Using Disagreements for Superordinate Frame Configuration

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Intractable disagreements

As an urban planner, Donald Schon (1) provides a remarkable review of the reasons for intractable policy controversies, resistant to evidence, and unlikely to be settled by compromise. Any "agreement" negotiated is then unlikely to hold, since implementing such an agreement usually gives rise to new conditions of disagreement. This was ignored in the Earth Summit (Rio de Janeiro, June 1992) pursuit of environment/development agreements charted by Jim MacNeill (2). Conventional reasons for such differences are emotion, values or politics. Schon argues that these are "junk categories" -- a category that can be used to explain phenomena that are poorly understood, without needing to question the validity of one's own approach. In his view these categories rest upon false dichotomies due to distortions of reason.