I seldom find argumentative discussions to be useful for generating new ideas, which is why I tend to avoid them. But my work spans a pretty wide range of fields, and people need less training to be able to think usefully about some of them than others. When I'm struggling with ideas about high-level cognition, I find it useful to talk to an old friend of mine who's a social psychologist. I find that the training that he has, even though it's pretty unconnected to my research, is enough that I can explain where I'm coming from rapidly enough for a useful discussion to happen. But if I'm fighting with some math, the set of people that are going to be able to usefully discuss it with me is a lot smaller. Some disciplines are flatter, while in some you need much more background before you can get started.

Either way though, arguing is usually pretty useless.