The differing positions that people take on issues arise from their individual histories, from the history of the culture(s) and identities they inhabit, and from their stakeholder positions. Since reality may be perceived differently by people who occupy different social and political positions, people may paint very different pictures of that reality.

Depictions of a state of affairs are often called “conjectures” in rhetoric. These conjectures are not just the claims that people make about a particular issue, but the underlying beliefs and assumptions that help them make these statements about “the way things are.”

When parties to an argument hold different conjectures about the way the world works, this difference may contribute to their inability to agree. For example, a conservative politician might conjecture that people are poor because they don’t want to work hard, while a liberal politician might conjecture that people are poor because for reasons beyond their individual control (say, the economy or the low minimum wage) they have been unable to find good work. A socialist, on the other hand, might conjecture that people are poor under capitalism because capitalism mandates that wealth be unequally distributed.

Conjectures are often tied to determining the “facts” of a situation, but as you can see from this example, they do not exactly establish the “truth” or “fact” of the issue under discussion; rather, they represent an educated guess about what might be, or what might have occurred—and unearth some of the assumptions about why.