You are correct. The chaos that results is due to misaligned understandings of what these two words mean in each participating discussion member's head. It's a

You are correct. The chaos that results is due to misaligned understandings of what these two words mean in each participating discussion member's head. It's advantageous to define what these two things mean up front for your team before engaging in debate in this spirit. In my experience, defining strength of opinion as confidence in coverage of potentially relevant circumstances and defining looseness of holding as eagerness to identify blindspots in that coverage can help dissipate some of the toxicity.