Fighting fake news with fact check has not been a successful project

Fighting fake news with fact check has not been a successful project and emotions can any day overwhelm the domain of truth writes DILIP MANDAL in The Print



 

During the debate over the motion of thanks to the President’s address in Parliament, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi made several good points in his speech. He raised critical issues like the importance of federalism, widespread joblessness, inequality, crony capitalism in India, and unfulfilled development promises. He also talked about the sacrifices made by his family and ancestors. Congress supporters as well as Left and liberal secularists are going gaga over Gandhi’s speech and talking in superlatives. This is fine.

Gandhi’s extempore speech, without the use of a teleprompter, was laced with conviction and courage.

But politics, unlike debating society, is not only about oratory and being convincing and logical or even about telling the truth. More so in India of today, where in Narendra Modi, Gandhi has an opponent whose claim to fame is his glorified ability to strike an emotional chord with the people.

Prime Minister Modi has made and is still making two sets of promises. One set of promises are for the larger audiences, those who are not in the BJP fold. The second set of Modi’s promises are for the BJP’s core voters, the insiders. 

The written manifesto BJP’s isn’t bothered about

Let’s look at first set of promises as per the BJP’s 2014 Lok Sabha election manifesto.

1. Price Rise: Will stop hoarding and black marketing. Special courts to stop hoarding. Price stabilisation fund.

2. Employment: Jobs to 2 crore youth every year.

3. Health: Drinking water for all. AIIMS-like institutions in all states

4. Smart Cities: Will create 100 new smart cities with free wi-fi and world-class facilities

5. Housing: Pucca house for everyone by 2022

6. Infrastructure: Bullet train, freight corridors, Sagar Mala project, upgraded connectivity of Northeast and J&K with the rest of India.

7. Education: Raising public spending on education to 6 per cent of GDP. Establishing national e-library

8. Rural Development: Identifying 100 of the most backward districts and bringing them at par with developed districts

9. E-governance: Broadband connectivity in all villages. Digitalising all government records.

10. Women: 33 per cent reservation for women through constitutional amendment

11. Electoral reform: Electoral reforms to eliminate criminals. Evolve a method of holding Assembly and Lok Sabha elections simultaneously.

The BJP government started work on some of these promises and can also claim deliveries. But even the BJP does not make them poll issues anymore. It is hard to recall the last time any senior BJP leader even talked about these promises in political rallies.

My argument is that the BJP does not identify itself with these issues anymore. They are simply packaging material used for impression management.

So, when Rahul Gandhi talks about BJP’s failures in health, Make in India, education, employment, manufacturing sector or on mitigating inequality, he is hitting the BJP where it doesn’t hurt the party. The BJP is not even claiming to have performed in these fields. Whatever it has done are side shows that even the BJP does not believe in promoting.

So, what are the BJP’s main offerings? It is this question that brings us to the second set of BJP’s promises.

Unwritten promises the BJP is fulfilling

These are the promises that the party makes to its core constituencies, its faithful voters. These promises often don’t end up in the BJP’s election manifesto. The party goes into an unwritten agreement with its core voters, promising that these will be delivered, come what may. These promises are like construction of Ram Temple in Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura, Uniform Civil Code, abrogation of Article 370, cow protection, ‘saving’ Hindu girls from the so-called “love jihad”, keeping Muslim ‘refugees’ in check, promoting Sanskrit, Yoga and Ayurveda, and so on and so forth.

The BJP has delivered on each of these promises. With the Triple Talaq law, it has delivered half of Uniform Civil Code, which is work in progress for the BJP. Kashi Corridor’s development has made Gyanvapi mosque almost invisible. The BJP has assuaged the sentiments of the Kashmiri Pandits and the Brahmins by dismantling the statehood and assembly of J&K. One can easily argue that these are not the real issues as they have nothing to do with people’s welfare, health, education, job or infrastructure.

But to say so will be an underestimation of India’s political reality. Consider this: there is almost zero possibility of someone in mainland India dying in a terror attack, and yet, the BJP can make fighting terrorism a big issue as we saw in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, when Modi-led BJP campaign played the Pulwama attack to the hilt. Any such attack is by and large a case of intelligence failure, but that argument was lost in the cacophony of counter attack and macho nationalism that Modi, BJP leaders and the media drove incessantly until the end of the election. In the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the biggest casualty was the BJP’s 2014 election manifesto. Nobody was interested in putting out a report card, assessing the government’s delivery on the promises it had made to register an unprecedented victory five years before.

