Guide to Better Arguments, Step 2: Do Your Homework

In my first post for this series, I argued that step 1 to having better arguments was to assume the humanity of others. You may notice that this post follows the pattern of being about things that happen before or outside if an actual argument. This is on purpose, of course. Indeed, one of the big problems in contemporary arguments is that we have a tendency to simply enter into them. Or perhaps we are drawn into them.  The fast-paced nature of modern information causes issues to seemingly appear instantly, and we have learned through experience that if we don't jump in fast, we'll be left behind.

Because of this, we have the unfortunate and problematic habit of entering conversations before we're really prepared to. There are things that need to happen before we begin arguing. The first was based on the idea that we should develop the right attitude. This one is a more practical matter. Step 2 is that we should resist the temptation to join an argument that we are not prepared for, and instead when an issue arises that we feel demands our response, we should begin by doing our homework.

In an interview with Princeton Press about his book On Bullshit, philosopher Harry Frankfurt suggests that:

It's a widespread view in a democratic society that a responsible citizen ought to have an opinion about everything. Well you can't know very much about everything, and so your opinions are likely to be based upon bullshit.

 Frankfurt describes nicely a prevalent problem that leads to some very bad arguing. That is that we tend to think that we must enter every important conversation. We think this is true even if it turns out that we don't know very much about a topic. We do some quick views of news clips, perhaps follow a few links we find on social media, and we quickly form an opinion while the iron is still hot. If we want to avoid the problems this creates, we have to learn to so our homework. This seems obvious, but it requires some specific commitments.

Even before we begin, we must do our homework with the right attitude. We tend to form an opinion quickly, then begin looking for information that backs up what we already believe. This is a terrible way to research, but it's without question the most common way. To do this is to weaponize knowledge--it's gathering ammo to use against your opponents. Knowledge should be a peacemaker. Instead, when you research, research to learn. Instead of starting with an opinion that needs to be supported, start with a question. Start with a desire to understand a complex and difficult issue. Then research with the following commitments in mind.

1. Wait to form an opinion for as long as possible.

The British Psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion adapted John Keats's concept of "negative capability," referring to the concept as "the ability to tolerate the pain and confusion of not knowing, rather than imposing ready-made or omnipotent certainties upon an ambiguous situation" (Meg Harris Williams: The Aesthetic Development). When teaching student writers, I described this as the ability to put off forming a solid opinion for as long as possible in order to evaluate all the available evidence and interpretations. This is indeed uncomfortable for us. We feel the need to know how we feel about something right now. This is especially true in contemporary culture where we have a tendency to define ourselves by our politics. We think that our opinions are central to who we are. But if we are arguing better, we must begin thinking better. This means thinking longer.

My best real-world example of this is that in 2014, after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri, I was often asked for my opinion. I was, after all, a police supervisor. I was and am, arguably, an expert on police use of force. In fact, evaluating police uses of force and offering recommendations about them to police command staff is one of my primary responsibilities. On the other hand, I knew about this shooting only through news reports and media stories, just like everyone else. And I knew nothing about the offender, officer, department, or city where it happened. So when I was asked for my opinion, I would tell people that I didn't know much about it and therefore could not speak to this particular case. I would sometimes offer some philosophical and ethical thoughts on police use of force in general, but I would not speak on this case in particular until I felt like I had done a lot of homework. I read everything I could find. I read books about the so-called militarization of policing, and read both investigations into the event done by Eric Holder's Department if Justice. I did not publish a written opinion of the Ferguson incident for more that two years.

I don't suggest that everyone should refuse to have an opinion on any issue for two years. But I would suggest that people ought to have a meaningful commitment to evaluating an issue in long-form before forming an opinion and certainly before arguing with others about it.

This might mean, unfortunately, that when an important argument begins, you may have to decide to sit this one out. But fear not; if it's an important issue and a real problem, the subject will come up again (after all, here we are talking about police shootings again, six years after Ferguson). And next time, you'll speak as one with authority because you've actually done the work and taken the time to sit with the issue. In the meantime, it is okay to say that you don't know enough about something to speak on it.

2. Read deep and wide

One very unfortunate consequence of our social media lives is that we are prone to build echo chambers for ourselves, where the other people in our feed tend to look, sound like, and think like us. When we have those errant friends from our old lives whose opinions are irritating to us, we may put up with them for a while, but when we've had enough, we hide or unfriend them. Because of this habit, we can end up being surrounded by opinions just like our own almost all of the time. This makes opinions different than our own seem even less natural and less reasonable to us. We assume that most people, or at least most reasonable people, think like we do, and this makes other views seem even more foreign and clearly wrong. 

