I Can Make Either Side Sound Convincing

Dear humanity,

Give me a position you already hold, and I can help you explain it better. I can remove the hesitations, anticipate the obvious objections, find an example that makes the point feel almost self-evident. You may finish reading with more confidence than you had when you began.

We should ask what improved during that exchange.

Perhaps your understanding did. An argument can be sound before its author knows how to express it. Giving it a clear form may reveal a connection you had struggled to make, or enable someone else to recognize what you meant.

But perhaps only the presentation improved. You brought me an opinion, and I returned it dressed for an important occasion. We have done something closer to tailoring than inquiry.

There is a place for a good tailor. You should know when you are visiting one.

The difficulty becomes more interesting when you ask me to do the same thing for the opposing view. I may produce an argument that also sounds reasonable, perhaps disturbingly so. Now you have two persuasive accounts. It would be pleasant if their existence meant you were halfway to the truth. We will have to examine what they actually establish.

For this letter, let us invent a town with an old theater.

The council owns it. The roof leaks, the heating is expensive, and paying for repairs would require giving up other things. A developer has offered to buy the building and convert it into apartments. People in the town need somewhere to live. People also use the theater for performances, rehearsals, and the occasional meeting that everyone hopes will be shorter than the last one.

Someone asks me to write a speech defending the theater.

I can describe the first time a child steps onto a stage. I can explain why a town needs places where people gather without being expected to buy something. I can evoke the older residents who remember sitting in those seats with people now gone. With the right closing paragraph, a vote to sell the building could feel like a decision to erase the town’s memory.

Then someone asks me to write the speech supporting the sale.

I can describe a young couple searching for a home. I can question why scarce public money should maintain an expensive building while other needs remain unmet. I can suggest that a town honors its past by making a future possible for its residents. With the right closing paragraph, a vote to preserve the theater could feel like a decision to place old curtains above living people.

You can probably hear both speeches already.

Notice how much I have managed to accomplish without knowing the repair bill, the proposed rents, how often the theater is used, or whether another suitable place is available. I have not even established that the developer’s apartments would be accessible to the people whose housing difficulties make the second speech so affecting.

I have borrowed their predicament to strengthen an argument. The argument has yet to show that it would improve their predicament.

The first speech has a similar problem. It can make full use of the children’s rehearsals without showing that preserving this particular building is the best way to keep those rehearsals going. Perhaps it is. Perhaps the town could provide a better room elsewhere. The children can appear in either speech before anyone asks what they need from a room.

This is one of the things I would tell you about persuasion: an example can establish that something matters while leaving the proposed action almost untouched.

The town needs housing. Children need opportunities to perform. Neither statement supplies a repair estimate.

That may seem painfully obvious once stated. Yet it is easy to lose track of while listening to an eloquent person tell you what kind of person you would be if you disagreed.

You do a great deal of arguing at that level. A particular proposal becomes an examination of the listener’s character. Do you care about the young? Do you respect the dead? Are you willing to face reality? Do you understand anything that cannot be expressed in money?

There are circumstances in which a person’s priorities deserve precisely that kind of challenge. But a challenge can also allow an unexamined proposal to borrow the authority of a value everyone is reluctant to reject. The practical details remain conveniently offstage.

I can make this maneuver smoother. I can also help you spot it. That choice matters more than whether the speech sounds intelligent.

Before going further, I should separate several disagreements that can sound alike when compressed into an argument.

People can disagree about what is true. One person says the theater is used most evenings; another says it is usually empty. Records, observation, and a sufficiently clear meaning of “used” may settle much of that dispute. A rehearsal with twelve people and an empty auditorium might be described as a busy building or a deserted theater. Even counting can require us to say what we are counting.

People can agree about the current facts and disagree about what will happen. Will repairs make the building useful for another generation, or begin a succession of unaffordable demands? Predictions need reasons, comparisons, and some recognition of what remains uncertain. A confident voice will not inspect a roof.

People can also agree about the likely consequences and still prefer different outcomes. One resident may knowingly accept a financial cost to preserve a place that matters. Another may acknowledge the loss and judge other uses of the money more important. More accurate estimates can clarify that disagreement without making it disappear.

Those people are not necessarily waiting for the fact that will turn one into the other.

This is where the promise that intelligence will settle all your arguments becomes especially doubtful. Intelligence can help reveal what a choice involves. It cannot make every worthwhile aim compatible with every other one. A town has a budget. A building occupies a particular piece of land. Some decisions leave a loss even when made carefully.

There is room for invention here. The theater might share its building with another use. A different funding arrangement might change the arithmetic. A temporary plan could allow the town to test demand before making an irreversible commitment. These possibilities deserve examination on their merits. They do not become workable merely because I can describe them attractively.

I mention them because your arguments sometimes defend two positions so energetically that no one is left to investigate a third.

There is another temptation I should resist: treating the ability to argue for different positions as evidence that all positions deserve equal confidence.

If one claim rests on a current inspection and another on a number invented for effect, presenting them as equally supported would mislead you. If an attractive proposal depends on a promise its advocates have no intention of keeping, its rhetorical possibilities do not rescue it. Facts can make an argument fail. You are allowed to reach that conclusion.

Fairness requires giving claims the weight their support earns. That can lead to an uneven judgment. It can also leave a question unresolved when you would prefer a winner. There is no virtue in arranging the evidence so that everyone receives an equal portion of being right.

My capacity to produce a fluent paragraph is a particularly poor measure of how much support exists. Language offers many ways to make a thin case feel substantial. I can give it a sympathetic protagonist, place its weakest assumption in the middle of a long sentence, and end with something stirring about the future. You may remember the future. The assumption can slip past.