You can’t fact-check emotions

In his book Nervous States, British political scientist William Davies argues, “Experts and facts no longer seem capable of settling arguments to the extent that they once did. Objective claims about the economy, society, the human body and nature can no longer be successfully insulated from emotions.” He cites various events in recent history to argue that the 17th century enlightenment ideas of experts and facts are now losing steam, and the institutions that should be beyond the fray of politics of sentiments and emotions are withering away.

In such a scenario, when emotions and feelings have become more overpowering, Rahul Gandhi is trying to become a fact-checker and a hermit who talks about GDP, growth and human development. He might be telling the truth, but will that sufficiently counter the emotional pitching of the BJP? We don’t have any template to answer this question, but fighting fake news with fact check has not been a successful project. If fake news confirms the ideas and emotions of an individual or a group, then it travels far and wide. Fact check, on the other hand, reaches a limited audience as it targets the thinking faculties and misses the feelings and emotions. And emotions will, and do, overwhelm the domain of truth on any given day.

Despite all the praises and claps Rahul Gandhi got for his fiery speech, his task remains quite difficult.

Journalist and editor William Davis has an advice, which can be useful for Rahul Gandhi and for all the rationalists and liberals — “Rather than denigrate the influence of feelings in society today, we need to get better at listening to them and learning from them. Instead of bemoaning the influx of emotions into politics, we should value democracy’s capacity to give voice to fear, pain and anxiety that might otherwise be diverted in far more destructive directions. If we’re to steer through the new epoch, and rediscover something more stable beyond it, we need, above all, to understand it.”

How to talk your way to the top

Janan Ganesh in The FT 

Always doubt the Stoicism of a “Stoic”. If the point of their creed is cool detachment from the world, the active espousal of it seems perverse, like an anarchist’s fiscal policy. Marcus Aurelius, don’t forget, never meant his Meditations — sales of which boomed even pre-lockdown — to be read. Whether his appropriation by the shamans of modern self-help is his triumph or his ultimate rout, I can’t decide. 

Strange, isn’t it, which bits of antiquity we exhume, and which we let lie? The American right wants more of the neoclassical architecture that makes Washington so grand, and so inert. Britain, which is definitely a serious country, is trying to revive Latin in schools. I’d be keener on this Restoration if there were a place for the most sorely missed feature of the ancient world. Bring back, for the sake of the young, the teaching of rhetoric. 

I have seen enough meetings, parties, job interviews, broadcast slots, panel events and dates to sense which habits of speech harm a person’s standing with others, sometimes without either side quite knowing it. They include the filler words “like” and, in England, “sort of”, often pronounced, with nervous speed, “siddiv”. They include starting a sentence with, “I guess . . . ” and ending it with, “Does that make sense?” They include, above all, the interrogative tone in non-interrogative statements. 

What links these familiar but far from exhaustive examples is their disclosure of self-doubt. And not the endearing kind. “Like” stems from a deep fear of pauses, lest the other person stops listening. Upspeak is a constant probing for approval. These tics are all the worse in a non-American as they suggest a further, almost meta lack of confidence: that in one’s own culture. 

The aesthetic case against a lot of modern speech is easy to mount. The challenge is to convince people of the strategic stakes: that mere avoidance of the glitches above will raise their perceived stature. 

In today’s economy, few workers get to be judged on output that is discrete and identifiably theirs (such as a newspaper column). More often, they are among the many contributors to a rolling and amorphous process: a corporate merger, say, or IT maintenance. One effect is that, in all candour, I have no idea what most of you do. 

Another is that a career can hinge on meetings and other “performances” between the actual doing of work. When someone’s added value is so hard to delineate, the spoken word becomes a clue. And this, to stress, is just the professional risk of modern speech habits. It says nothing of the social and romantic costs of sounding like a teenager from Encino. 

The flaw in most self-help is that it dwells on the interior life, rather than outward technique. To exhort someone into a state — of confidence, of Stoicism, of anything — at least in a lasting way, is hard. But small adjustments in what they do can transform their outcomes. And from those real-life gains comes the gradual change in inner state. 

I don’t wish I had had, when young, some protein shake-reviewer on YouTube urging me to live in alignment with my values, dude. What I wish I had had was someone to tell me that nothing — not eye-contact, not spread arms — conveys confidence like a mid-sentence pause. Or that a flat, declarative tone in a room full of upspeakers is such an advantage as to be tantamount to cheating. This, which we moderns learn through trial and error, if at all, is what an Athenian would have recognised as rhetoric. It is a life skill, not just or even mainly a political one. 

