to actually properly set aside or, or dismiss the disagreement.

Ken Taylor
And even that sounds good, that sounds good. I’m with you so far, but take it back to our roving report. And that’s a epistemic, Lee fraught situation. Those people who say trans racialism is, is not okay, trans gender is okay. Rebecca to Val is trying to figure out what’s the difference? And she gets hammered. She gets hammered, but for the legitimacy of her inquiry, what’s going on there?

Nathan Ballantyne
Well, I think there are some people who believe that kind of case is a lot like your case of the creationists. Right? So there’s a legitimate question about what cases are like that, and what cases are a lot different? It turns out that through the intellectual world, there’s going to be disagreement about how to divide up cases. But clearly, everyone’s going to find some cases have the following character. We’re confronted with people who disagree, who are also aware of much of the same evidence that we’re aware of. They’re also in possession of the skills and the virtues needed to think critically about this evidence. So we’re really confronted by them, we should feel sort of strange pressure to make sense of this disagreement. Why do we disagree? Is it the case that I’m wrong? And this other person has got the truth? Or are they wrong? If we can’t tell? Yeah, that seems to lead us to this kind of lottery situation, right? We feel the arbitrariness of holding the view that we do.

Ken Taylor
So Nathan, we’re gonna have to dis you’re raising. I think the essential point we’re gonna have to dig into it after a short break. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about a humble disagreement with Nathan Valentine from Fordham University.

Josh Landy
We don’t want to be so wishy washy in the face of disagreement that we have no firm convictions at all. But we also want to be so stubborn that we never change into our minds. How do we strike the right balance?

Ken Taylor
Finding the golden mean between wishy washy pneus and stubbornness, plus your calls and emails when Philosophy Talk continues?

When is agreeing to disagree a healthy and humble response to conflict? I’m Ken Taylor. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions, everything except

Josh Landy
your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy and we’re asking about the art of humble disagreement. Our guest is Nathan Ballantine from Fordham University.

Ken Taylor
So Nathan, I think the example of Rebecca to Val and all that illustrates that this is not a cold blooded thing, this is an intensely urgent thing. And I want to ask you about how we go about deciding whether I’m in a situation like I am, say, with a creationist, who may think I’m going to ignore the creationist, whether or not he or she likes it, right, that’s on the one hand, or a situation in which I’m like a Rebecca to Val situation, I want to challenge this way of I want to explore this way of thinking there’s other people over on the other side, who present themselves as reasonable. Right. And from their point of view, I’m just being something I don’t know, how do I decide whether you know, the creationist situation or, or the or the Rebecca to Val situation?

Nathan Ballantyne
Well, I think the key question for us has to be whether we’re competent to make the judgments we make when we assess other people, we assess them as being out as equal to us in their competence, the evidence that they have, or we think that they’re less than we are, we think they’re not as good. And I’m wanting to just set aside all of the further kinds of evaluations we make of people when we say, you know, they’re evil, or they’re all the other mean things that people end up saying about those who disagree with them. So the really important question is the our assessment of bias in other people, this is a natural way to respond to those who disagree with us, we end up thinking, well, they’ve made some kind of mistake, because they have a trait or a character characteristic that leads them astray. When dismissing peers in this way, I think this is probably the most common reaction, you don’t think, Oh, well, this person is just as good as I am at answering this question. You think they’re less than you?

Josh Landy
So that seems that seems right to me. But I mean, how do I know that I’m not the one who’s, who’s biased? Because

Ken Taylor
they’re going to see you? Right? They’re going to see it differently from you. Right, right.

