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

You don't need to agree on everything. Just on one thing, for now.

A little while back, I was talking with a colleague about what I study. I’d laid it out the way I always do: my working theory that it’s possible to help someone to change or expand how they understand the world quickly, but not coercively.

He listened.

And then he said, “I don’t believe that exists.”

Woo. That’s not fun to hear.

Here’s the thing, though: His position was reasonable. It was coherent with how he sees the world. It was even defensible given his positionality—the metaphorical ground he stands on when looking at the world—and how that has led him to study related topics. While I don’t share his view, a third scholar might hold a third position.

The point of this story isn’t about who’s “right.” (That’s why I’m doing the research in the first place, after all: to find out to what extent, if any, I am—and by whose standards!)

The point of the story is the kind of disagreement lying at its heart. Namely, that my colleague and I were looking at the same phenomenon and disagreeing about whether there was anything there to study at all. He says no, I say yes, and we each have a reasonable ground for thinking the way we do. There was quite literally nothing I could have said in that moment that would have made him go, “Oh, of course, this upends everything I thought I knew!” That’s not how scholarship (or belief!) works, nor should it be.

In other words, this was not a disagreement I was going to win with more proof. You can’t out-evidence someone in a situation like that, because you’re not actually disagreeing about the evidence. You’re disagreeing about something underneath it: what counts as real in the first place.

And yet he and I did get somewhere.

What we found in the end wasn’t an agreement on the big claim. It was an agreement on a smaller one—a specific, narrower version that he could accept might be real, or at least real enough to be worth studying.

This is the kind of gap I’ve talked about under that unlovely word I used before, positionality. There are at least three places where these gaps in positionality can trap new ideas: reality, knowledge, and value. That story, and this post, is about the first one, and the one that lies the deepest: our positions on reality.

We assume what’s real instead of defining it

So, before we get to how my colleague and I found that narrower point of agreement, let’s back up and look at what actually gets in the way.

The first issue is that we often assume we already know what’s real, both for ourselves and for everyone else. We assume our view of reality is the shared one. Psychologists even have a name for this habit: naive realism, the conviction that we see things as they objectively are, that any reasonable person would therefore see them the same way, and that anyone who doesn’t must be misinformed or biased. While that may be, the trouble is that we keep building on that assumption instead of stopping to check it.

An assumption isn’t an agreement. It just looks like one until it breaks.

Once you see that, you can also see why trying to win an argument about whose reality is the “right” one is unlikely to go well for either of you. (Nobody enjoys being told they’ve got reality itself wrong!)

The reason it fails isn’t just that it’s annoying. It’s that you can only agree on something once it’s been defined. Arguing about the whole of reality and truth doesn’t give you anything small enough to actually agree on and move forward. So the fix isn’t to win the argument. It’s to define the piece you need. I’ll come back to the how, but there’s one more useful piece to talk about first.

Three places people stand

It helps to know that people genuinely do take different positions on how they define reality. I’m going to walk through three of them. (And before all the philosophers come for me: please note that what follows is a MAJOR simplification of some pretty complex topics. There are more than three positions, and they don’t all divide on the same question — but these three are enough to see the gap that matters here.)

The first group believes there’s one real world, the same for all of us, and that we simply need better tools and better methods to see it clearly. Once we see it, the thinking goes, everyone will agree. Philosophers call this positivism — as in, I am positive this thing is there; we just have to find it.

Then, a funny thing happened on the way to certainty: people kept turning out to be confidently wrong about things they’d previously been positive about. It turns out, for instance, that the earth goes around the sun, not the other way around. Enough of those corrections happened, and you get the second group, known as postpositivism. (Creative, I know.) There’s still one real world, the postpositivist says, and we should work as hard as we can to get at it—but we’ll go with our best current read of it and hold that read loosely, ready to be proven wrong. Again, I’m oversimplifying, but that’s the gist.

