This paper aims to investigate the pragmatic features and strategies of disagreement in contemporary spoken Romanian, on the basis of authentic data. Disagreement will be regarded in its cooperative dimension, considering that all types of genuine, bona fide communication involve various stages in establishing an intellectual consensus. Special attention will be given to the main causes which generate communicative divergence: metalinguistic/metadiscursive (the dispute on the semantic/pragmatic use of language), dialectical (the debate of general ideas and principles) or factual (contradictory interpretation of facts). The paper shall try to formulate some general conclusions, in order to configure the profile of intellectual disagreement in Romanian society and to integrate it into an intercultural and anthropological perspective.