When there is disagreement, people talking about politics and religion tend to talk past each other and misunderstand reasons for disagreement. Being constantly bombarded by disinformation, misinformation, lies, deceit, irrational emotional manipulation and the like is a major source of honest misunderstanding. But a recent research paper, Latent Diversity in Human Concepts, focuses on a another major source of honest misunderstanding. Specifically, humans use certain words to refer to certain concepts, but the actual meaning of those words varies widely among individuals.
Scientific American comments on the paper:
These discrepant views—[e.g., differing personal] concepts of penguins—are the kind of information researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, elicited from participants in a study that was published last month. The team’s results show that even the plainest of nouns can invoke dozens of distinct concepts in individuals’ mind. “People have wondered for a long time how to put a number on how much overlap there is, and it’s really low. It blows my mind,” says psychologist Celeste Kidd of the U.C. Berkeley, who was senior author of the study.
To make matters worse, the researchers found that people are usually oblivious to these differences and believe that most other people think like they do even when almost nobody does. This may be one reason people so often are at loggerheads. “We think it can explain a lot of disagreements people have,” Kidd says. “It’s an approach to understanding why people talk past each other.” Being more aware of how often we might not be comprehending one another may help us “get on the same page when it matters,” she adds.
It is well known that abstract, high-concept words such as “knowledge” and “fairness”** provoke frequent debates about exactly what is meant. But researchers have struggled to formally characterize how people’s concepts differ and to quantify how often that happens. Past efforts have stumbled, Kidd says, because we do not fully understand what concepts consist of.
** And, one of my favorites, “fascism.”
Participants believed around two thirds would agree with them when the actual proportion was usually much smaller. In some cases, people believed they were in the majority when virtually nobody agreed. This shows that people are typically oblivious to the extent to which others share their concepts. “That was cool,” Gelman says, “and may have implications for when we think we’re communicating but aren’t.”
The study may offer hope that we can sometimes overcome our differences by simply becoming aware of them. “When people disagree, it might not be for the reasons they think,” Kidd says. “It could just be because their concepts aren’t aligned.” Her advice: “Hash it out,” she says. “Questions like ‘What do you mean?’ can go a long way toward preventing a dispute going off the rails.”
That last paragraph states why I look to find stasis with people I disagree with. Stasis is a point in mutual understanding where people know why they disagree. Since minds in disagreement rarely change, getting to mutual understanding is about the best that can be done. In my opinion, reaching stasis is pro-democracy and usually or always in the public interest. Leaving disagreements unclarified is pro-authoritarianism and usually in the elite's interests.
The paper includes these comments:
Many social and legal conflicts hinge on semantic disagreements. Understanding the origins and implications of these disagreements necessitates novel methods for identifying and quantifying variation in semantic cognition between individuals. .... Our results show at least ten to thirty quantifiably different variants of word meanings exist for even common nouns. Further, people are unaware of this variation, and exhibit a strong bias to erroneously believe that other people share their semantics. This highlights conceptual factors that likely interfere with productive political and social discourse.
Even when two individuals use the same word, they do not necessarily agree on its meaning. Disagreements about meaning are common in debates about terms like “species” (Zachos, 2016), “genes” (Stotz et al., 2004), or “life” (Trifonov, 2011) in biology; “curiosity” (Grossnickle, 2016), “knowledge” (Lehrer, 2018), or “intelligence” (Sternberg, 2005) in psychology; and “measurement” in physics (Wigner, 1995). Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein even disagreed about what constitutes a “fact” (de Waal & ten Hagen, 2020). In contemporary society, social issues often hinge on the precise meaning of terms like “equity” (Benjamin, 2019), “pornography” (Stewart, 1964), “peace” (Leshem & Halperin, 2020), or the “right to bear arms” (Winkler, 2011). Sometimes these debates are settled by fiat—for example, the U.S. Supreme court decided that a tomato counted as a vegetable (not a fruit) for tax purposes because the law should follow the “ordinary meaning” of words rather than their botanical meaning (see Goldfarb, 2021; Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304, 1893).
Despite the frequency of such terminological debates, these conflicts have not been characterized using cognitive psychology methods.
This kind of misunderstanding arises mostly (completely?) from essentially contested concepts (ECCs). The ECC is a concept that was first prominently articulated in 1956, but was known at least by propagandists and deceivers for millennia. This linguistic phenomenon is not new. It's just inherent in the human condition. According to the recent paper and despite knowledge about this important aspect of human cognition, this kind of research is new. I suspect that in the last couple of years, the severity of the plague of ECCs has dawned on social science generally. That's probably what motivated researchers to begin studying the phenomenon.
As usual, this kind of knowledge is sharp and maybe at least two-edged. It will be used by propagandists, tyrants and deceivers ('bad people') to get what they want if this kind of knowledge can be leveraged that way. If so, then it would also be useful for societies to add to their defenses against the dark arts that bad people use to manipulate and deceive.
My conception is broader:
Two different things or arguments are asserted
or implied to be about the same when their actual
differences make them significantly dissimilar
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