And then there’s a third group, the one that once represented a real split in the sciences. These are the people who say: no, everything is a construction. They’re called the constructivists. For them, what’s real is what we ourselves perceive, what we build, and what we can observe between us. Constructivism has a whole mess of varieties within it, but you can think of “perception shapes reality” as the idea that connects them.

My colleague sits in one of those third camp varieties. He believes the sudden shift in perspective I’m arguing is real is actually the product of meaning made and accumulated over time. I believe it exists apart from that. (Quick hint, since it matters later: I’m not in that third camp either. I’m in one that borrows from a couple of these, and I’ll come back to it.)

Here’s why any of this matters. When two people are standing in different positions and each assumes their own reality is the shared one, they’re not really disagreeing about the facts at all. They’re standing on different ground about what a fact even is. No wonder more evidence doesn’t help. The disagreement is sitting underneath the evidence, where evidence can’t reach.

You don’t have to agree on everything, everywhere, all at once

So if people really do stand in different places about what’s real, are we stuck?

No. And the reason is something we all already know, even if we don’t say it out loud:

We don’t have to agree on everything, everywhere, all at once, for all time, in order to make progress.

To move forward together, to explore something, or even just to understand where the other person is coming from, we need far less than total agreement.

Why? Because inside a boundary — inside a definition — partial agreement is still agreement. You can say, in effect, “I agree with you here. I just don’t agree with all of it.” And that’s enough. You don’t have to resolve the whole spectrum of what’s real. You don’t have to talk someone out of their entire worldview. You just have to find one thing you can both treat as real enough to keep going.

Said another way: instead of arguing about everything, find agreement on something. Focus on the one piece of reality that actually needs to be explicit, and then check whether it’s shared. It can be as simple as saying, “Can we agree that, for the purposes of this conversation, this is a [table], and that [tables work in roughly this way]?”

You haven’t settled the deep metaphysical questions of ontology, which, by the way, is what this whole reality layer of positionality is properly called. But you’ve built a small floor the two of you can stand on together, at least for a little while.

And a floor is all you need to take the next step.

Define one thing, together, for now

Put those two ideas together—that you can only agree on what’s been defined, and that partial agreement inside a boundary still counts—and you get the answer, or at least an answer, to how you help an idea take hold in someone who sees the world differently. You arrive at a scoped definition of the thing you’re talking about.

In plainer terms: define something out loud, but limit the scope to only what’s truly necessary to move forward. There are three steps to it.

1. Find your own ground

First, find your own ground, and say it out loud—the way I eventually did with my colleague. You can’t see the assumption you’re standing on until you put it into words, so start there. I told him, in effect, “I believe this thing exists.” He was able to say, “I don’t. I believe it’s actually this other thing.”

Okay, great. Now we both knew where we each were standing, which is more than most disagreements ever establish. (For the record, my own positionality is that there’s a reality separate from us, but that we can never fully know it, because we each view and interpret that shared reality through our own individual perspectives on it. The official name for that is critical realist. That won’t be on the test. Also, there won’t be a test.)

2. Narrow to the one thing that has to be real

Second, narrow to the one thing that actually has to be real for you to move forward. Not all of it. Just the specific piece your idea rests on. This is where the scope does its work, and where most conversations could be rescued if anyone slowed down enough to try.

This is the part of the story I promised to come back to. My colleague and I were never going to agree that sudden perspective transformation exists across every situation, full stop. That was too big, and we stood too far apart on it.

So we stopped arguing about the whole and went looking for a piece. Was it possible, I asked, that a narrower version of this kind of sudden perspective change exists, but that doesn’t depend on the conditions he’d attribute it to? Would that be worth studying?

And there, on that smaller and more carefully bounded claim, he could meet me. “Yes,” he said, “and I’d love to know what you find.” We hadn’t resolved reality, but we’d scoped it down to something we could both treat as real enough to work on.

