An inside group who understand and an outside who cannot

When disagreement is recast as a failure to comprehend, the argument has been closed rather than won.

Real fields have technical language, and using it is not a warning sign: precise vocabulary exists because ordinary words are ambiguous, and any serious subject develops some. The pattern is different. It is the claim that disagreement can only come from not having understood, so that critics are not people with a different reading of the evidence but people who have failed to grasp the material. Once that move is made, no criticism can land, because every criticism is pre-classified as a symptom of the critic's limitations.

This is often accompanied by a sense of membership, and by the flattering suggestion that the audience has crossed a threshold others have not. That feeling is very effective and worth noticing in yourself. It works because it is pleasant, not because it is evidence. The genuine test is whether an informed objection can be stated in a form the speaker accepts as fair. If every version of the objection is rejected as a misunderstanding, no version was ever going to be accepted.

The contrast with healthy expert communities is instructive. In those, the sharpest critics tend to be insiders, disagreement is normal and often public, and being corrected by a colleague is an ordinary Tuesday rather than a betrayal. Where you find a body of knowledge whose adherents are unanimous, and whose only critics are described as outsiders who could not follow it, you are usually looking at something other than a field of study, whatever its vocabulary suggests.