I am increasingly of the opinion that everything ultimately comes down to psychological traits and, from there, the epistemic frameworks through which we think (which are also heavily reliant on psychological traits)

I have been expressing a lot of frustration about the conflict between “points, ethical frameworks, arguments’ people and ‘vibes, narratives, feelings” people recently. Obviously, I am very biased towards the first one and this can be inadequate when something requires having an intuitive sense of how people are feeling about things and the framing heuristic they are using. This causes them to inform me that I am missing the point. I cannot see the wood for the trees, etc.

However, on a more fundamental level when discussing what the material reality is of a political or cultural issue and what we should do about it, focusing on specific details specifically, running them through coherent ethical frameworks and making arguments really is the useful thing.

When we are looking at someone’s stance on what we consider a societal problem and that person disagrees with us about whether it really is a problem, what kind of problem it is and what we should do about it, it is as though we are looking a machine.

To the ‘points/frameworks/argument person, that machine is not working. It is not fit for purpose. They are trying to break the machine down into clear component parts so its possible to identify the malfunctioning bits, fix them and put the machine back together in a way that works properly and long-term. That is how they frame their argument - by showing the component parts and testing whether a bit of it (a truth claim, proposition, principle) works by looking at it specifically, demonstrating that it does not work, showing how this will lead to injustice and/or bad outcomes and arguing to replace it with something else that is ethical and/or productive of good outcomes.

The vibes/narratives/feelings person does not like this. They take in a general sense of the criticism but do not address the point or the way it functions in the system specifically. Instead they present you with the whole machine again but they have reframed it in such a way that the broken bit you have identified is less visible or is somehow compensated for by other working parts which don’t actually fix the flaw. They ask you to accept this recobbled together version of the same machine. But the flaw is still there so it still doesn’t work and isn’t even coherent in itself and will break down again as soon as it is stress tested.