Nathan Ballantyne
Oh, of course they are. It turns out that your assessment of yourself matters here too, because you’re making a relative assessment of you compared to them. And I think there’s some really fascinating scientific evidence that bears on how competent we think we are in this situation. Specifically, there are psychologists who’ve studied the assessment of bias in others and ourselves. And what they found is that they’re very different sources of information that we use when we’re assessing bias. When we judge bias and other people, we don’t look inside their heads and witness how they’re conveniently overlooking troubling evidence or how they’re moved by the forces of self interest. No, we actually gauge their bias by focusing on their visible behavior and their identities. But when we judge bias in ourselves, we do something totally different. We focus on our own minds, we introspect, and we just ignore facts about our behavior and our identities. Ultimately, what’s going on here is that even if it’s in our self interest to think something, maybe we gain financially from thinking that way, but we ignore those kinds of facts and think about how things feel. So it sounds like argument, it’s gonna

Josh Landy
be very hard for me to say, look, I’m not biased, you’re biased because, you know, I’m probably just I’m giving myself different treatment that I’m giving the other person so so that sounds like Gosh, it’s gonna be really hard for me to make this distinction between people I can ignore and people I need to take

Ken Taylor
no well you can make it but it’s not going to be based on any deeper principle, and more and moreover, Nathan this sounds to me like a recipe for what I’m gonna call epistemic tribalism, which is kind of what Josh was accusing me of in at first but I they don’t have to share my beliefs, but they have to share my habits of mine. How do I but how do I notice whether they share my habits of mind by noticing whether they believe what I believe in the circumstances in which I believe it? That just sounds like a recipe not for epistemic humility, but epistemic tribalism, or am I missing something?

Nathan Ballantyne
No, that that sounds right to me. The psychologists have shown that there’s this really pervasive bias that influences Our judgments about bias. So we’re, we tend to think bias influences other people much more than ourselves. And if we end up making judgments about people basically based on what tribe they’re a part of, we’re going to think that people who are more like us are less biased than people who are different. So I agree this is a recipe for a lot of arrogance. So

Ken Taylor
are you telling me that there is no way? Because I asked you, how do I go about this citing you, you seem to want to allow me to decide to pay attention to some and ignore others, you seem to want to allow me to do that. But how I go about deciding this in a principled, respectable way. Now, it sounds like you’re telling me lot’s of luck with that, Ken. So what is it, Dave? I mean, how do I

Nathan Ballantyne
do think? I do think that lot’s of luck, Ken is the best message if you are going to be disagreeing, say with your philosophy colleagues about complex metaphysical debates, or with your friends who are informed and intelligent when you’re talking about politics? I mean, good luck. But there are lots of cases where we’re not talking about that kind of dispute at all. And instead, there are people telling us that the earth is flat, we can actually dismiss them quite effectively even knowing full well, that there are these difficulties in making assessments about bias, okay. Just don’t tell us that it’s impossible. Okay, to make assessments of that it’s hard. Okay.

Ken Taylor
But okay, so there’s a modified message, I’m gonna put a spin on this. I don’t know if you’re gonna like it or not, there are these radical epistemic outliers. Okay, you can dismiss the radical epistemic outliers. But there are a lot of people who I have intense disagreement with over things of great import, who aren’t radical epistemic outliers. And I still want to desegregate them into the ones I can ignore. And the ones I can’t ignore. Are you telling me Okay, bracket, the radical epistemic outliers? You use? You got a real problem?

Nathan Ballantyne
That is my view. Yeah, I think that finding out that we disagree should lead us to become much more open to the arguments and evidence that other people are bringing to us less confident in our own views. But I don’t just think it’s mere disagreement that pushes us there. I also think that reflection on this kind of competence that we have, is going to really, really be required to push us the whole way toward much more humility.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about disagreement how to disagree with humbly, we’d love to have your comments or question and John, the Mountain View is on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk. John, what’s your comment your question?

Speaker 1
Well, I’d like to offer for your consideration, the somewhat cynical comment by JC Brown. In his book techniques of persuasion, he said, The will to believe is more powerful than any mere experience. And emotion is stronger than reason, in the vast majority of people. Have fun with that.

Ken Taylor
David, have some fun with that? Take up John’s invitation and have some fun with that. What do you make of that?

