What do you do when you can’t agree on what’s even real?

We want our ideas to take hold with people, even with, maybe even especially with those people who don't already see the world the way that we do. But what do you do when someone doesn't even agree that what you're talking about is real? This happened to me. I was talking with a colleague in my field about what I study about sudden perspective transformation and how my working theory is that it's possible for someone to change or expand how they understand the world quickly, but not coercively. His response? I don't believe that exists. That's not fun to hear. Now, his position is reasonable, coherent, defensible based on how he sees the world and what his academic background is based on the metaphorical ground he was standing on. The gap wasn't about evidence. We're looking at the same phenomenon and disagree about whether or not there's actually something there to study at all. 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? You just saw the answer in the story I just told you, but let's back up a little bit and figure out what's really getting in the way when we're trying to answer that question. The first thing is that a lot of times we assume we know what's real for both ourselves and everybody else. And in fact, most people assume that their view of reality is shared by other people. Or if we don't believe that our view of reality is shared, we at least believe that our view is the correct one. We often continue with that assumption rather than checking for that basic agreement on what we believe is there or isn't there in the first place. The challenge is that an assumption isn't an agreement. It just looks like one until it breaks. What you don't want to do is try to win the argument in the moment about whose view of reality is right. Unlikely to go well for either of you. You can only agree on something once it's been defined. Make the piece of reality that you need or that you're talking about explicit, and then check to see whether or not it's shared. Something that can help here is to understand there's actually 3 different big buckets of how people view reality. It's the same for everybody, and we just need better tools, better approaches, et cetera, to see it. And then once we see it, everybody will agree. Philosophers call this positivism. Meaning I am positive this thing is there. We just have to find it. To be fair, many people, after discovering that some of the things they had previously been positive about turned out not to be quite so true, for instance, that the Earth rotates around the sun, not the other way around, that gave rise to the second big bucket known as post-positivism. Creative, I know. There's one real world. We need to work as hard as we can to get it, and we're going to go with what we think is real until we're proven wrong. I'm oversimplifying, but that's the That's the general gist. Finally, and this represented a big split once upon a time in the world of the sciences, was people who said, "Nope, everything is a construction. What's real is what we ourselves perceive, what we build, and what we can observe between us." My colleague was roughly from that tradition. He believes that this sudden transformation of perspective, what I'm arguing is real, is the result of accumulated meaning-making over time. I believe that it exists separate from that. The issue is this: when two people are in different buckets about what even is reality, they're not disagreeing about the facts. They're standing on different ground about what the facts are. We've all been there. We don't have to agree on everything everywhere all at once for all time in order to make progress, in order to move forward, to explore something together, or even just to understand where each other is coming from. Inside a boundary, inside a definition, partial agreement is still agreement. We can say, I agree with you here, I just don't agree with all of it. In that case, you don't have to resolve the whole spectrum. We don't have to convince someone to change their entire view of reality. We just need to find the way to talk about the same thing in a way that we both can move forward. For instance, can we agree that for this discussion that this is a table? And tables function in this particular way. You don't have to have settled the metaphysical philosophical questions of ontology, which is what it's actually called, but you've built a floor you can both stand on together, at least for a little while. Putting those two things together, the answer, or at least an answer, for how to help an idea take hold in somebody who sees the world differently is to arrive at a scoped definition of what it is that you're talking about. In other words, define something out loud but limit the scope to only what's truly necessary to move forward. There's really 3 big steps to this. Number 1, similar to what we've talked about before, find your own ground and start by explaining that out loud, as I did with my colleague. Now, I said there's 3 big buckets, but there's a lot of nuance and difference in between. I believe, for instance, that there is a reality that is separate from us and our perception of it. I don't believe that we can ever truly know it because I believe that whatever that reality is, is shaped by our own perspectives about that thing that actually exists. Second, narrow to the one thing that needs to be real in order to move forward. Not all of it, just the specific piece of reality that your idea rests on. This is where the scope is doing its work. So with my colleague, I couldn't get agreement on sudden perspective transformation exists in every situation, but we could agree that it exists in a primed version. My question was, would it be worth studying if it exists in an unprimed version? Yeah, let's find out. We narrowed to a specific version of it, priming-independent sudden perspective transformation, and we found that we could both treat that as real enough to both consider to be worth studying. The third step is to formalize what I just talked about. To build and check a provisional scoped definition. That's what my colleague and I did. Can we agree for this discussion X exists and does or maybe does Y? Then confirm that actually held. Now you might be saying, okay, but isn't this just making reality up? That is a question that has been asked of that third bucket, the constructivists. And you could ask it about this too. If we are just saying, hey, scoped definition for this discussion, haven't we just defined our way out of truth and reality? I don't believe so, no. And that's because of my own positionality. I believe that agreeing to treat something as real does not mean and say that for all time, for everyone, therefore that thing is real. It's just allowing us to behave as if it were, which allows whether you're positivist or post-positivist or constructivist to say, okay, we can make some progress without having to decide something that we haven't been able to figure out for millennia. What's the nature of reality? Now, I'm not asking you to adopt my position. I just told you where I stand instead of assuming you would infer it. And that's pretty much always what it comes down to when it comes to sense giving, is to say, here's where I stand, here's why I stand there, and now I'm curious about what you think about that thing that I've just talked to you about. Ultimately, this is not about trying to close a reality gap by just saying No, you're wrong, I'm right about everything. Nobody likes that. You're working to find the one thing that you both can agree is real enough for the conversation about the new idea to proceed. So this is the first and the deepest of at least 3 layers of this idea of positionality, the nature of how you see the world and what's real and what you can know and what you value. Once we've got a scoped definition of what's real, the next step is deciding together how we can agree will know. That's known as epistemology. We'll cover that next time. Sense giving, sense making is all about mutual understanding. So I would love to know which of those 3 buckets did you find yourself in? And did it surprise you? Reality is there, we'll just need to keep working for it, and there's one true answer. Reality is as good as we can get it until we get more information. Reality is what we just think it is. Or did you see some kind of combination that feels even more real to you? I'd love to know.