Do Arguments Change Minds?

Arguments aren’t just for debates and courtrooms—they shape how we think, persuade, and make decisions every day. In this episode, we break down the basics of constructing and evaluating arguments, revealing why good reasoning is essential for cutting through misinformation and bad logic. Whether you're making a case at work, debating politics, or just trying to win an argument at the dinner table, understanding how arguments work gives you an edge, tune in to sharpen your thinking and learn how to spot (and avoid) logical traps. We'll also look at Peirce's four methods for fixing our beliefs. 

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Transcript

Imagine you're in a car dealership. You've done some online research and you know exactly what kind of car you want. But as soon as you start talking to the salesperson, you feel like you're on the ropes. Every reason you give for wanting a certain car, they counter with a smooth argument for something else. Something better. Something more expensive. It's persuasive, and before you know it, you're actually considering the car you didn't even want to look at before.. What's going on here? Are you genuinely reconsidering your options, or are you just being strung along by some persuasive argument? Arguments have the power to persuade rather than force people to do what we want them to do. But what exactly are arguments and how do they work? Welcome back to American Socrates. I'm your host, Charles M. Rupert. Today, we're diving into arguments, not the kind where you shout at your cousin over Thanksgiving turkey or something, but the kind that guide us to better decision-making. We'll cover what makes an argument strong or weak, how to spot solid reasoning from clever tricks and most importantly, how to make sense of arguments in everyday life. Whether you're choosing a car or considering a new job or just debating with friends, understanding arguments can help you think for yourself. That is, it helps you make choices, choices that are ultimately yours and not someone else's. So to begin with, we need to know how to spot an argument in the wild. Then we can focus on breaking it down. Arguments are all about convincing us that something is right. They give us reasons to accept, believe, or maybe even do something. Take some sort of action. So they've got two key parts. First, there's the conclusion. That's the main point. Whatever it is we're supposed to be accepting or buying into or come to believe or the action that someone wants us to take. And then there are the premises. These are the statements that provide reasons. They back up the conclusion. There's always just one conclusion per argument. But you can throw in as many premises as you want to support it. Whole books are written with one conclusion, and the rest of the sentences are basically just premises. But at a minimum, there only needs to be one conclusion and one premise to constitute a full argument. So let's say you're looking at an argument and trying to figure out if it's solid. Step one will always, always, always be to identify what the conclusion is. You want to figure out what you're trying to be convinced of. If you know that, you're already halfway there. Since there's only one conclusion in any argument, it's always the easiest thing to look for. Now, that doesn't mean it's easy to find. We might call it the conclusion, but that doesn't mean that it comes at the end of the argument. It can come at the beginning. It can come in the middle. It can come at the end. In fact, authors sometimes leave it out entirely, allowing us to, quote, draw our own conclusions, so they say. To say then that all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, allows us to put our own two and two together, and that can be a powerful rhetorical device. But it does sometimes make logical analysis a tad trickier. Luckily, there are some helper words that we call indicators that are added only to signal to the listener that this is the conclusion. Words like thus. So, therefore, hints, consequently, or even some phrases like the implication is that, or this suggests strongly that, are used to point out the main claim being had in the argument. So that the reader doesn't miss it. Premises have clue words, too, like because or sense. When you see those words, they're likely setting up reasons to support the main claim. which is typically located close by, hence the indicator word. For example, if you were to say, you should read more books because reading helps sharpen mental focus, regardless of your age, we can use the indicator word because here to note that everything that comes after it is a premise. And so what comes before it must be the conclusion. So once you've got the conclusion, you know everything else is a premise, or it's perhaps something irrelevant. Although just like with the conclusion, people will sometimes leave out premises that are just too obvious to state. Stating them often sounds like we're talking down to somebody, so they just don't say them at all. To use that same example, to say Socrates is a man, therefore he's mortal, leaves out the important logical premise that all men are mortal. But