Nathan Ballantyne
I was thinking about a line from Bertrand Russell, he said that we don’t need the will to believe we need the will to find out. I want I guess I want to pass it to Ken and Josh, what are you thinking about this? I mean, it’s like

Josh Landy
I think it fits nicely with what you were saying about biases. And I think, you know, if we really want to try to get things right, we’re going to have to tackle the fact that we’re susceptible to all these cognitive biases. But I so I totally agree with this. And I tend to be on the side of humility. But for the sake of argument, let me let me press you a little bit in the other direction is, I started thinking a little bit about people like Martin Luther King, for example. Right? I started thinking, what would the world have been like if he’d been more humble about his beliefs, I think would have been worse off. So. So I wonder, you know, aren’t there cases where it’s actually a good thing to have the courage of your convictions? I mean, think about Dubois, his idea of double consciousness, you know, this is letting other people get inside your head. So my question I guess is, Couldn’t there be a worry if we’re attending to the fact that we’re biased and we’re always trying to qualify your own positions and not be too arrogant? Don’t we risk losing the courage of our convictions and the ability to make change?

Nathan Ballantyne
Well, not necessarily. One question about Martin Luther King is his epistemic situation. What kind of evidence did he have for these controversial views that he was putting forward? I, myself am inclined to think that at least since the 18th or 19th century in America, there have been people who were fully aware of profoundly strong reasons for equality. People who were involved in anti slavery movements, people who were involved in the suffragette movement, these these people, they weren’t just sort of flipping a coin and going on Correction, I think they’ve actually had insights. So we could think that Martin Luther King Jr. Didn’t have good evidence for his convictions? Well, I think,

Ken Taylor
Well, look, I think he had good, perhaps good evidence for his belief that certain things are deserved certain things are forms of injustice. But his deeper belief that was required to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, is that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, and that it requires human agency in cooperation with the will of God. Yeah, no, he had no real evidence for that. Right? Well, he kind of went back and forth about that, because but he thought you had to accept that on faith. Right. And so that’s like a belief in that in the face of the evidence that doesn’t actually support it. And there seems to have been an essential role for his conviction, beyond the evidence that the arc of the moral universe not only bends toward justice, but requires human agency to help it bend.

Nathan Ballantyne
Well, that’s going to require another type of assessment, I was thinking about the specific belief that he has that would be rejected by racist Southern Governors, right. So I was thinking that he could be completely reasonable to reject them, right? Because he has excellent reason to believe in equality. These further beliefs that motivate people to act in the world are, I think, a really fascinating topic of discussion. So one type of evaluation you can make about them is epistemic. And you can say, well, maybe the evidence is ambiguous. We live in a world that’s, you know, not completely clear about whether the Ark of justice is bending a certain way. But he lived in in a particular way that manifested this conviction. I’m inclined to maybe judge him or evaluate disbelief in terms of its practical benefits. That’s, that’s one assessment you can make about it did, did this help him do good things? Well, if it did, then we might want to say, well, it’s a positive belief, even if it’s not held on great evidence, different types of evaluation.

Ken Taylor
I think that’s important point, so that these beliefs beliefs are many different purposes. And one wants to evaluate them relative to the purposes but we should let some callers in here, Michael, all the way from Boston. I hope I assume you’re listening online. Michael. Yes. Welcome to philosophy,

Speaker 2
extremely good ears are an extremely good radio. I think if we’re going to try to talk about how we can disagree, we also have to talk about or why we can disagree, we also have to talk about why we’re talking in the first place. If we’re trying to persuade if you’re trying to test our own beliefs, if we’re trying to persuade a third party if we’re trying to be irritating, which is what trolls do. I’m thinking also that in there’s a question about when we can discuss something is largely is partially a matter of on what terms, there’s a difference between two association football teams playing soccer with wildly different strategies, and one side playing soccer and the other side playing rugger, they will never agree, or there’s a very good chance that they will never agree that the games been won or lost if they’re playing completely different games.

Ken Taylor
Michael, I think you’re making a really good point. And I thank you for the call. And I’m just going to follow up, Nathan, because I think Mike was making really good point, because I want to just say that this is like core to, for example, various approaches to political philosophy, that public discourse among people who are trying to build a polity together and regard each other as free and equal citizens is one thing. Or as Habermas said, people who are engaged in conversation that jointly aims at truth, that’s one thing, and people who are just like shouting at each other in a contest, where one is just diminished, and the other is the victor. That’s a completely different thing. So one of the things we have to ask, I think, Michaels, right, why are we talking together? Right? Because that’s going to shape something about how we approach this agreement. Do you agree or disagree with that?

