The Perspectival Cleft
I love debate. For me, the line between a good conversation and an LD is thin, and mostly relates to time limits. Obviously, this love can be something of a challenge, socially speaking — though I do like to think that, as I’ve grown older, I’ve gradually developed a facility for “shooting the shit” or “small talk”, or whatever it is you call everything that’s not debate.
In general, other people seem to dislike debate-style conversations for two reasons: they don’t like the oppositional flavor of the discussion, or1 they don’t see the point. I’m a competitive person, so I actually enjoy the first reason — as long as ad hominem attacks and other fallacies are left out of it. However, both the engineer and the artist in me are very sensitive to the second reason.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
As people say, you’re never going to convince someone who believes X of the merits of ~X, and that is doubly true within a single conversation. So why waste your breath?
In two words: perspectival cleft. This is a term that has been kicking around my head for a while now, and something akin to its meaning may have already been coined. But what I’m talking about is simple: the place where two reasonable people’s opinions diverge.2 The place, in other words, where the disagreement is born.
The awareness of such a cleft can dramatically change the tenor of the conversation. Rather than attempting to force two people’s opinions to be parallel, you can simply work to uncover the exact location of the perspectival cleft. And once you do uncover it, it’s really a marvel. It’s sort of like finding a book that says one thing to one person, and something totally different to the other. Moreover, there naturally are reasons for the cleft itself. Identifying the cleft is a concrete step toward resolving them, and thereby the overarching disagreement. These consequences make the discovery of the cleft a practical goal — in addition to an amusing diversion — and thus one whose achievement is deeply satisfying.
- The word “or” is intrinsically inclusive, rendering the phrase “and/or” redundant. I vote to introduce “xor” into the common lexicon for the rare cases we actually demand exclusivity. ↩
- This naturally assumes that they had converged to begin with, but I believe this is a fair assumption — most sane adults from the modern era actually have very similar fundamental beliefs about the world. This is true practically (people concede the utility of tools, for example), as well as morally (people concede the immorality of slavery). ↩