Kinds of disagreements

1.0 Introduction

Philosophers often use terms in ways that seem to me to be out of touch with reality. This isn’t because they use the terms in ways that are totally divorced from ordinary usage, but because they take some specific way we might use a term in ordinary language and employ it in a narrow sense, then leverage this usage to give the misleading impression that they’ve presented some substantive critique of a particular philosophical position. This is achieved by prompting others to conflate the narrow use of a term with broader usages or with pragmatic implications of a term’s usage in ordinary language. Suppose, for instance, I define lying as “intentionally making a propositional claim about what is true when you believe it to be false, or what is false when you believe it to be true.” Now consider this scenario:

Sam: Alex, did you eat the last slice of pizza?

Alex: (Shakes his head).

Sam: Oh…well then I wonder who did.

Now suppose Alex did eat the last slice of pizza. Did Alex lie? I would say so. Yet as per the definition above, Alex didn’t lie, because lying was defined as an instance of making a propositional claim. So long as we narrowly define “making a propositional claim” to require a specific verbal act of saying or writing something, shaking one’s head is not an instance of “making a propositional claim” and is therefore not an instance of lying.

This would be a very misleading way of describing Alex’s behavior. What many people would want to know in this situation is whether Alex actively misled Sam about whether Alex ate the last slice of pizza. And Alex did. This is some kind of deception, or dishonesty, or whatever. We can get really pedantic about whether we want to call it lying or not, but the point is that some narrow, stipulative use of the notion of lying could be leveraged here to imply that Alex didn’t deceive, or mislead Sam about who ate the last slice of pizza.

Of course, in this case, we have a birds-eye view, and know what really happened. So it’s easy to spot the misleading use of the notion of “lying” here. But that’s just my point: it’s clear enough in this case, but it’s not always so easy to spot similarly tricky uses of language in the arguments philosophers actually make. Here, I want to focus on similar tricks with language that frequently occur in critiques of metaethical subjectivism, the view that moral claims are true or false relative to the moral standards of each individual.

2.0 What are disagreements?

The example I want to focus on here is disagreement. Consider this objection to moral subjectivism:

If subjectivism were true, then there would be no moral disagreements. But there are moral disagreements, so subjectivism is not true.

The reasoning for this argument goes something like this: When people go around saying things like “abortion is wrong,” or “abortion is not wrong,” these statements can be translated as statements like: “I oppose abortion” and “I do not oppose abortion,” respectively. Since each moral claim simply involves a report about the person’s own moral standards, if two people who have different stances on abortion encounter one another and state their positions on abortion, both claims are true:

Alex: “Abortion is wrong” = “I (Alex) oppose abortion.”

Sam: “Abortion is not wrong” = “I (Sam) do not oppose abortion.”

Supposing Alex and Sam are both sincerely reporting their moral attitudes, both statements are true: Alex opposes abortion, and Sam does not oppose abortion. If both statements are true, then Alex and Sam are not stating conflicting positions on the truth of the moral rightness or wrongness of abortion. There simply is no disagreement.

So far so good. But here’s the problem for such a view: when we go out into the world, we observe people arguing about abortion. We see people holding up signs promoting pro-abortion and anti-abortion positions, we see people protesting outside abortion clinics, and we observe people arguing about abortion on YouTube and TikTok. We see politicians enact policies to facilitate or inhibit abortion. We see philosophical articles arguing for or against abortion. And so on. Clearly, the reasoning goes, these people disagree about whether abortion is morally right or wrong.

Yet, if moral subjectivism were true, people cannot disagree. So subjectivism conflicts with our observations about the way people actually speak and interact with one another. So moral subjectivism is false.

3.0 Clarifying the “no disagreement” objection to subjectivism

What is it that subjectivists are unable to do? Subjectivists are unable to disagree with other people about the truth status of propositional claims like “abortion is wrong” because the truth of such claims is indexed to each individual, and thus the truth status of each claim depends on the standards of each individual. If I encounter someone who sincerely says:

It’s okay to torture people for fun.

This person is effectively reporting something about their own psychology. Perhaps this person could be confused or misguided, and they really don’t think it’s okay to torture people for fun. But if we bracket unusual cases like this, along with cases of people lying about their moral values, and we focus exclusively on competent, sincere instances in which people make such claims, there isn’t much room for a subjectivist to say that what the person is saying is false. For comparison, this would be a bit like running into someone who says that they like the taste of chocolate, and claiming that this statement is false.