everyone already knows that. There's not a reason to spell it out, at least not to an adult, right? They might think that you're insulting them. And so you just leave it out. So once you have the whole argument nailed down, conclusion first, then premises, and any implicit premises that you might need to add, you'd think you're ready to start analyzing the argument to see if it sounds good or if it's actually is good. But, unfortunatelyfortunately, we need to make sure it actually is an argument first, because there is something else out there that takes the exact same form of premise and conclusion, and that is an explanation. Before we start testing for validity or cogency, we need to make sure that we're not dealing with an explanation. The two are easy to mix up, but they play very different roles in reasoning, and so there's a way to tell them apart. Arguments and explanations look identical, so it takes a little practice to be able to tell which one you're dealing with at first. For example, here's an argument and an explanation. The sky is blue because it almost always appears blue when observed by people on Earth. The sky is blue because particles in the atmosphere scatter light in the blue spectrum more than in any other part of the spectrum. Now, if we just thought of these two statements as arguments, we'd have to consider if they are in opposition to each other. Are these somehow two different competing or contradictory theories? But these statements actually do different things. Now, any statement could serve as a conclusion of either an argument or an explanation, as in the case above, we were just saying, you know, where the statement was, the sky is blue. This is the conclusion in both the explanation and the argument. If we're making an argument, we might say the sky is blue because it's always appeared blue when observed by multiple people on Earth. That's giving a reason for people to accept or come to believe that the sky happens to be blue. If we're trying to give an explanation, though, we'd say that the sky is blue because particles in the atmosphere scatter blue light more than other parts of the spectrum. Here, we're not so much arguing that the sky is blue. We're explaining why the sky is blue, right? Rather than, say, yellow or red. In the second case, the explanation, we already agreed that they the sky is blue. We just want to understand how it is that it appears to be so, right? How has the sky come to be that way? An argument is like saying, Here's why you should believe that something is true. It's designed to give you reasons and evidence to accept a claim. Think of arguments as supporting a belief that something is there. case. An explanation is meant to show how or why behind something. Explanations try to reveal what's going on behind the scenes, what's causing something that we already accept to be the way that it is. They're not about trying to prove a point. They're about offering insight into something that we are ready to happen to believe. Let's try this again, with the conclusion Socrates is mortal. As an argument, Socrates is mortal because he's a man, and all men are mortal. That That argument gives us a logical reason to believe that Socrates is mortal. As an explanation, we might say Socrates is mortal, because he drank poison hemlock, which made him unable to support his own weight, causing his death by asphyxiation. That's an explanation. It's telling us why he died, or how he died, in terms of what physically happened to him. Now, just like arguments, we can evaluate explanations based on how logical they are, even if they don't aim to prove a point. Let's say we're trying to explain why the sky is blue. Consider these three possible explanations. First, great wizards from the mountain fortress of Xak Zaroth cast a spell of obscurity in the hue of blue over the sky every morning, and they take it down at night. 2. Our vision fades to blue as we look at things that are further away. The sky is very far away. And this is why things like distant mountains or distant skyscrapers can appear as sort of hazy blue that they're not when we get close up to them. Explanation number three. The prominent gas particles of nitrogen and oxygen in Earth's atmosphere scatter blue light more than the other gases. And as such, blue is the most prominent color in the sky. Now ask yourself, do all three of these explanations adequately explain why the sky is blue? Actually, yeah, yeah, they do. When you think about it, any one of them could be a proper explanation. But chances are you feel that the third explanation is actually the most likely. And you should ask yourself, why? Where does that feeling come from, this sense that this is the right explanation? Well,, this explanation is the most consistent with the other things you happen to believe. If you had believed in magic, then the first one wouldn't seem as implausible to your ears as it probably does.. But since you don't believe in wizards, magic spells, and secret mountain fortresses, this probably sounds far-fetched. The second explanation sounds much better, since we do see a sort of blue or purplish haze on distant objects, but we can rule that one out rather easily, since