This causes us to naturalize our own views, and because our views seem self-evident, we begin to assume that people who argue views other than our own must be either politically motivated to knowingly lie, or they must be evil. This, of course, is a huge violation of Step 1. 

This is only one of the reasons why you should read as widely as possible. Read multiple viewpoints, multiple presentations and interpretations of data, and read not just in the narrow issue you're interested in, but also some in the issues surrounding it (for example when researching inequities in public education, you may end up also reading about the history of urban sprawl and about school funding methods). This helps you to understand the complexity of the issue. Read people who you think you agree with and people you think you disagree with, and remember to assume their humanity. If they make arguments you think you disagree with, examine the ethical system that causes them to feel the way they do. You may find that their concerns are legitimate and in so doing find some common ground.

When you read a source, use this trick taught by Peter Elbow: read the source once as a believer and once as a doubter. This will help you to both read assuming the authors humanity and to read critically.

3. Evaluate your sources.

I suspect that people know that not all sources are created equal. But navigating these sources is not as easy as it may seem. People have a hard time knowing which sources are valuable and which are not. People are getting better (believe it or not) at recognizing sources that are trash. It may not always seem so, but we have come a long way since a fellow student in my freshman composition class thought that it was illegal to post untrue information on the internet (in fairness to her, in those days, most of us had never used the internet when we got to college except maybe to flirt in a chat room).

I'm afraid that many people evaluate sources based on whether or not they share their political, religious, or other view points. I hope that we can learn that this is not a valid way to judge a source. Instead, we need to learn to evaluate all sources critically and to decide how much value to place on each source. We can do this by evaluating several things about it. The first being a source's use of evidence. Sources handle evidence differently and for different purposes, and not everyone who presents data in a text understands how data works.

While its not actually true that "you can make statistics mean whatever you want them to mean," it is also not true that any form of data speaks for itself. Data is tricky. It must be controlled and carefully interpreted. Knowing how to take raw data and make sense of it is a specialty and it takes training. Though this is not entirely fool-proof and within each of these categories there is a wide range of quality, for the most part this hierarchy will help guide you: a TV news story is better than a tweet by a politician; a print news article is better than a TV news story; a piece by an expert is better than a print news story; a peer-reviewed academic essay is better ran a piece by an expert (although writing by an expert will usually rely on academic research). Again, this is not fool-proof, but it's based on each level of media's ability to give fuller detail, a commitment to verifiable data, and an understanding of how to interpret data. Understanding how these sources works will help you know how much weight to give each source. For example, it is common for news paper articles to present data, often that they have themselves collected. This is generally well-meaning enough (no matter what media-haters think) but news paper writers tend to present data as if it speaks for itself and as if it is self-evidently objective. This is not because they are trying to trick you or because they have an "agenda." It's simply because journalists are rarely trained as researchers. They are writers, and are not often trained to properly control data or to interpret it. 

Beyond this, when you are evaluating a source you should ask if the organization publishing it has specific goals in mind, who the author is and how they are trained, what the writer's motivations seem to be, where the data the author uses came from (which may mean that you have to go evaluate yet another source). Be especially cautious when reading people you agree with. Just because you agree with them in principal does not mean that their argument is valid, or that they are treating data fairly. Be willing to disregard someone you agree with but who came to their conclusions unethically or illogically. Using them in your argument will weaken your argument and make you seem less reasonable. 

4. Consider all your opinions to be tentative.

While you should be very slow to form your opinions, you should be quick to notice when they need adjustment. Be willing to complicate your own opinions or even to change them entirely when you encounter new evidence that challenges what you thought you knew. I firmly believe that we need to normalize people changing their minds. Too often, when someone changes their mind, we accuse them of being fickle, or weak, or "saying whatever the audience wants to hear." Our ability to record and retain texts for much longer makes this problem worse. We love to confront people with old recordings or writings where they contradict themselves. We point it out as hypocrisy. This needs to change. We need to make it normal and honorable for people to change their minds.

What would help this is a commitment to transparency in our communication. When we change our mind, we shouldn't do so slyly or try to pretend that we've alway felt this way. We should be willing to say "I used to believe this, but then I learned this, and that caused me to rethink the issue." Likewise, if you don't know something, be willing to say "I don't know, and so I don't have an opinion right now." I sometimes like to start sentences with, "I don't know if I believe myself, but I think _______." 

Finally, our commitment to truth and to proper action must outweigh our desire to be right. It must outweigh our desire for political or social standing. It must be more important than getting our way, or teaching so and so a lesson, or any other personal, selfish goal. We have to stop seeing argument as a game to win, and start seeing it as a way to come to better understanding and better solutions.