Nathan Ballantyne
Well, I’m thinking that the normative questions we asked when we about disagreement, should we disagree or not, are largely about what’s appropriate to believe, given our evidence. So there are further questions about social engagement, how we should engage with others. And I want to I guess, I want to distinguish between these questions, so I am in agreement with with Michael, that these are different issues. But when we’re talking about disagreement, what we mean is a kind of conflict of beliefs, and that those conflicts can happen in all sorts of different contexts. One type of evaluation we may have about people who disagree is entirely focused on the epistemic facts of the matter what what our evidence supports, but there could be totally different types of evaluation that, that kick in when we’re thinking about how politics works.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that seems to me. I mean, I think Michaels point is a really good one. What are we trying to achieve? I mean, I think there are multiple, there multiple reasons for arguing with certain amounts of humility, one of them the kind of Habermasian, what kind of world do we want to live in? Do we want a world in which you can actually make some progress on important and difficult issues by talking together? But maybe another one is just more local one on one kind of thing? I mean, you’ve talked about, you know, data about biases. I mean, I wonder if you’ve thought a little bit Nathan about how we convince people because right, so there’s been some, there been some studies suggesting that if you actually use evidence in arguments, you’re just backfires. And you end up convincing people the thing they first thought, so maybe a little strategic humility can be helpful if your aim is to convince somebody else?

Nathan Ballantyne
Well, I’m reminded of Socrates and sophus here. So I agree that rhetoric is very different than argument. But I’m inclined to think that there’s at least one very special, sacred domain of conversation, when we’re trying to gather to seek the truth. And rhetoric isn’t going to cut it there. What we should really do is get people to believe the right things for the right reasons.

Ken Taylor
Right. But not all conversations are about seeking the truth. But I want to I want to talk about that. Right? Because in a pluralistic liberal democracy, it’s not all about seeking the truth. It’s just seeking a fair structure to that allow us each to go possibly your own separate ways, but we’ll come back to that you’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re asking about disagreement and humility, with Nathan Ballantine from Fordham University.

Josh Landy
In our last segment, we’ll explore ways of cultivating intellectual humility. Do we need to redesign our schools or politics or media?

Ken Taylor
Yes to all of the above, cultivating humility when Philosophy Talk to continuous.

The only someone lacking humility would call the whole thing off over such a small disagreement. Is that right? I’m Ken Taylor. This is philosophy dog, the program that questions

Josh Landy
everything except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy. And our guest is Nathan Ballantine from Fordham University. We’re asking about how to disagree humbly.

Ken Taylor
And we’ve got a caller Milton from Oakland, welcome to Philosophy Talk, Milton, what’s your comment or question?

Speaker 3
Well, hello, there are some disagreements can be of critical importance and humility might go out the window, for example, with family disagreements between a husband and a wife, or their children, that you sample. One of the parents is clearly clearly allows a mother or father, no one would disagree with that. And yet the better parent tries to compromise. And there is no no agreement reached, this could lead to some critical results like a divorce or custody of children. The the humbly agreeing to disagree in offense goes out from a window and in a situation like this. And we all know that

Ken Taylor
saying thanks for that. Thanks for the comment building. So, Nathan, you’ve got a thought about Milton’s observation.

Nathan Ballantyne
I think in cases of family conflict, I’m guessing that often evidence goes out the window. We’re not responding to arguments in the way that we would like to in a more intellectual arena, we’re responding with our emotions, and this can make compromise extremely difficult. So I wonder what the ideal family would be with us people never blow up at each other and always get get always get along? Well, probably not. That doesn’t seem like human behavior.