we do believe that we see the moon and the sun and stars, and all of those are farther away than the sky, and they all are not blue. So the third simply fits the best with all of the other things we believe, and that is how we judge it as an explanation. This is called abductive logic, where of all the hundreds of possible explanations for any given experience, we tend to automatically rule out the ones that seem inconsistent with everything else we already believe. This doesn't make them true, though. This just means our initial hypotheses are gravely biased by current beliefs and our current values. Keep that in mind the next time someone tells you that that sounds like crazy talk. It only sounds crazy because of the other things you happen to believe. The more conspiracy theories you tend to believe, the easier it gets to believe in even more outlandish stuff. Okay, so let's say we've found our conclusion, we found our premises. We've ruled out the possibility that this is an explanation, and we're finally sitting down with a genuine argument. It's finally time to start figuring out how to analyze it. Let's talk first about how we handle this sort of uncertainty. Charles Peirce, the philosopher and founder of pragmatism, had a fascinating take on it. He thought of our minds as constantly working to fix our beliefs, to settle on ideas that feel solid enough to guide our actions and relieve any doubt we have to be feeling. For Peirce, belief is like a mental acre. While doubt is what keeps us moving, pushing us to find answers that we feel are right, at least right for right now. And here's where Pers's ideas get interesting. He solved doubt and belief not just as two sides of the same coin, but as driving forces in a cycle. We question, we find beliefs that satisfy those questions. But if those beliefs eventually let us down, we go back to questioning, or Or is he called it inquiry? So what does that mean for our lives? Well, doubt and belief are two distinct experiences, almost like opposite poles. When we ask a question, we're in a state of doubt. When we make a statement, we're in a state of belief. Belief is comforting. It's like a guide steering our desires and our actions down. Doubt, though, is irritating. It's like an itch, and as a human being, you have to scratch it. Doubt can drive you crazy. But here's the interesting part. Doubt isn't the opposite of a belief. It's not a belief that something is false. It's more like an agnostic feeling, a sense that something just isn't sitting right.. And while you don't know what is wrong, you know that something is wrong. This irritation of doubt drives us to seek satisfaction and belief. That's inquiry. An inquiry's goal is to find a belief that can resolve the doubt that we feel. Once we land on a belief that satisfies us, we stop questioning until that belief fails us somehow. If it starts coming up short or doesn't get the results we need, doubt starts to creep back in and we're ultimately driven to start a new inquiry. It's a cycle, really. Our beliefs can always be questioned and our doubts can always find some sort of temporary answer. But here's a critical point. No belief we arrive at is ever guaranteed truth. At best, it's a belief we think is true, not something that's undeniably true. This is why it's almost impossible to create a doubt artificially, like Descartes trying to find a doubt for everything in his hyperbolic skepticism. Real inquiry doesn't start from absolute certainties. It begins with things we're already questioning, things that don't seem to add up, that don't make sense to us. In this way, Peirce parts ways with both those philosophers who thought that true knowledge can be made through deduction and those who thought it had to come through some form of induction. He's saying that trying to prove something we already believe or disprove something we already don't believe but is pointless. It's not really doubt at all. True inquiry starts, then, with a genuine doubt and ends, at least for a time being, and a belief that we're willing to live by. Your doubt ends when you accept an argument that, for whatever reason, fulfills your needs. If it fails to fulfill your needs, then doubt reenters, and you're forced to open a new inquiry. So P believed that all inquiry is about finding beliefs that we can hold on to. beliefs solid enough to guidide us in our decision making when we know that we really can't take these choices back and redo them. I mean, most of life is like that. You know, if you decide to go to this cause, you can't take this year back and go to another college somewhere down the road. It was that college. That's the one you went to. You cannot repeat your time. You can do something that different in the future, but you can't repeat this moment. So if you take a job at one place, you can't take somewhere, somewhere else at the same time. If you marry this person, you can't marry someone else at that same time. You know, it'll have to be one or the other, and you can't go back. Person identified, then, four main ways that we come to fix our shifting beliefs into something more stable, something we call knowledge. Those are tenacity, authority, a priori reasoning, and