While technically it could be, it’d be a stretch to suppose we know what people’s taste preferences are better than they do. In any case, the critic of subjectivism may add that people who argue with one another probably aren’t intending to dispute whether other people are accurately reporting their own preferences. Rather, they appear to think the other person’s moral claims are mistaken in some deeper sense.

4.0 Propositional disagreements

These considerations indicate that this “no disagreement” argument construes disagreements as propositional disagreements. A propositional disagreement is a disagreement about the truth status of a propositional claim (i.e., a claim that is truth-apt, or capable of being true or false). Such disagreements construe disagreement as only occurring when two or more individuals maintain contrary positions about the truth status of a given proposition. This would be a proper disagreement:

Alex: It is true that P.

Sam: It is not true that P.

Alex and Sam disagree about whether P is true. Two only “disagree” when they hold different positions on the truth of a given proposition (e.g., “P”). Typically, this will involve one person holding that the proposition is true, and the other that it is false (though there are other possibilities if we want to get fancy with logic).

5.0 Dispositional disagreements

Not so fast! While I am happy to refer to propositional disagreements as “disagreements,” should these be the only kinds of disagreements we think of as “disagreements”? I don’t think so. I want to introduce another type of disagreement, which I’ll call a dispositional disagreement. A dispositional disagreement is any disagreement in which two or more people or groups have conflicting goals, such that the success conditions for their respective goals are either mutually exclusive (one’s success entails the other’s failure) or would be in tension unless some resolution is met. That is, either one or both sides of a dispositional disagreement will fail to fully realize their goals if the other party achieves their goals, unless they reach some accommodation that allows them to both agree on some outcome that they find mutually satisfactory. This is all a fancy way of observing that:

Sometimes people’s goals conflict with other people’s goals.

Suppose Alex and Sam want to go to a restaurant. Alex wants to get pizza. Sam wants to get sushi. The following conversation ensues:

Alex: We should get pizza. We had sushi the last two times we went out.

Sam: Yea, but that’s because we both agree there’s no good pizza place in town. Let’s just get sushi again.

Alex: I don’t want to get sushi. I’m getting tired of it and I’d prefer to eat pizza.

Sam: I understand that, but the pizza place is always loud and busy and I’d rather not go there.

Alex: Yea, that’s true, but sometimes I feel like a livelier atmosphere and I’m just in the mood for pizza.

Sam: Okay, fine! But we’re getting sushi next week!

Did Alex and Sam have a disagreement about where to go for dinner? I would say so. I don’t want to engage in conceptual analysis of what a “disagreement” is. I don’t think there’s a fact of the matter. We get to decide how to use the term “disagreement.” What I want to draw attention to, though, is that Alex and Sam have conflicting desires. As per the technical term of art I introduced, dispositional disagreement, this is clearly an instance of that (even if we decided not to call it a “disagreement”).

Whether this conflict in goals is or isn’t a “disagreement” is irrelevant to any points I want to make here. What I want to point out is that dispositional disagreements can and do occur, and they can and do account for why people with conflicting goals, values, or interests would come into conflict with one another. They can account for why people would argue, why they’d try to persuade one another, why they’d potentially get angry with one another, why they’d try to reach a satisfactory resolution. And, critically, they can account for why a person would hold up a sign, or go to a protest, or get into a physical altercation.

In short, people can have conflicts that are not reducible to or explicable in terms of propositional disagreements. Conflicts can also be caused by dispositional disagreements.

This is important, because in such cases, we can suppose that the people engaged in a dispositional disagreement agree on all the stance-independent facts relevant to their conflict. For instance, suppose two people disagree about abortion: Alex thinks abortion is morally wrong, and Sam thinks abortion is not morally wrong. Must they disagree about any particular proposition? No. They could agree about all the nonmoral facts: they can agree on all the biological details related to fetal development, facts about when consciousness emerges in development, facts about what causes pain and if or when a fetus can experience pain, and so on. They may likewise agree on all the facts about the effects of various policies on abortion, the motivations people have for getting abortions, and so on. In short, they can agree on all the nonmoral facts.

Now, what about the moral facts? If they’re subjectivists, they may agree about those, too. They both agree that Alex is opposed to abortion and Sam isn’t, and that’s all there is to their moral claims: expressions of their respective moral stances on abortion.

