Can Thinkers Disagree?

Author’s note: In addition to publishing new posts weekly, I periodically republish “evergreen content”—articles that focus not on current events but on why we think the way we do, as well as on how we can think more and better than is presently the case. Today’s post was originally published on Sep 07, 2025. Enjoy!

In these posts, I’ve introduced the notion of Thinkers, and more recently of Feelers. Whereas Thinkers think their way to conclusions, Feelers rely on their heart and gut instead of their head to reach them. As we have seen, the Thinker-Feeler distinction isn’t binary. It can instead be displayed on an “intellectual spectrum” with “pure Feelers” at the left endpoint and (theoretical) “pure Thinkers” at the right endpoint. Most people will be somewhere between these endpoints, with their location depending on how much they rely on thinking versus feeling.

In this post, I’m going to disabuse readers of the notion that the Thinkers of the world will be in agreement about whether a claim is true or false. Not only can they disagree, but such disagreement is commonplace.

How, you might wonder, can this happen? One way is if two Thinkers have drawn their conclusions from different evidence. It could be, for example, that the first Thinker has access to evidence that the second Thinker doesn’t. It could also be that although a piece of evidence was available to both Thinkers, one overlooked it. Alternatively, the first Thinker might have been aware of that piece of information but dismissed it, because they questioned the reliability of its source. They might, in particular, be reluctant to take seriously a video provided by someone with a reputation for producing deepfake videos.

And even if two Thinkers relied on the same body of evidence, they might have used different reasoning processes to arrive at their conclusions. It might be that one of them fell victim to a cognitive bias: Not even Thinkers are immune to them! Alternatively, one Thinker might have made a simple math error.*

Along these lines, consider two Thinkers who disagree about a historical event, say the Battle of the Little Bighorn, fought on June 25-26, 1876, in which more than 200 soldiers of the United States Army’s 7th Cavalry regiment were killed by a coalition of Native American tribes. It might be that these Thinkers have differing opinions about the reliability of participant accounts. They might also disagree about the chronological order and significance of the events of that battle.

It is important to keep in mind that whether you are a Thinker is determined by the process you use to reach your conclusions, not by the conclusions you reach! In particular, two individuals engaged in open-minded critical thinking can come to different conclusions. This is what happened in the cases described above.

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Realize that when two Thinkers come to different conclusions, one of them must be mistaken—or maybe they both are! This in turn raises a question: If open-minded critical thinking can lead us to mistaken conclusions, then why employ it?

The answer is that those who rely on open-minded critical thinking will, in the long run, end up holding more true beliefs than those who use alternative belief-formation processes. The claim, in other words, is that although engaging in open-minded critical thinking is not an infallible way to optimize our mind, it’s the best way we have.

Because they felt rather than thought their way to conclusions, Feelers will find it difficult to defend them. As a result, they might experience anger and resentment when someone challenges those conclusions. They might do their best to ignore the challenge, and if forced to confront it, they might verbally abuse, shout down, or even try to silence the challenger.

Contrast this with the situation in which two Thinkers discover that they disagree about some subject. The discovery will trigger mutual curiosity. They each know that the other person has engaged in evidence-based reasoning to reach their conclusion. So where did their intellectual paths fork? They will start comparing the evidence they used and the inferences they drew on the basis of that evidence. On locating the crux of their disagreement, they will focus their attention on it.

As a result of this investigation, one of them might change their mind. It is also possible, though, for both to change their mind—to realize that they had both gone astray in their reasoning. This “change of mind” might involve switching from believing a claim to disbelieving it or conversely, it might mean switching from believing or disbelieving a claim to nonbelieving it, and it might mean continuing to believe or disbelieve a claim but adjusting their level of confidence in that belief.

If this outcome sounds implausible, remember that we are assuming that the individuals in question are both Thinkers. As such, they will by definition be open-minded, and one of the things their mind will be open to is the possibility that their beliefs are mistaken and that someone else has a better understanding of an issue than they do. And because their goal is to optimize their mind—rather than maintain a public image of infallibility—they will welcome having someone set them straight and might even thank them for doing so.

Thinkers, as we have seen, will stress-test their beliefs in conjunction with their mindcleaning regimen. We have also seen that the best way to do this is to find a “contrary Thinker”—a fellow Thinker, that is, who has reached a conclusion contrary to theirs. This is one last piece of evidence that Thinkers can disagree about a subject. It is also evidence that Thinkers themselves not only realize as much but harness the thinking power of contrary Thinkers in their mind-optimization efforts.

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*Recently, tons of black plastic cooking utensils were discarded in response to a science journal article that concluded that they weren’t safe to use. Subsequently, it was discovered that the authors of that article had made a basic math error.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.”