I think mostly everyone agrees with this, and has tried, and in practice, we keep hitting “inferential distance” shaped walls, and become discouraged, and (partially) give up.
I’ve found an unexpected benefit of trying to explain my thinking and overcome the inferential distance is that I think of arguments which change my mind. Just having another person to bounce ideas off of causes me to look at things differently, which sometimes produces new insights. See also the book passage I quoted here.
Note that I think the form of inferential distance is often about trying to communicate across different ontologies. Sometimes a person will even correctly get the arguments of their discussion partner to the point where they can internally inhabit that point of view, but it is still hard to get the argument to dialogue productively with your other views because the two viewpoints have such different ontologies.
Thanks, this is encouraging.
I’ve found an unexpected benefit of trying to explain my thinking and overcome the inferential distance is that I think of arguments which change my mind. Just having another person to bounce ideas off of causes me to look at things differently, which sometimes produces new insights. See also the book passage I quoted here.
Note that I think the form of inferential distance is often about trying to communicate across different ontologies. Sometimes a person will even correctly get the arguments of their discussion partner to the point where they can internally inhabit that point of view, but it is still hard to get the argument to dialogue productively with your other views because the two viewpoints have such different ontologies.