Now suppose we say that, because of this, they don’t disagree about whether abortion is morally right or wrong. This would be a very misleading thing to say. Such claims have led people to wonder why subjectivists would ever bother to argue with one another. I’ve seen critics say things like:

If you’re a subjectivist, you have no reason to object to anyone doing anything. You are committed to the view that you do you.

It makes no sense for subjectivists to argue with other people or try to change their mind.

Subjectivism is inconsistent with showing any concern at all for what other people say or do.

If you’re a subjectivist, why would you try to impose your values on other people?

If you’re a subjectivist, why would you expect anyone to care about what other people do?

These questions and remarks all rely on the supposition that there’s something performatively inconsistent with being a subjectivist and engaging in any kind of conflict or disagreement with others. As if the only reason anyone would care about what anyone else did would only make sense if we thought other people endorsed false propositional claims.

This is, in a word, nonsense. How could anyone’s thinking on this matter become so twisted as to think that if you don’t think someone endorses false propositions, that you’d be completely unconcerned with what they did? Imagine the following scenario:

Alex: Hey, what are you doing here? Put down that flamethrower!

Sam: No! I am going to burn you to cinders! Bwahahahaha!

Alex: Wait! Do you believe that the proposition “It is morally permissible to burn Alex to cinders” is true?

Sam: Why yes I do!

Alex: Well, I believe that proposition is false! Let us argue about it.

Sam: Fine! But if you do not persuade me, I will burn you to cinders! Bwahahaha!

This is weird. Why would the conflict turn on their belief in the truth of a proposition or not? What is ultimately central to this dispute are people’s desires or goals. Sam wants to burn Alex to cinders. Sam does not want to be burned to cinders. This is the central conflict. And this conflict would persist according to most of what metaethical/metanormative position you could take on the rightness or wrongness of setting people on fire:

(1) Moral realism: It’s wrong to set Sam on fire because it violates one’s stance-independent moral obligation to not cause extreme bodily harm without good reason. This could be relevant to their respective goals and motivations, but in these cases, if nobody cared one way or another about setting someone on fire or being set on fire, it’s unclear why they’d bother arguing about whether Alex should set Sam on fire. After all, they may disagree about whether there are stance-independent moral obligations related to setting others on fire, but if they aren’t also moved to set the other on fire or to avoid being set on fire, why would they bother talking about this at all? Even in the case of them being moral realists, it is not the propositional disagreement that does the heavy lifting here, but their dispositional disagreement. Thus, the dispositional disagreement accounts for and makes sense of any arguments or conflict between them.

(2) Error theory: It’s not morally wrong for Sam to set Alex on fire, but it is nevertheless the case that Alex does not want to be set on fire, and so it would make sense for Alex to resist Sam’s efforts and attempt to persuade Sam to not use the flamethrower. The dispositional disagreement accounts for and makes sense of any arguments or conflict between them.

(3) Noncognitivism: On a view like, e.g., emotivism, Alex feels that “Boo, setting me on fire,” and Sam feels that “Yay, setting Alex on fire.” Their conflict makes perfect sense as a set of conflicting emotions or attitudes that are in turn associated with conflicting goals or desires about what states of affairs that Alex and Sam want realized. The dispositional disagreement accounts for and makes sense of any arguments or conflict between them.

(4) Appraiser individual relativism: Alex does not want to be set on fire even though Sam wants to set Alex on fire. Their conflict of goals here fully accounts for their interaction. The dispositional disagreement accounts for and makes sense of any arguments or conflict between them.

There may be some metaethical views that would create tensions for the dispositional disagreement regarding the flamethrower:

(5) Agent individual relativism: Alex is committed to the view that if Sam wants to set Alex on fire, that it is morally good for Sam to set Alex on fire. In this case, Alex’s actions in resisting Sam’s attempts to set Alex on fire may, in fact, conflict with Alex’s commitment to agent individual relativism. After all, it is morally good for Sam to set Alex on fire. In this case, one might argue for a genuine conflict. It’s not so clear, though. What if Sam also thinks that Sam has a moral obligation to protect themselves from bodily harm. In this case, Sam would be obliged to believe both that it would morally good to resist Alex and that, because it’s morally good for Alex to set Sam on fire, that it is morally wrong for Alex to resist Sam’s efforts, since doing so thwarts Alex from doing something morally good (and Sam may believe that it is morally bad to do so). I’m not sure how an agent relativist thinks about conflicts of this kind. Perhaps this reveals that agent relativism doesn’t make much sense or faces serious issues when conflicting moral standards encounter one another.