3. Build and check a provisional definition

Third, formalize this shared agreement: build a provisional scoped definition, and then actually check that it holds, like the table example I used earlier. “Can we agree that, for this discussion, this is X, that X appears to us as real, and that it performs Y functions (or behaves in Z way)?”

Then, confirm out loud that the agreement is real, rather than assuming it. Inference and assumptions are what got you into the gap in the first place. Don’t let it sneak in at the last step.

But isn’t this just making reality up?

Now, you might be thinking: “Hang on. Isn’t this just making reality up? If we simply agree on what’s real ‘for this discussion,’ haven’t we defined our way out of truth altogether?”

It’s a reasonable objection, and it’s been leveled at the constructivists, in particular, for a long time, so it’s only fair to ask it here too. I don’t think so, though, and the reason comes straight back to my own positionality.

Agreeing to treat something as real, for a purpose, is not the same as declaring that it is real, for all people, for all time.

A scoped definition is a working agreement about how to proceed, not a verdict on the nature of things. And that working floor is exactly what lets a positivist, a postpositivist, and a constructivist all make some progress together without first having to settle a question none of us has cracked in several thousand years of trying.

Yes, that’s my critical realist position coming through. It’s why I believe a provisional, shared definition isn’t a surrender of truth. It’s the most reachable, honest floor two differently positioned people can build. For the sake of moving an idea forward—and maybe changing how someone sees and acts—agreeing on our perception of a thing, for now, is good enough to get started.

(Also, notice what just happened in that paragraph. I didn’t ask you to adopt my position. I just told you where I stand, instead of leaving you to infer it. That, more than almost anything, is what sensegiving comes down to: Here’s where I stand. Here’s why I stand there. Now I’m genuinely curious what you make of it and how you see the world differently—and why.)

Start with what’s even there

So, to put the whole thing as plainly as I can: this was and is never about closing a reality gap by announcing, “No, you’re wrong, and I’m right about everything.” Nobody likes that, and it doesn’t work anyway. It’s about finding the one thing the two of you can agree is real enough, for now, for the conversation about your actual idea to proceed.

This is the first and deepest of the three layers of positionality—what’s real, what you can know, and what you value. Reality is the one underneath the others. It’s what’s even there to talk about. Knowledge and value get built on top of it.

Once you’ve got a scoped definition of what’s real, the next question is how the two of you will agree you can know it. That’s epistemology, and it’s where I’ll pick this up next time.

For now, I’ll leave you with the question I most want answered:

Which of the three positions did you find yourself in while reading this — and did it surprise you?

Do you believe that reality is out there and we’ll get to one true answer if we keep working?
Or that reality is as good as we can measure and make sense of it until better information comes along?
Or that reality is simply what we make of it?
Or, like me, did you find yourself in some combination that feels more real to you than any one of them alone?

Let me know!

Until next time,

Tamsen

Go Deeper

A few places to dig in, if you want the thinking under this one.

If you want the actual map of these positions, beyond my fit-for-purpose simplification, read Egon Guba and Yvonna Lincoln, “Competing Paradigms in Qualitative Research” (1994). It lays positivism, post-positivism, and constructivism (plus a couple I didn’t get into) side by side as stances on what’s real and how we know it.

If you want the psychology of why we skip the defining step in the first place, read Erika Weisz, “Are You a Naïve Realist?” (Nautilus, 2022), on Lee Ross’s naive realism: the bias that convinces us our own view of reality is simply the objective one. (The original scholarly source is Ross and Ward, “Naive Realism in Everyday Life,” 1995.)

If you want the case that there’s a real world we each see only partly, which is roughly where I stand, read Joseph Maxwell, A Realist Approach for Qualitative Research (2012).

And if you’re curious about the phenomenon in my opening story, that sudden reorganization of how someone sees something, read Becker, Sommer, and Cabeza, “Insight Predicts Subsequent Memory via Cortical Representational Change and Hippocampal Activity” (2025), which watches it happen in the brain.