Ken Taylor
Yes, look, I think Milton’s point raises a broader thing. And it touches on what I was getting at the at the end of the last segment, which I want to I want to come back to, I think there are spheres, many spheres in which disagreement with the other puts pressure on you have some kind of some kind, like scientific rationality right next to experimenters doing the same experiment. And they come to different conclusions about something we want more experimentation because we want to settle it. Right. There are other spheres in which disagreement doesn’t quite put the same pressure on you. We disagree about abortion, right. And we’re not going to convince each other about the probe. of abortion, but we have to live together in a polity. So we have to settle, not whether abortion is right or not, but something about how to conduct ourselves together in light of these disagreement. Politics is about how to not come to blows in the face of reasonable disagreement that are not going to be solved by further arguing, you know, Rawls talks about the burdens of judgment and comprehensive schemes and all that sort of stuff. I mean, do you agree that there were spheres in which disagreement puts pressure on us and enter and, and other kinds of spheres in which it puts a different kind of pressure on us? Oh, of

Nathan Ballantyne
course, given our practical purposes, in living together in a society where fair play and rule of law are relevant, disagreement should mean something quite different than when we’re simply seeking the truth. But I wonder how these two concerns fit together? Because Exactly, we don’t want to completely ignore this truth seeking drive that we should have when we do politics. I’m not sure what to say,

Ken Taylor
I think it’s a mess. I think that’s why I think this was signed on to that. But I think that’s why these conversations get so fraught, because there’s two sides of this, right? There’s the scientific truth seeking, we want to claim that this is so and use that as a justification, and then against the other who, for whatever reason, won’t accept that. And once they get on with his or her life, we it’s really fraught Well,

Josh Landy
I like to refer to a philosophy term mutually regulating ideals, right. So maybe what we’re talking about here is that we have two ideals, right, an ideal of truth and knowledge, on the one side, an ideal of kind of comity, and a kind of pluralist democracy, people getting along, not fight on the other side. And maybe what we want to be doing is trying to balance those ideals against each other, we may not always be able to have both. But we need kind of a skill of judgment to know well, this is a situation where you’re going to have to set aside your relentless desire to get it right. And just get into that mode of Well, look, let’s have the kind of conversation that’s going to keep us harmonious, like the like the colleague just said, you know, an argument in a family, it is not always the most important thing to get it right.

Nathan Ballantyne
No, I like this idea of balancing. And I’m thinking now that there are different psychological mindsets that actually lead people in very different directions. Here, so interesting. There’s some psychological work on it’s kind of a quest perspective. And people see their beliefs as an attempt to figure things out, they’re seeking, they’re looking for more truth. And other people use their beliefs as a kind of defense. So when they’re challenged when there’s a worldview threat, when they feel anxious, because someone’s challenged, their deeply held beliefs, they actually ramp up their confidence, and they use their belief as a kind of protection mechanism. So Questers, and people who are more defensive, are going to think very differently about these regulating ideals. So

Ken Taylor
I think that I think that’s really illuminating, I think it helps us understand what was going on, in that. Rebecca to Val case, she was a cluster, in the sense she’s trying to figure out where there’s a logic of this argument go, and there were people with a stake in this debate, a live to stay, who saw that as an some kind of attack, and got into this defensive mode. And so what happens when that happens, you just have people like, I don’t know, they’re really at loggerheads, which leads me to want to ask you another question. Haha, we’re gonna do something for you that we only we do on philosophy talk from time to time, we’re going to make use czar of some domain, where you have plenary powers. And here’s what I’m going to do. I know this is a lot of heavy burden, Nathan, I know it’s a heavy burden. We’re going to make you in charge of society and culture and belief formation and argument, anything you say goes, and we’re going to give you the task of redesigning things so that that we cultivate more intellectual humility in ourselves. Well, okay, what’s the first thing just to focus on the first thing that you might try to judge?

Nathan Ballantyne
Well as SAR, I would like to proceed by making a committee and I point, Ken and John, this is

Josh Landy
fantastic. Good decision.

Nathan Ballantyne
So what we’re going to begin with a little thought experiment. So let’s suppose we want to make people better able to humbly disagree. And let’s say we have two different tools to actually make that happen. One tool is principles of evidence. The other tool is social incentives. So principles are these things that we can talk about and write in books. Social incentives are very different, right? They’re things like Your pressure media influence government policies and they get woven into our everyday lives. So to make someone respond humbly, to disagreement more often, which kind of tool would you pick?