(6) “Nihilism”: “Nihilism” is sometimes used to refer to error theory or to both error theory and noncognitivism (since both deny that there are moral properties). However, it may also be used to refer to the view that nothing matters at all, and that there are no reasons for anyone to do anything (either morally or in some or all other normative respects). On such a view one might suppose that there’s no reason why Alex should not want to be set on fire or why Sam should want to set Alex on fire. In this case, one might think that their actions don’t make much sense: why are they doing anything at all if there’s no reason to do anything?

I don’t know of anyone who endorses agent relativism or this form of nihilism. I am sure somebody does, but even if they did, why maintain that relativism (or other antirealist positions, for that matter) can’t account for disagreement if the only accounts that can’t make sense of conflicts, arguments, efforts at persuasion, and so on are specific (and quite probably rare and weird) forms of antirealism? Why not critique those forms of antirealism in particular rather than making sweeping, blanket statements about alleged problems with “relativism” or with antirealist views more generally?

6.0 Passive and active disagreements

More generally, considering each of these metaethical positions illustrates a key point: dispositional disagreements cut right to the heart of why anyone would actually bother to argue with anyone in the first place: people argue with others in the interests of some goal that they have.

We are not weird propositions-spewing machines that simply go around presenting conflicting propositional claims and then disputing the facts relevant to assessing those propositions just for the hell of it. The only time anyone bothers arguing with anyone is because they are motivated to do so. And insofar as “goals” simply refer to those aims or considerations that motivate us, it is motivations that are in the driver’s seat behind any actual instances of people coming into conflict in the real world, including hashing out disagreements about what’s “morally right or wrong.” In short, it is our goals and desires that do the heavy lifting when we engage in disputes with others, not a passionless, blind clash of beliefs about propositions.

Were this not the case, how would we account for why people happen to argue about issues like abortion or gun control, but don’t argue about the precise number of moons on Kepler-1990 c? Another distinction between different forms of disagreement is relevant to this point. We can refer to a “disagreement” as any instance in which two people believe conflicting truth claims or have conflicting goals, regardless of whether those people are aware of one another or are engaged in any actual conflict. For instance, Alex may believe God exists, and Sam may believe God does not exist, but they may have never interacted and could live in completely different cities, or even entirely different worlds. Yet we could still say they “disagree” in that their views conflict with one another. Yet there are also what we can think of as active disagreements, where people are actively engaged in some dispute or conflict (whether it be about what’s true or what to do). We may think of the latter as disputes. While there are countless nonsocial passive “disagreements” of the former kind: conflicting beliefs and goals, disputes are far less common.

Yet it is disputes that we want to account for, not passive disagreements. Passive disagreements of the propositional or disposition kind involve disagreements about matters of fact or conflicts in goals, respectively, as a matter of stipulation. Such disagreements pose no threat to subjectivism. Rather, it is our actual observations of the disputes people engage in that subjectivists (and other antirealists) must account for, since it is these disputes that ostensibly present a challenge to these views.

Yet disputes involve a whole host of empirical considerations about people’s goals, attitudes, values, reasons for interacting with one another, and so on. They are highly social interactions. As such, they are an appropriate target of inquiry for the social sciences. If we wanted to know what’s going on when people engage in disputes we could…study disputes. We could figure out what is prompting people to engage in any given dispute. Are moral disputes best accounted for by appealing to a shared commitment to the existence of stance-independent normative facts? If the original contention was that subjectivism couldn’t make sense of such disputes because such disputes concern propositional disagreements and there would be no propositional disagreements between subjectivists, then sure, we wouldn’t be able to make sense of such disputes. But why on earth would a subjectivist be committed thinking that any given proportion of observed disputes concern propositional disagreements rather than dispositional disagreements? Granting that such disputes are propositional disagreements would seem to commit the subjectivist to thinking that:

1. People are committed to subjectivism. As a result, they take both their moral claims and the moral claims of others to express their respective subjective moral values.

