Maybe John Nerst’s erisology is the “dual” to your essay here, since it’s basically the study of disagreement. There’s also a writeup in The Atlantic, and a podcast episode with Julia Galef. Quoting Nerst:
By “disagreement” I don’t mean the behavior of disagreeing. I mean the plain fact that people have different beliefs, different tastes, and react differently to things.
I find this endlessly interesting. A person that disagrees with me must have a different mind in some way. Can that difference be described? Explained? What do such differences say about the contingent nature of my own mind? Can this different mind to some extent be simulated inside my own? Can I understand what it feels like to think like someone else?
That’s one part. How we negotiate these differences is also interesting. How do we communicate our beliefs to each other? How to we interpret, model and counter others’ beliefs? How, and how well, does language work as a medium for connecting and comparing mind with mind, and with reality? Negotiating the differences — including trying to reshape minds in your own image through argumentation and rhetoric — tend to result in coordination and organization of ideas and beliefs across groups of people.
From one perspective it doesn’t matter so much if an idea is in a single person or distributed across many; the study of disagreement is perhaps best thought of as the study of differences and dissonances between ideas and systems of ideas and how they affect and are affected by the individual and collective mechanisms by which ideas are shaped and organized inside and among minds.
As I see it, this doesn’t exactly match any particular existing discipline, even though there’s plenty of relevant research and knowledge already. Psychologists and political scientists study opinions, anthropologists and historians study differences in how and what people think across space and time, philosophers study how concepts work, and machine learning specialists come up with ways to create them from data. Rhetoricians know how to argue convincingly, economists know what incentives we face when doing so, and biologists know why those things are incentives at all. And so it goes, for a dozen more disciplines (feel free to complain that I’ve overlooked yours). All these fields are relevant for understanding disagreement, but there’s no institutional structure for integrating it into a cross-disciplinary body of knowledge fit for public consumption.
Excellent and thank-you! I’d somehow forgotten about Nerst and would have linked to his work directly. I think the additional value Hahn’s ontology brings to erisology is an explicitly positive gradient, in a hill-climbing sense. For any disagreement, Hahn’s ontology allows the parties to accept some level of agreement (Where are we on the agreement landscape?) and have an objective target for improvement, assuming good faith on everyone’s part. I’m inclined to try to communicate it to Nert based upon your linking the two!
Maybe John Nerst’s erisology is the “dual” to your essay here, since it’s basically the study of disagreement. There’s also a writeup in The Atlantic, and a podcast episode with Julia Galef. Quoting Nerst:
I particularly liked A Deep Dive into the Harris-Klein Controversy, although it’s long (9,000 words), and I frequently find myself thinking of The Signal and the Corrective and Decoupling Revisited as frequently-occurring failure modes in online discourse between smart well-meaning people.
Excellent and thank-you! I’d somehow forgotten about Nerst and would have linked to his work directly. I think the additional value Hahn’s ontology brings to erisology is an explicitly positive gradient, in a hill-climbing sense. For any disagreement, Hahn’s ontology allows the parties to accept some level of agreement (Where are we on the agreement landscape?) and have an objective target for improvement, assuming good faith on everyone’s part. I’m inclined to try to communicate it to Nert based upon your linking the two!