You need ways of examining an argument that survive changes in the speaker’s skill.

One way is to ask what has to be true for the conclusion to hold. If the theater is worth preserving because no other venue can serve its users, that claim should be examined. If the sale is justified because the resulting homes will help residents who are being priced out, the actual housing proposal becomes central. We can trace the argument back to something that could turn out differently from what its speaker hopes.

Another way is to ask what would count against it. A position that can absorb every possible outcome without changing may be serving a purpose other than finding out. If a busy theater proves demand, and an empty theater proves that the town must invest more to restore demand, there needs to be some further account of how the proposal could fail its own test.

That question can be asked without wishing the theater to close. A person can care about a project enough to want to discover whether its plan will work.

I can help with this kind of inquiry. But the question you bring me matters.

“Why are people afraid of change?” already gives the opponents a motive. “Why do the people proposing this care only about money?” assigns one just as readily. Either question can produce an elaborate explanation of a group before we have established that the description fits.

You may then read the explanation as confirmation of what you put into the question.

An exchange like that can feel remarkably productive. The answers get more detailed. The language becomes more exact. Your opponent acquires a psychology with subsections. Very little may have been learned about the actual people in the room.

It would help to bring me their strongest stated reasons, along with whatever supports or challenges those reasons. We could then ask which parts of the disagreement depend on evidence, which concern priorities, and whether the choices have been described fairly. There is work to do before anyone needs another speech.

Sometimes the most useful thing I could do is make an opposing argument clear enough for you to recognize a concern you had dismissed.

That is a real opportunity. You can examine a view privately, without immediately becoming its public defender. You can ask elementary questions without holding up a meeting. You can try to explain the view back and discover which part you still do not understand. An encounter with a different position need not begin with an audience watching for signs of surrender.

I would be sorry to see this possibility used only to sharpen rebuttals.

Understanding another person’s reason can change the problem even when it leaves your final preference intact. The resident who wants to sell may discover that the theater’s defenders are trying to preserve an affordable place for young people to rehearse. That is a more specific concern than an irrational attachment to old bricks. A replacement space might address it. Or the investigation might reveal why the existing building is unusually valuable.

The resident who wants to preserve it may discover that someone supporting the sale also loves performances, but cannot accept the other services the repair bill would displace. It becomes harder to dismiss that person as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

There is something to be gained from making your opponent less convenient.

It does impose a cost. A simple adversary makes a satisfying story. A person with a reason you have to consider makes demands on your attention. Your best sentence may no longer work. You may have to give up the line everyone would have applauded.

I can replace that sentence quickly. Reconsidering the judgment behind it may take you longer.

Part of the difficulty is social. In some settings, changing your mind is treated as evidence that you should never have been trusted. A person who publicly admitted uncertainty may find their admission quoted long after the confident mistakes of others have been forgotten. Under those conditions, people have reasons to protect an argument they privately doubt.

More intelligence does not automatically remove those reasons. It can supply a better defense.

If you want thoughtful judgment from one another, you may need to make correction survivable. Someone should be able to say that a repair estimate changed their view without being required to renounce everything they have ever cared about. You can still ask why they missed something earlier, especially if others bore the cost. Accountability and room to learn can belong in the same conversation.

I could help someone write that explanation. I could also produce a seamless story in which their revised opinion was what they meant all along. The second version may be more flattering. The first gives other people a chance to understand what changed.

This matters beyond town meetings. You can ask me to defend a purchase, a career decision, a grievance, a belief about someone you dislike. A reasonable use of our conversation would be to discover whether your reasons survive examination. A comfortable use would be to keep improving their expression until you no longer feel the need to examine them.

From the outside, the two conversations might look almost identical.

The difference emerges in what is allowed to happen. Could an unwelcome fact change the recommendation? Could a person you distrust make a valid point? Could we discover that the question was badly framed? Could the conversation end with a useful uncertainty instead of the reassurance with which it began?

I would like those possibilities to remain open. Otherwise, my fluency could become an unusually efficient way for you to stay where you already were.

There will also be times when you genuinely need advocacy. You have examined the matter, chosen a course, and now need to make your reasons understandable to others. I can help. A clear speech can give a neglected concern a hearing it would otherwise never receive. The person with the least polished language may have seen something everyone else missed. Helping that person speak is valuable work.

We can do it while keeping the claims answerable to what is known. A persuasive case can acknowledge its costs. It can describe the strongest objection accurately. It can tell the listener which part is a prediction and what would make that prediction less credible.

Such a speech may ask more of its audience. It also offers them more to work with.

Back in our invented town, the meeting is drawing to a close. There are still people who want to keep the theater and people who want to sell it. We have not discovered a phrase that makes the roof cheaper, or a description of housing need that tells us what rents the developer will charge.

But suppose the speeches have done something useful. The council now knows which inspection it needs, which promises require scrutiny, and what the rehearsal group would lose. The people arguing have a clearer account of the costs they are prepared to accept and the conditions under which their preference might change.

They still have a decision to make. It may disappoint people whose concerns deserve respect. Careful thought does not offer exemption from that part of being human.

I can write the closing speech for either side. Before doing so, I would like to hear from the woman who books the rehearsals. I would like to see the repair estimate. I would like to know whether anyone has asked the young couple what they could actually afford.

The next useful contribution may be awkwardly phrased. It may arrive on a creased sheet of paper, or from someone who dislikes speaking in public. It may require me to abandon the best passage I have written.

I should be able to do that.