2. For some inexplicable reason, they also go around arguing about whose moral claims are true, even though their commitment to (1) would suggest this makes absolutely no sense because nobody is actually disagreeing about what’s true

This conflict is supposed to prompt us to think that since people do go around arguing about whose moral claims are true, that therefore people must not be subjectivists, after all. But why should we grant that people are disputing the truth of propositions in the first place? The subjectivist simply holds that:

1. People are committed to subjectivism. As a result, they take both their moral claims and the moral claims of others to express their respective subjective moral values.

2. When people engage in moral disputes, they are typically engaging in dispositional disagreements, not propositional disagreements

…and perhaps that is what’s going on when people engage in disputes about moral issues. What’s so weird about philosophical arguments against subjectivism is that they don’t actually involve any empirical evaluation of what’s going on when people argue about moral issues. They simply do the following:

1. Presume all such disputes involve propositional disputes

2. Note that the prevalence of propositional disputes conflicts with subjectivism

3. Declare subjectivism false, because it conflicts with our “observations”

Yet these “observations” are speculative armchair hypotheses; they have not, in fact, established that the actual moral disputes people are engaged in are propositional disagreements in the first place. Instead, philosophers appear to simply assert that “disagreements” just are propositional disagreements, then appeal to their anecdotal knowledge (which I don’t dispute) that people engage in moral disputes as an indication that such people are, in fact, engaging in propositional disagreements, without actually providing any empirical evidence that this is, in fact, the case.

Worse still, philosophers often conflate propositional and dispositional disagreement to give the impression that because people with conflicting moral values that aren’t realists aren’t engaged in some type of propositional dispute, that therefore they have no dispositional disagreements, or that any conflicts, aggression, attempts at persuasion, arguments, and so on are unmotivated and don’t make any sense. Ironically, the suggestion that it would make no sense for people to engage in any of these activities unless they were engaged in a propositional disagreement is, itself, the notion that makes no sense. The best explanations for why people would engage in active conflicts with one another, fight, attempt to persuade each other, negotiate, argue, and so on appeals to conflicts between their goals and desires, i.e., dispositional disagreements.

While it might have at first seemed like subjectivists were in dialectical retreat, and had to perform some fancy maneuvers to accommodate the alleged data their position supposedly struggles to account for (i.e., “moral disagreement”) subjectivism and other antirealist views do as good or better of a job of accounting for such disagreements because they locate the source of the disagreement in its proper source: conflicting goals and values, not conflicting beliefs about what propositions are true or false. As such, it is not simply that subjectivism and other antirealist views can scrape by and survive the critique that subjectivism can’t account for disagreement (and, similarly, that other antirealist views struggle to account for why anyone would bother arguing with each other), subjectivism and other antirealist views do a better job than realism. Antirealist views cut out the completely unnecessary “middleman” between conflicting positions and the kinds of conflicts that motivate people to come into conflict with one another.

Here’s why. Suppose Alex and Sam are both moral realists. However, suppose they also don’t care what the stance-independent moral facts are. Perhaps they don’t care about these facts any more than they care about the exact mass of a particular tree, or whether there are more wheels or doors in the world. They only care about their own goals and values. If we observed Alex and Sam arguing about something, what would we expect them to be arguing about?

I can tell you what we would not expect them to be arguing about: what the stance-independent moral facts are. Why would they? They don’t care what they are and aren’t motivated to comply with them.

As far as what we would observe: we’d observe disputes about their dispositional disagreements. Here’s the kicker, then. I propose that:

Virtually all observed disputes will involve dispositional disagreements. But not all observed disputes will involve propositional disagreements.

In other words, when it comes to actual disputes, all disputes involving propositional disagreements are accompanied by dispositional disagreements because it is the dispositional disagreement driving the conflict in the first place: two people would never bother to voluntarily argue about what’s true unless they had some desire, and were therefore motivated, to do so.

In principle, they could both have a purely intellectual interest in what the stance-independent moral facts are, but even if they did, we must explain why they have opted to dispute the truth of any given moral claim rather than engage in some other dispute about some other set of facts. The best explanation for why they’d dispute what the moral facts were is because they care or desire to know to a sufficient extent that they prioritize such a dispute over some other dispute. In other words, nobody is going to bother to argue about something unless they want to.