Ken Taylor
I’d pick the not the principle. I’d like the principles, right. But I think principles live through being implemented in a social world in a social structure. So I would say, let’s take this guy’s let’s on our committee, let’s take this as a design problem. We know what the principles are that we want to induce, we talked about those principles, but we want to design social, educational, cultural mechanisms that will cultivate a fealty to these principles. So we’d have to change the media, we’d have to change our schools. That’s what I think. I don’t know. What do you think Josh? Yeah, I

Josh Landy
mean, maybe people should take more philosophy classes.

Ken Taylor
Well, I know cuz that’s gonna tell them the principles and well redesign the lived lived up

Josh Landy
to 10. Yeah. Oh, good. I was worried you were gonna fire him?

Nathan Ballantyne
No, no. So the, I think was crucial here is understanding how principles of evidence and social institutions can be put together in the right way to create people who are capable of following the principles. And this is actually a really difficult thing to do in a society that can’t agree on what’s most important. But education is obviously a central part of this. And that’s what

Josh Landy
I was when I was getting back flippin. But I do mean it seriously that we’re not just teaching people principles, we’re giving people a kind of a model of how to disagree in a humble way we take each other seriously, we often disagree, but we try to understand each other’s argument, we try to enter it for me, then we don’t just write people off because they’re from a certain town or country or whatever. Right? No, ad hominem. So aren’t we doing that in, in our educational missions? Yeah, we’re doing

Ken Taylor
I agree that that’s what we’re aiming to do. Right? I do think though, there’s a question of, so I wanna, so you’re in Epistemologists, by trade, Nathan, Anna, and I and I, and I have this thing, I have this thing about what I call a priori epistemology, for which I don’t have much use, and I say to my epistemology, friends, I want you to come out of the Airy, the air, right, and get down to the ground, where institutions have to be designed, because it pista the social epistemology of belief formation in the 21st century is a mess. And we need to think about how to design these intermediate these mediating devices and structures in our culture and a culture of argument sell that people’s beliefs are better. So I want I want I want Epistemologists to be engineers of the social world, you think that’s a crazy thing to want?

Nathan Ballantyne
Absolutely not. I think this is actually taking up the most exciting pista Mala G from the 17th and 18th century, when there was a cultural crisis. Basically, there’s all of this religious and political conflict. There’s not a sense that no one anyone knows the authority. What, who’s the authority now, after the scientific revolution comes along, and the Reformation the Counter Reformation happened and what philosophers do is they turn to deep questions about method and knowledge and proper opinion. And they’re trying to come up with ways to reorganize society around rules that will make us better able to understand the truth and to also live together I see in works of John Locke, very much this spirit and I think that’s, it’s possible to at least aspire to that in the present day. Well, on

Ken Taylor
that hopeful note, Nathan, on that hopeful note, I’m going to thank you for joining us. This has been a humbling and inspiring conversation here here.

Nathan Ballantyne
Well, thank you so much.

Ken Taylor
I guess it’s been Nathan Ballantine, professor of philosophy at Fordham University author of the forthcoming book, knowing our limits just got one last tiny thought for us

Josh Landy
now Well, can I haven’t changed my thoughts from start to finish? I’m kidding. I think I think clearly it’s really complicated their situations we should stick to your guns their situations we should agree to disagree there situations where you should be open minded. Lord, grant me the wisdom to know the difference.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, there you go. And I hope Epistemologists come out of the laboratory and into the field and help us redesign the epistemic landscape. This conversation continues at philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers where our motto is get this Koto Ergo Blago, I think therefore I blog and you you can become a partner in that community just by visiting our website Philosophy Talk dot o RG.

