I am a philosopher of language. That is typically my primary perspective, so communication and limitations often fall into my sights. I believe that not all disagreements can be resolved through language communication. This illustrates one barrier in particular.
This essay is not an attempt to resolve disagreement, adjudicate truth, or reconcile competing worldviews. It is an attempt to explain why so many disagreements persist despite intelligence, good faith, and shared vocabulary – and why escalating those disagreements often makes them worse rather than better.
What follows is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. I am less interested in who is right than in why arguments so often fail to converge, and why those failures are routinely misinterpreted as moral defects rather than structural mismatches. The claim is not that ‘anything goes’, nor that all perspectives are equally valid, but that many disputes operate across ontological fault lines that no amount of better reasoning, evidence, or civility can bridge on their own terms.
Recognising this does not require abandoning one’s commitments. It requires abandoning the fantasy that every disagreement is corrigible and that persuasion is always the appropriate response to difference. If the essay succeeds, it will not produce consensus. It may, however, produce a little more clarity, a little less moral theatre, and a slightly more disciplined form of charity – one grounded not in agreement, but in an honest appraisal of where disagreement actually lives.
On Ontological Incommensurability and the Case for Civilised Disagreement
Most disagreements that metastasise into moral theatre are not disagreements at all. They are collisions between incompatible ontologies, misdiagnosed as differences of opinion.
This assumption is not merely optimistic.
It’s wrong.
We continue to behave as though all disputes take place on a shared stage called “reality,” where facts sit patiently waiting to be interpreted, weighed, or refuted. From this perspective, disagreement is assumed to be corrigible. If only one side listened harder, reasoned better, or acquired the right evidence, convergence would follow. This assumption is not merely optimistic. It is wrong.
Many of our most entrenched conflicts persist precisely because the parties involved do not inhabit the same world in any substantive sense. They operate with different background assumptions about what exists, what counts as real, what can ground truth, and what sorts of things are even eligible for belief. Argument, in such cases, does not fail due to bad faith or insufficient charity. It fails because it presumes a shared ontology that does not exist.
Before proceeding, a clarification. I am using ontology here in a deliberately broad, working sense. Not merely as an inventory of what exists, but as the background framework that determines what can count as real, meaningful, or normatively binding in the first place. This inevitably overlaps with epistemology, ethics, and theories of agency. Not because these domains are identical, but because in lived discourse they travel together. The fault line I am describing is not disciplinary. It is structural.
Opinion Is Not Ontology
A difference of opinion presupposes a common world. Two people may disagree about what justice requires, but only because they agree, tacitly, that justice is a thing of some kind. Two people may dispute whether God exists, but only because they share enough conceptual scaffolding for the sentence to function.
Ontological disagreement runs deeper. It concerns not what is the case, but what it even means for something to be the case at all. When these levels are conflated, discourse becomes theatrical. Arguments are repeated with increasing urgency, frustration is moralised, and disagreement is reinterpreted as stubbornness, ignorance, or vice. Civility erodes not because people are cruel, but because they are speaking from worlds that do not interlock.
Consider debates over abortion. Pro-life arguments typically presuppose that the fetus is already a moral person; pro-choice arguments often presuppose that moral personhood is inseparable from bodily autonomy. These positions are not primarily disagreements about policy, compassion, or even ‘the value of life’. They are disagreements about what kinds of entities exist and when they begin to matter. Shared language about rights or harm often masks this deeper ontological divergence, which is why such debates rarely converge despite decades of argument.
When Critique Presumes the Ontology It Opposes
This distinction helps explain a familiar but often confusing phenomenon: cases where two parties appear to agree on symptoms, vocabulary, and even outrage, yet remain fundamentally misaligned.
Consider critiques of institutional cruelty that condemn dehumanising practices while retaining the very assumptions that make those practices intelligible. For example, workplace critiques that oppose excessive surveillance, unfair metrics, or punitive performance targets often still presume the figure of the autonomous, responsible worker whose output reflects individual will. The system is blamed for misapplying norms, not for producing those norms as instruments of control. Such critiques are often insightful and well-intentioned. They identify real harm. They name real suffering. And yet they stall.
The reason is not timidity or bad analysis. It is ontological inheritance. These critiques operate inside the same metaphysical framework that generates the harm they diagnose. They presuppose moral realism, individual agency, and normative grounding as givens, then object to their misapplication. The result is an internal critique: coherent, compelling, and structurally limited.
This is not a misunderstanding.
It’s a category error.