science. The first tenacity this is when we cling to our beliefs and avoid anything that might make us question them. It's a stubborn approach, but it brings a lot of comfort and stability. For instance, consider the number 3.14159265359, so on. That number has a name. Its name is Pi, but consider the number 314159265359, so on. That number does not have a name. But what if we decided to call it picks? Is there any reason why we can't call it picks? If you accept that that number is now picks, then that number is now picks. And we know it to be that. When I speak of picks, you can imagine 31,41592, whatever. So we have now fixed the belief that a certain number has a certain name, the name picks. Why and how do we fix that belief through sheer tenacity of will? The obvious danger here is that we are just making things up as we go. So the threat of tenacity is its great unreliability.. Just deciding that things are a certain way, often does it match up with the way things are. So while it's great for things like names, tenacity is not great in deciding what will cause something to burn or, you know, what won't or a host of other things. Next up, we have the method of authority. Here, communities or trusted sources help us fix our beliefs, like the thing we call a tree, the large plant structure covered in leaves. We got the name tree for that because someone we trusted told us it was a tree, probably our parents, maybe a teacher, somebody. It has greater concrete success than tenacity in the sense that two heads are better than one. And a whole society of heads is better still. Religious doctrines, social traditions, and customs, and even scientific consensus often rely on this method. But authority has its drawbacks, too, namely, the suppression of different views and the possibility that our authorities are just as fallible as really any of us are. It may turn out that what you call a tree is actually a giant shrub, but you simply didn't know enough about the distinctions to make an accurate call. Then there's the a priori method. In a nutshell, this is synonymous with most philosophy today, academic philosophy. This approach seeks truth through reasoning alone, relying on deduction and what seems reasonable. It's logic and math, where we try to reach truths without relying on concrete evidence, but on what Hume called the relation of ideas. For example, if we say a triangle has 180 degrees, then half of a triangle is a right angle, which has 90 degrees; that truth can be derived simply by knowing the earlier ideas. But a priori reasoning is limited by its subjectivity. What seems reasonable also tends to vary a lot by our personal experience, and it doesn't always connect that well with reality. Each of these methods, then, has its limits, pushing us in person's view towards the method of science. The process of inquiry, grounded in experience, and the testing of beliefs against the real world. Pers's method of science is based on two big ideas. First, there's materialism. The idea that real things exist independent of our thoughts. That's an assumption that he has to make here. Second, there's transcendental idealism, meaning our sensations might vary, but we can still find patterns through perception. We come to know that a wall is a wall because it has certain functions that we expect a wall to have. Together, these let us develop true beliefs about the world. So the world has lessons to teach us, and if we apply the right ideas, we can recognize patterns that we can then use in order to deal with the world. The proof is in the pudding, so to speak here. To be sure, I don't mean by science, the reading of scientific journals. That would be the method of authority. Rather, I mean the conducting of scientific inquiry itself. You know, the whole like observe, form a hypothesis, experiment, analyze the methodology, so on. We teach that, you know, to like sixth graders, but when few of us actually really do it, mostly when we talk about the findings of science, we talk about what somebody else discovered and we read about. Conducting your own research then means literally conducting it, not just doing an internet Google search and reading somebody else's writing. One common objection to science is that it can't prove its own starting assumption. The real things exist independently of us. Versus response to this has three parts. First, science doesn't break down under its own method, like the other approaches sometimes do. It works consistently. And so a wall keeps on functioning as a wall, whether we are conducting a scientific inquiry of it or not. Second, we all tend to use this method in everyday life. And third, it's proven effective over time at settling opinion. This is Peirce's pragmatism. It's effective, and so it gives us good knowledge that we can mostly rely upon. Each method of fixing beliefs has its strengths, according to purse. A priori reasoning is very certain. Authority tends to bring a sense of peace and consensus. A tenacity is very strong and very direct. But the knowledge they impart has only a tenuous connection to reality. Science, on the other hand, he argues, is our best method for telling reliable beliefs from unreliable