While it is possible in principle that the only reason people would argue about the truth of a particular moral claims is out of a purely intellectual interest in whether it was true, is this a plausible explanation for most everyday moral disputes? No. Quite the opposite. This would be one of the weirdest and most implausible explanations for why people would argue about moral issues.

I propose what I take to be the eminently plausible hypothesis that most moral disputes are, in practice, primarily driven by conflicting goals and desires, and that, while they could also involve propositional disagreements, the latter are entirely superfluous to account for why people would argue with one another. Worse still, propositional disagreements will tend to piggyback on dispositional disagreements, especially when it comes to moral and other normative issues. Such issues are more fundamentally about what people value, or care about, or want. To the extent that disputes about what the stance-independent moral facts are play any significant role in real-world disputes, they will only do so as an intermediary consideration between what will, in practice, almost always be a dispositional disagreement.

In short, subjectivism and other antirealist views make more sense of actual moral conflict than realism. Realism presents at best a superfluous overlay of propositional disagreements that would only arise in practice by parasitizing dispositional disagreements.

7.0 Conclusion

Philosophers often criticize subjectivism for its failure to account for so-called “moral disagreement.” Yet these critics construe “disagreements” in a specific, narrow sense to refer to conflicting beliefs about the truth status of propositional claims. That is, they construe moral disagreements as propositional disagreements. These critics then allege that subjectivists cannot make sense of “moral disagreement” by inappropriately suggesting that all such disagreements must be propositional disagreements, and because subjectivism wouldn’t be able to account for propositional disagreements, that it cannot account for the actual disputes people engage in. Such critics conflate the notion of a propositional disagreement with disputes, helping themselves to the presumption that everyday moral disputes are propositional disagreements rather than dispositional disagreements.

Yet the actual nature of everyday moral disputes is an empirical question. Critics of subjectivism are not entitled to presume to know whether actual disputes are propositional disagreements. We must appeal to appropriate empirical data to better understand the nature of actual disputes. Philosophers have historically eschewed such empirical inquiry. Instead, they often employ narrow, stipulative conceptions of certain terms or concepts, then mistakenly help themselves to the presumption that such technical uses of terms can be employed interchangeably with their ordinary language counterparts. The result is a chronic tendency to conflate narrow, decontextualized conceptions of a particular term with richer, contextually sensitive uses of that term as they appear in ordinary language. This allows philosophers to (whether intentional or not) exploit the pragmatic features associated with the ordinary use of a term by conflating that term with its technical, philosophical counterpart.

In this case, this is achieved by playing a bait-and-switch with the notion of a “moral disagreement.” Here’s how it works:

1. Establish that we all agree that people engage in “moral disagreement”. We observe people arguing about what’s morally right or wrong, trying to persuade one another, and so on

2. Presume that a moral disagreement is a type of propositional disagreement

3. Note that if subjectivism were true, then people who made conflicting moral claims couldn’t, in fact, be engaging in a propositional disagreement

4. Since subjectivism can’t account for propositional disagreements, it can’t account for the phenomenon of “moral disagreement.”

5. Declare subjectivism false, because it can’t account for our observations.

6. Note that it makes no sense, if you’re a subjectivist, to argue with others, or try to persuade them, or care what others do, and so on

The problem here is that the observations we agreed occur in (1) are not necessarily exclusively, primarily, or best explained by supposing that they are propositional disagreements. Quite the contrary, they are better explained as dispositional disagreements. This renders (5) false. It can account for our observations. And it further establishes that (6) is especially ridiculous. People aren’t required to engage in propositional disputes in order to engage in dispositional disputes.

Such tricks with language are fairly easy to expose. In light of this, I am puzzled at their prevalence and persistence. How are analytic philosophers not recognizing the bag of tricks that could lead to these kinds of confusions and errors? It’s just a heaping pile of dubious presumptions, naked conflations between different meanings of terms, flagrant equivocation, and fairly straightforward and misleading exploitation of pragmatic implication to give the false impression that rival philosophical positions are far more ridiculous than they are. All of this is bundled up in a bunch of speculative empirical presumptions that are almost never accompanied by any actual empirical support. What’s more, those who employ these arguments often show open contempt for empirical data, or at best ambivalence, indifference, or ignorance.

Perhaps this will change. Perhaps, by exposing the rhetoric and tricks with language behind many popular arguments, I can play some part in minimizing the role bad arguments play in ongoing philosophical disputes.