Wilbur, the elder, explained why arguing was so important to them: No truth is without some mixture of error, and no error so false but that it possesses no element of truth. If a man is in too big a hurry to give up an error, he is liable to give up some truth with it, and in accepting the arguments of the other man he is sure to get some errors with it. Honest argument is merely a process of mutually picking the beams and motes out of each other’s eyes so both can see clearly…

Open disagreement is associated with personal animus, stress and futility, partly because we see so many toxic fights on social media. Thanks to the popularisation of research into the flaws of human cognition, we’ve also become increasingly aware of how hard it is to argue without ‘biases’, such as the tendency to pick a side and stick to it rather than weighing evidence for different views dispassionately. It can be tempting, then, to avoid open argument altogether, but this merely transforms our differences into sullen resentment, while depriving us of a powerful tool of enquiry. An alternative is to propose that, when debates do take place, they should be fastidiously civil, emotionally detached and unimpeachably rational.

the Wright brothers didn’t argue politely or dutifully. They took delight in verbal combat, throwing themselves into every battle. ‘Orv’s a good scrapper,’ said Wilbur, fondly. In another letter, Wilbur chastised a friend for being too reasonable: ‘I see you are back to your old trick of giving up before you are half-­beaten in an argument,’ he wrote. ‘I felt pretty certain of my own ground but was anticipating the pleasure of a good scrap before the matter was settled.’

The French evolutionary psychologists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have offered an intriguing answer to this question. If our reasoning capacity is so bad at helping us as individuals figure out the truth, they say, that’s because truth­-seeking isn’t its function. Instead, human reason evolved because it helps us to argue more effectively.

In most studies, the Wason Selection Task is completed by individuals working alone. What happens when you ask a group to solve it? That’s what David Moshman and Molly Geil, of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, wanted to find out. They assigned the task to psychology students, either as individuals, or in groups of half a dozen. As a third condition, some individuals were given the test alone, and then joined a group. The results were dramatic: the success rate of groups was 75 per cent, compared with 9 per cent for individuals.

I’ve also sat at tables when different individuals fight their corner, sometimes beyond the point that seems reasonable to do so. That kind of debate can be enormously productive; it can also, of course, tip over into an ego battle that generates more heat than light. Over centuries, we’ve developed processes and institutions to stabilise the volatility of disagreement while unlocking its benefits, modern science being the foremost example. It’s also possible to create these conducive conditions ourselves, as the Wikipedians and the Wrights show us.

The first condition, of course, is to openly disagree.

A second condition is that the debate should be allowed to become passionate without becoming a shouting match.

Third, the members of the group must share a common goal