Josh Landy
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send your question to Philosophy Talk dot o RG sorry, comments at philosophy. And we may feature it on our blog. Now a man who humbly disagrees with most things especially speed limits. It’s Ian Scholes, The 62nd philosopher,

Ian Shoales
he unchosen the problems of disagreeing these days is that more people are nuts. Used to be well, they’re always nice, but their beliefs were confined to pamphlets so published Tomes, the charts and pictures of pyramids and what the aliens might look like had we photographs of them. Now we have the internet with outlets like medium and Quora, and Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, which combines the American tradition of respect for individual belief, combined with the authority bestowed on anything said out loud, so we have a core belief that President Kennedy was not killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, if you believe he was you were a dupe Akaka Patsy, because President Kennedy in fact was killed by take your pack Russians the mob Cubans to CIA by lefties because Kennedy was going to get us deeper into the Vietnam War. By the right because Kennedy was going to pull us out of Vietnam. Now expand that conspiracy impulse we have birthers who insist that President Obama was not born in a white what is the game but this belief is beyond me we have tutors who believe that 911 is caused by missiles hidden bombs and even in one YouTube video I watched sound waves that vibrated the towers into collapsing who Dennett Well, Israel Saudi Arabia the CIA again, Dick Cheney, you can disagree about the details. Truth is don’t care about that it was Arabs or Jews dancing in New Jersey as they watched the towers fall, it doesn’t matter. Just so the central narrative planes into buildings does not stand. Its crisis actors and George Soros all the way down. It’s impossible to disagree with any of that. I mean, it’s possible, but it’s a black hole, all of it. Don’t get Bob going in Hillary don’t get Vince going on Trump. Back in the 60s the early days of who killed the Kennedys people can only talk mano a mano, there’s no this lol BRB, emoji emoticon no kill avatar saying, I saw we I said something offensive. None of that. If I offended it was get out of my house and don’t come back. Call me Nazi hippie middle class tool. doors slammed voices shouted. None of this unfriending nonsense. Now I called my high school principal of fascist and the school paper, allegedly causing many differing opinions to fill the aeromedical Midwestern town opinions about freedom of the press about the ingratitude as long haired young about respect to elders about the Vietnam War about the ongoing cultural crisis. My high school principal threatened to sue me for libel. But then we stopped the war man, and we turned to cocaine and voting for Reagan scandals about it, nobody cared until the internet. Now it’s easier to have an opinion than ever louder opinions. And we have homegrown algorithms in our head. Now we can size up people in a nanosecond and then retreat to our corners where we know everything and yet are always wrong. Even though we’re right, we’re wrong. In other words, saying the earth is flat takes less than a second longer than that to disprove with optics and gravity, but that won’t convince the flat earth or any way. So why even bother? No matter what ridiculous claim is made that Hillary Clinton is smuggling orphan sex slaves into a DC piece of product, for example, news outlets have to send reporter to the pizza parlor, check it out. So just let it go. It’ll morph into something else just as ridiculous. We have a president who is very big on conspiracy theories if they affect him. But if there is a deep state secretly running things, he is the president. Wouldn’t he be in charge of it? Couldn’t ask for a memo to explain things for him because we’d have to read it. Also remember, President Trump was a big birther. Back in the day he claims he actually sent private detectives to why to ferret out the truth about Obama’s birth. And if you believe that we’re in bigger trouble than I thought, well, that’s just my opinion. Don’t argue about it really. I call him a lying fascist. But the last time I said something like that, but an authority figure I got kicked out of the house so let’s agree to disagree. I gotta go.

Ken Taylor
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of K LW local public radio San Francisco, and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. Copyright 2018.

Josh Landy
Our executive producers are David Demarest and Matt Martin. The senior producer

Ken Taylor
is Devon’s Treliving. Laura McGuire is our Director of Research. Cindy. Prince Baum is our Director of Marketing.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston and Paul and Peter.

Ken Taylor
Support for philosophy comes from various groups at Stanford University. And from the partners that are online community thinkers,

Josh Landy
the views expressed or mis expressed in this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University

Ken Taylor
or other funders, not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, Philosophy Talk dot o RG where you can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening. And thank

Josh Landy
you for thinking.

Unknown Speaker
We’ll leave it there, gentlemen. We will leave it there. We’ll leave it there. We’ll leave it there, gentlemen. All right. Well, we got to leave it there. We’re gonna have to leave it there. I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. Don’t leave it. Why would you leave it there? That was a terrible place to leave.