ones. Though, Peirce admits it's slow and sometimes impractical for quick decisions. And because science is open to doubt, it always leaves room for some disagreement. In the end, Peirce argues that we probably need all four of these methods in order to make well-rounded and practical decisions. So how how do arguments, then, really help us? And can they actually fix our beliefs into knowledge? The answer here really depends on how open we are to adjusting those beliefs to refining what we think. For people who just want to be right, reason might not be all that useful. In fact, it might actually disrupt their faith in what they claim to know. Now, Pearse had this idea about the limits of what we can be sure of. He once said, I know of no method of education by practical joke. except nature. Nature's got no problems letting us believe something for years or decades or even centuries, and then pulling the rug right out from underground. us. Why? Because inductive logic, the science that Perse was talking about, always has some degree of uncertainty. To see how this plays out, let's break down three main types of inductive reasoning very quickly. Generalizations, analogies, and causal reasoning. First, in generalizations, we make claims about all or most members of a group based on a smaller sample that we have observed. So, for example, saying dogs make great pets comes from knowing a lot of dog owners who love their pets, but not every dog and every dog owner. So here's the catch. Our sample just might not be truly representative. Maybe there are tons of people who, for whom dogs make terrible pets, but we just don't happen to know those people. That's what generalizations are only ever as good as the samples that we take. If the sample is too small or not varied enough, we risk falling into what's called a hasty generalization. If you surveyed only university students to decide whether college kids should prefer pizza or hamburgers, asking one person just isn't enough to represent the whole university. Analogies are when we compare things by their properties to decide if they're similar enough to be treated as one and the same thing. Think about a doctor diagnosing a patient. They check your symptoms, and they compare them with a known list of symptoms for certain diseases. If your symptoms match well enough with one of those other illnesses, they're going to diagnose you with having that illness. But analogies aren't foolproof either. You could have similar symptoms, but an entirely different disease. Or the disease might present itself in a way that's not typical for some people. And if we draw analogies on the wrong set of properties, we can also get into trouble. Just because both cars and houses have windows doesn't mean that they both can move. Finally, there are causal arguments. These are arguments where we claim a special relationship between two things. Specifically, that one thing is causing the other one to happen. So, for example, if someone says heart failure caused his death, what they're really claiming is that without a working heart, you can't live. But there's always a chance this relationship isn't what we think it is. It's easy to confuse cause with correlation. For instance, ice cream sales and drowning rates both rise and fall together over the course of the year. So it's natural to assume that that's because one is causing the other, but it's not really the case. The actual cause is the warmer weather, which leads people to both swim more, and hence drown more, and also to eat more ice cream. So inductive arguments give us some of our best insights about reality, but they're rarely perfect. We have to rely on experience, our education, and a good deal of critical thinking to distinguish good science from junk science. If we blindly accept anything just because it's labeled as scientific, we're veering into scientism and a rational form of faith. But dismissing scientific discovery that doesn't fit neatly into our worldview is equally problematic. Ultimately, balancing skepticism with openness is what gives us the best shot at using reason effectively. So in the end, you should be able to use this sort of method to figure out how to avoid false beliefs, not only in preventing you from believing someone else's false ideas, but in going through and cleaning out our own false ideas that we already harbor. All arguments have some room for error, but they can help us look for truth when we are critical of what we believe and what we're going to accept. We need to make sure that we are, in fact, dealing with an argument and not an explanation. And it's always wise to consider in what way we find an argument compelling. Why do you like this argument? What does it say about you and your experiences that you find truth here or doubt there? Getting to know yourself in this way can make you much less susceptible to bias and to subjective judgment-making. Join us next week as we explore the world of expertise by examining the question, should I trust experts? Thanks for listening to American Socrates. If you found today's episode interesting, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone you think might also love a little wisdom and their life.