Abstract

People disagree. Along with doubt, modesty and curiosity, disagreement is one of the most valuable assets reasoning beings can have. Disagreements give us alternatives. Sometimes we need to decide among alternatives. This paper is for such times; it addresses the development of a rational model for the resolution of disagreement. The goal is to reach rational agreement, or to reach the stage at which disagreement can be clearly described and turned over to rational consensus theories. A rarely noticed problem with all such rational consensus models is that they do not provide for generating either rational agreement or clearly described disagreement before turning to procedures designed to produce consensus. One purpose of this paper is to close that gap.