I'm here for the sharing, not the snobery

+1 OP

I’m in an argumentative field, and it’s very tricky to have discussions where someone wants to argue for something (prove their point) while also remaining civil. As we've seen in the wider world, without trust no fact can stand and no argument can win. Trust and care for others' dignity is the one indispensable ingredient to constructive dialogue. 

Debates and arguments remain civil in my field when people remain intellectually and emotionally open to the idea that they’re wrong, they missed something, or there’s an entirely other way to frame or approach the question.

It also helps to be as explicit as possible about what the goal sought is; that way, people are not arguing at cross purposes (i.e., for different goals).

(I don’t really understand @oldhvy’s post about not needing to "prove" things. Anyone who gives or asks for reasons is engaged in proof. His issue, I suspect has to do with people aggressively or relentlessly insisting that they’re right. Which is different.)

@cleeds  I'm in philosophy.

@artemus_5  "One of the problem on any forum or discussion is "facts". Everyone is interested in the "FACTS" But facts actually say nothing until their interpretation. There is where the disagreement starts."

Excellent point. Sometimes it starts even earlier, since the question of *which* facts are relevant is an interpretive move which precedes the selection of facts. In conversations about religion this is sometimes called "proof texting" or, more generically, "cherry-picking." It's not about whether something is or is not a fact; it's about whether (as the Brits pointed out about US foreign policy a decade ago) the facts were being selected to suit the policy.

@erik_squires 
"We need to give more people latitude when they make a subjective statement, as personal taste and value systems can't be argued."

I have seen my own value systems argued against here and it has helped me. I said, at one point, that I valued a lot of clarity in the upper end. People questioned whether I liked "brightness" or "accuracy." I realized that I was not clear in my own mind about what I actually valued. So, them questioning me about my own senses and what I thought I valued helped me reconsider my own subjective "certainties." They were, it turns out, wrong. The result was that I got clearer about what I should value, instead.

That was a lesson for me, both about vocabulary and fineness of sensations. That's the hard part for a lot of people -- there IS such a thing about arguing about taste, at the very least, to help someone else discover what they sense, what they call it, and how that experience should factor into a larger, composite experience. (Just watch a parent try to get a kid to enjoy a vegetable. Part of the challenge is to get them to abandon certain predilections about what food *should* taste like. They are just too narrow and their tastes need to be expanded.
As an audio correlate, look at posts about how many, less expensive B&W speakers are bright; this quality helps make a fast impression, but for those who know more, it lacks some of the "sophistication" of other (better) speakers. That is about the sugar-high of brightness being taken as (subjectively) better than the air, clarity, non-fatiguing implementation of other speakers.