Tamsen Webster explains why disagreements rooted in positionality can't be solved with more evidence. When people don't agree on what's real or how to know things, compromise means narrowing claims to specific, testable assertions instead.
He says no, I say yes. We both have a reasonable ground for thinking the way that we do. That kind of disagreement is not one that you win with more proof. You can't out-evidence someone in a situation like that because you're not disagreeing about the evidence. You're disagreeing about something even deeper, about what's real in the first place. What we found eventually wasn't agreement on the big claim. It was on a smaller one, a specific narrower version of what I was talking about that he could agree could be real, or at least real enough to be worth studying. What happened here was a disagreement based in our positionality, meaning the nature of the qualities of your position on things like what's real, how can we know, and what's valuable about what we can know about what's real. Which brings us back to that question of how do we get an idea to take hold when you can't even agree that something's real?
