During a year when there is much tumult around the world and in the United States in particular, it might be surprising to encounter a paper about patience and argumentation. In this paper, I explore the notion of deep disagreement, with an eye to moral and political contexts in particular, in order to motivate the idea that patience is an argumentative virtue that we ought to cultivate. This is particularly so because of the extended nature of argumentation and the slow (...) rate at which we change our minds. I raise a concern about how calls for patience have been misused in the past and argue that if we accept patience as an argumentative virtue, we should hold people in positions of power, in particular, to account. (shrink)

When parties attempt to persuade their opponents of the tenability of a certain standpoint using reasons, they will often find that the circumstances of the dialogue hinder their chances of resolution. Power imbalances, cognitive biases, lack of time or hidden interests are some of the circumstances they need to face. I will label these circumstances as _suboptimal settings for argumentation_. According to the pragma-dialectical tradition, higher-order conditions for critical discussion are unfulfilled in these cases (van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jacobs, & Jackson, (...) 1993). The main question of this paper is the following: what is the normative standard that parties in a discussion need to follow to arrive at a resolution within such circumstances? I will defend a middle-ground solution between two extreme ones. The first extreme position, the _anything-goes policy_, claims that, given that the conditions for a reasonable exchange of reasons are not satisfied, the dialogue stands outside the domain of reason, so anything goes for the parties. The second extreme position, the _business as usual policy_, claims that, since critical discussion is a normative model, the same rules should apply in suboptimal settings. Finally, the _supernormal policy_ that I defend claims that we need a more general and comprehensive norm that I refer to as a _supernorm_ to evaluate these cases. The supernormal policy divides argumentation into two stages: preparation and resolution. In the preparation stage, the parties attempt to restore or compensate for the suboptimality of the setting, while in the resolution stage, they attempt to resolve their disagreement. I contend that the moves of the preparation stage should be evaluated by using the supernorm instead of by the rules for critical discussion (van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004 ). At this point, the paper considers theoretical insights from Gilbert ( 1995, 1997, 2002 ) and Jacobs ( 2000, 2006 ) to understand what this entails. (shrink)

Some disagreements seem to be persistent: they are, pretty much, immune to persuasive argumentation. If that is the case, how can they be overcome? Can argumentation help us? I propose that to overcome persistent disagreements through argumentation, we need a dynamic and pluralistic version of argumentation. Therefore, I propose that argumentation, more than a tool that uses persuasion to change the mind of the counterpart, is a toolbox that contains persuasion, deliberation, negotiation, and other dialogical strategies that can be used (...) to reach an agreement. (shrink)

Interpersonal disagreement happens all the time. How to properly characterize interpersonal disagreement and how to respond to it are important problems, but the existence of such disagreements at least is obvious. The existence of intrapersonal disagreement, however, is another matter. On the one hand, we do change our minds sometimes, especially when new evidence comes in, and so there is a clear enough sense in which we can be characterized as having disagreements with our past selves. But what about synchronic (...) disagreements with ourselves? Are such cases possible, or is there something about the nature of belief that rules out the possibility of knowingly holding beliefs which cannot be rationally held at the same time? In this paper, I argue that there can be cases of intrapersonal synchronic disagreement, and that such disagreements can be deep, in the same way that interpersonal disagreements can be deep. For intrapersonal disagreements, just like interpersonal disagreements, can be grounded in conflicting frameworks for interpreting and reasoning about the world. I also argue that synchronic intrapersonal disagreements are peer disagreements. The paper ends with a discussion of four possible responses to interpersonal deep disagreements, concluding that if those responses are sometimes rational responses in the interpersonal case, then they are also sometimes rational responses in the intrapersonal case. (shrink)

I will connect the literature on deep disagreements with the literature on trust to construct a two-dimensional picture of the limits of argument. Argumentation and trust are important to the functioning of society, but each sets different expectations for when arguments can and should be used to resolve disagreements. When trust is factored in, we see a more nuanced picture of which disagreements will remain too deep for objective argument. Affective and social aspects of argument are not independent of procedure (...) and content. (shrink)