- We can learn much more from people whose views we share than from people whose views contradict our own.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.________________________________________
"We owe almost all our knowledge not to people who have agreed, but to people who have disagreed."
The speaker asserts that most of our knowledge originates not from those who have agreed but from people who have disagreed. In some senses, it is true that disagreement and opposing may facilitate our understanding by giving us some chance to overcome our narrow vision and sharpen our dull understanding. Only by emphasizing the positive roles of disagreement, however, the speaker is overlooking the negative aspects of cacophonous opinion and the value of sense of ‘sharedness’ in our learning process.
Admittedly, it is true that disagreement is invaluable to facilitate our learning. For some people whose views are too narrow and unqualified, it is the opposing views and corrective challenge that can really improve and sophisticate their understanding. Personally, for example, I could learn more comprehensively about the nature of legal system when I met a professor who had totally different religious background from me and wide range of knowledge about the legal system. Because he presented diverse philosophical and theoretical viewpoints unfamiliar to my limited understanding, I could not only sophisticate my own knowledge on the legal system but also change my previous position on the diverse legal and ethical issues such as death-penalty, abortion, and recent debates related to genetic science and human genome manipulation research. In this sense, it is not exponents and proponents but critics and dissenters who provide deeper and wider understandings.
Despite the fact that we can deepen and broaden our knowledge with the help of critics and dissenters, however, it does not necessarily mean that they are always a catalyst for our learning. For some young students who could not develop their receptive capacities enough to withstand the harsh and caustic criticisms, aggressive challenges and criticisms would damage their motivations to develop their initial, but not yet mature understanding. To them, it would be encouragement and attentive aid that can make them motivated and proceed to proper understanding. In short, if we can consider psychological stress that may originated from disagreement, it is difficult to assert that disagreement is always a virtue to expand our knowledge.
Moreover, people whose viewpoints and background knowledge are different from us may deter our understanding in the sense that we need to overcome the otherwise unnecessary misunderstanding and conflicting assumptions. When we are involved in an interdisciplinary group project, it is common that we face somewhat unpleasant and tedious preliminary debates caused by lack of common assumptions. If different members have been trained from different areas which have their own distinct foundations, background assumptions, and methodologies, valuable time and energy that could have been invested to understand and implement the projects might be wasted to build the commonly sharable background understanding. This also indicates that disagreement is the most effective means to expand our learning.
To sum, despite the valuable contributions of disagreement in facilitating our knowledge, both psychological distress and necessity to overcome distinct and uncomfortable assumption-difference tell us that disagreement is the only catalyst for our learning. Taken together, I cannot fully agree with the speaker’s assertion. Sometimes, it is not critics but our considerate supporters who really help us to make progress in knowledge.