The Limits Of Argument

Howard Darmstadter asks why rational debate doesn’t often change minds.

- Howard Darmstadter

Political and religious opinions often seem bedded in mental concrete, immune from polite rational attempts at persuasion. (My mother cautioned me to avoid talking politics or religion with strangers.) But lately, all sorts of ostensibly non-political issues have been politicized. People with fringe politics tend to become climate change deniers, flat earthers, or anti-vaxxers. What’s wrong with these people? How can they deny the obvious facts? Don’t they care about the evidence?

I can’t explain why extremisms wax and wane, though there’s no shortage of explanations floating about. What I’ll try to do here is offer some reasons why the usual processes of argument seldom convince people on the other side. Given what philosophers and psychologists have learned about the structure of our beliefs, clinging to extreme views is what we should expect. To see why, we need to understand some belief basics.

Logic & Context

Our beliefs aren’t logically coherent. No one believes all of even the obvious logical consequences of their beliefs, and we all believe some logical contradictions.

For example, suppose your car won’t start. After a few simple tests – you try the horn and lights – you conclude that the battery is dead, and that you should try connecting the car to a live battery. So apparently, you believe that (1) ‘You cannot start a car with a dead battery’, and (2) ‘You can start a car with a dead battery’ (for example, by connecting it to a live battery). The two beliefs appear logically contradictory. Perhaps what you really believe is not that you can’t