Comparing disambiguated views

I’ve been writing about disambiguation and the high-dimensionality of superficially low-dimensional phenomena like abortion. 

The continuum from pro-life to pro-choice can be visualized as a single dimension. 

But it’s probably more helpful to think of one’s position on abortion as high-dimensional. It’s composed of your views on questions like “when does life begin?” and “how much should we value the preferences of the would-be mother?” We can say that your positions on those dimensions project to a position on the single pro-life/pro-choice dimension. 

We can disambiguate one person’s views this way, and we can also disambiguate a second person’s views this way. And we can map both of their views onto a single graph. 

For many issues, this would go a long way towards getting two people to understand one another and to disagree productively rather than unproductively. 

We could also compare one person’s actual views with what the other person thinks that person’s views must be. This type of misunderstanding/ambiguity is responsible for a lot of unproductive disagreement.