From a different ontological position, the problem is not that the norms are misapplied, but that the norms themselves function as delivery mechanisms of harm. What appears as reform from within appears as reenactment from without. This is not a misunderstanding. It is a category error.
Recognising this helps explain why superficial agreement so often feels productive while changing nothing. Shared language can create the appearance of convergence while leaving foundational divergence intact. The temperature drops. The mediator applauds. The underlying machinery hums on.
Igtheism and the Refusal to Pretend
This is why I describe myself, somewhat unfashionably, as an igtheist rather than an atheist.
Atheism still accepts the question ‘Does God exist?’ as well-formed. It grants the concept enough coherence to deny its instantiation. Agnosticism does much the same, merely pausing at the threshold. Both remain inside the game.
Igtheism steps back and asks a prior question: What, precisely, are we talking about? If no stable referent can be specified, the sentence does not become false. It becomes undefined. The system returns ‘does not compute’. This is not evasive. It is diagnostic.
I cannot make sense of strong metaphysical Realism
Try as I may, I cannot make sense of strong metaphysical Realism, let alone Theism. The idea that there exists a fully formed, mind-independent world ‘out there’, grounding truth prior to mediation, language, practice, or perspective, does not parse for me. Not as a contested claim. As a coherent one.
However, and this is the crucial point, once I accept Realism as a mechanism, Theism suddenly makes sense. If you already believe in a metaphysically exterior realm that guarantees truth and coherence, then placing God there is not a leap. It is an economy of scale.
Paraphrased bluntly: They believe there is a whole world ‘out there’. I don’t believe in any of it, so God might as well live out there, too.
From within that worldview, atheistic Realism is arguably the stranger position. The cathedral has been built; denying the altar looks parsimonious rather than principled.
I am not offering a competing metaphysical system here. Not idealism, not pragmatism, not a substitute ontology waiting in the wings. I am declining the assumption that reality must come pre-packaged as a mind-independent domain in order to be intelligible or actionable at all.
Of course, non-realist positions are not exempt from this problem; they, too, can smuggle in unexamined ontological commitments under the guise of pragmatism, coherence, or practice.
Pascal’s Wager and Ontological Blackmail
This is why igtheism tends to offend theists more than atheism ever could. When a theist says, ‘How can you not care? Your soul depends on it’, they are not making an argument. They are issuing an ontological demand. Pascal’s Wager is merely this demand formalised into decision theory.
How can you not care?
The wager only works if one has already granted the existence of souls, post-mortem identity, divine reward structures, and a cosmic enforcement mechanism that cares about belief states. Without those assumptions, there is no wager. There is only a shouted house rule addressed to someone who is not in the casino.
None of this is meant to trivialise the existential seriousness with which such claims are often held. It is simply to note that care does not precede ontology; it follows it. One cannot meaningfully care about entities one does not recognise as intelligible occupants of the world.
Why This Doesn’t End in Relativism
None of this implies that ‘all ontologies are equally true’, nor that disagreement is pointless. It implies something far less comforting and far more useful: many disagreements are non-resolvable by design. This does not deny that ontological frameworks can and do shift over time, sometimes under empirical pressure; it only denies that such shifts are guaranteed, universal, or achievable through argument alone.
Non-resolvability does not entail arbitrariness. Ontological frameworks can be evaluated for internal coherence, practical consequences, and the kinds of lives they make possible. What cannot be done is to adjudicate between them using criteria that belong exclusively to one side. Recognising this does not require abandoning one’s worldview. It requires abandoning the fantasy that persuasion is always possible, or that failure to persuade is a moral defect.
Once we see that we are not standing on the same ground, something like charity becomes possible. Not the saccharine kind. The disciplined kind. I understand that this matters enormously to you. I do not share the ontology that makes it matter to me. This is not a truce forged through compromise. It is a ceasefire born of ontological honesty.
Civility Without Convergence
Our age is addicted to resolution. Every disagreement is treated as a problem to be solved, a synthesis waiting to happen, a bridge yet to be built. Sometimes there is no bridge. Sometimes the most responsible thing to do is to stop pretending there is one.
Sometimes there is no bridge.
Sometimes the most responsible thing to do is to stop pretending there is one.
Civility does not require agreement. It does not even require mutual understanding in the strong sense. It requires only that we stop mistaking incompatible world-models for intellectual obstinacy. We are not all arguing about the same furniture. Some of us are questioning whether the room exists at all.
Once that is acknowledged, the volume drops. The moral theatre loses its urgency. And disagreement, while still real, becomes less corrosive. Not because we have reconciled our ontologies. But because we have finally noticed that they do not reconcile.
Philosophics 