In my experience, that assumption isn't in principle "unprovable" - the parties to the disagreement usually don't realize they're making such assumption in the first place! Switching positions can make the existence of that assumption apparent to all, and if people involved are intellectually honest and discussing in good faith, it's pretty much impossible for their disagreement to remain as strong as it was before.
> Personally, I prefer having convictions and sticking to them.
Good point about competing interests and "reducing to something manageable". I prefer "strong opinions weakly held", but in practice, I embrace the natural inertia of beliefs. I.e. I don't consider me already believing something to be strong evidence the belief is true (i.e. "having convictions") - but the stronger a belief is, or more high-impact changing it would be (e.g. suddenly feeling a moral compulsion to upend my entire life), the more evidence and time I need to change my mind.
This may be also a dumber and less admirable strategy, but it's effectively a low-pass filter on evidence: it saves me from changing my mind every other day, and suffering the costs (including cognitive dissonance if I plain override my beliefs for sake of quality of life).
It is a rather offensive way to portray the world. All the questions, all the puzzles, all the mystery, everything has been answered and further investigation frowned upon. They would have to again defend their chosen "truth", they would have to question everything!
Not what I was conveying. There's a place for nuance, but from my experience in practice, being able to be decisive is more useful than contemplating and questioning. Not to say I avoid the latter (what are we doing right now?) or that it isn't useful, but the times at which it's really needed are few and far between
It's surprising how often intelligent people get into what feels like a protracted argument when the underlying disagreement is semantic.
The moment you identify the charged term, which may have gone unsaid to that point, and expand it to cover what everyone's trying to express, it tends to be that both sides--having come to the discussion informed and intelligent--were right. Just not universally.
Most unresolved disagreements I know of are because the groups disagree on some unprovable underlying assumption. Switching positions on it doesn't make the beliefs stronger or weaker
Being able to believe something and stick to it, regardless of challenges from competing interests or forms of coercion: that's more valuable in practice than being more reconciliatory