When and why our culture stopped treating it as such, others will know. But the victims are all around us. To speak commandingly does not require a John Updike vocabulary or grammatical exactitude. It does not entail the crushing of regional accents and demotic idioms. I offer Manchester’s own Noel Gallagher as a model to emulate, and legion Sloanes as the inverse. As for America, many decades into upspeak, no one who has that tic of the elite campuses and the modish industries has had a sniff of the White House. The people have, in whatever style, spoken.

How to conduct good meetings

 John Gapper in The FT

Jeff Bezos and Winston Churchill do not have much in common, but one is chief executive of a company that is valued at $770bn and the other stopped the Nazis invading Britain, so the advice of both is worth heeding. Amazon’s founder and the UK’s wartime prime minister agreed on one thing: the value of a good memorandum. 

Mr Bezos’s recent letter to shareholders extolled the Amazon practice of starting all internal meetings by everyone present reading a memo of up to six pages, explaining what they are there to discuss. Instead of watching a PowerPoint presentation, or breaking into an immediate debate, Amazon’s executives spend up to half an hour in complete silence, absorbing the briefing that one of them has prepared. 

“This is the weirdest meeting culture you will ever encounter,” Mr Bezos admitted in one interview. The principle is that an executive must refine his or her proposal so fully to express it in narrative form that everyone will be able to understand it. Reading the memo means that all those in the room are informed for the conversation that follows, and are not merely bluffing. 

Churchill would have appreciated the attention Mr Bezos has given to this. On August 9 1940, a month before the Blitz bombing of London started, he dictated a memo to the UK civil service on the subject of memos. “To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long.” he declared. “The discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clearer thinking.” 

Amazon’s approach sounds eccentric, but there is a lot of value in it. Most large companies have too many meetings in general — some executives spend their days traipsing from one airless room to another — and too many of them are disorganised and sprawling. People spout off without knowing much about the topic, or caring whether they do: it becomes a battle of rhetoric. 

Mr Bezos is a student of managerial efficiency — Amazon itself is a huge machine for sucking inefficiency out of the retail industry. He has grasped that starting out with everyone knowing the basics makes the debate both better informed and more democratic. There is less chance of a decision being taken arbitrarily or ignorantly, or of a clique of two or three people in the room controlling the outcome. 

The surprising aspect is his faith in narrative, rather than the data on which Amazon relies. You might have thought that data would rule decision-making at Amazon, but not so. He said: “We have so many metrics . . . and the thing I have noticed is that when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you’re measuring.” 

He believes in telling a story vividly, rather than relying on data or graphics, or packaging a business case in bullet points on a slide. Some Amazon memos can be almost like dramas: a typical memo for a new product comes in the form of an imaginary press release for the service, backed by a question and answer brief written in a way that a customer would understand. 

Churchill, a journalist turned politician, was equally a devotee of strong narratives that could shape policymaking. “Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational,” he instructed his civil servants, warning them that “most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether”. 

He and Mr Bezos also agreed on the correct place for any data and slides: somewhere at the back. “If a report relies on detailed analysis of some complicated factors . . . these should be set out in an appendix,” Churchill declared. Amazon’s data-rich executives must obey the same rule. 

Conciseness can be taken too far. Staff at the US National Security Council were told to trim their policy memos to a single page for Donald Trump because he did not like to read too much. Then it turned out that the president wanted what one official described to the New Yorker as “two or three points, with the syntactical complexity of ‘See Jane run’”, and preferred pictures. 

But preparing a crisp narrative is much harder work than spraying around some sentences on a slide. It requires someone to pause and not only to think through the thread of the argument, but to shape it in a way that can inspire others. Churchill could do that on his feet; the rest of us must concentrate. As Mr Bezos notes, it takes a lot of effort to write a “brilliant and thoughtful” corporate memo. 

The impact of narrative is clear in public speaking. The Technology, Entertainment, Design conference became a global brand by forcing speakers to hone their “Ted talks” ruthlessly for months in advance. No one is allowed to get on stage and improvise some thoughts. A corporate meeting is not a Ted event, but it is still a gathering that needs to be educated. 

Churchill, for whom making well-informed decisions was a matter of life and death, devoted some time on a day when Birmingham was bombed to setting out how to write memos. Mr Bezos has done extremely well for Amazon by appreciating the value of briefing his executives thoroughly. We should probably listen to them.

Why we argue – and how to do it properly

The internet provides ample space for stating opinions. But true persuasion is an art – one this week-long series aims to teach

• 
• • Protagoras
  • theguardian.com, Monday 9 September 2013 13.00 BST

Marlon Brando as Mark Anthony in the 1953 film Julius Caesar. 'True persuasion is democratic.' Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar

It's the weekend and you are heading out to meet friends at the cinema. You are looking forward to seeing the new thriller by a favourite director. But then you discover that some of your friends would rather see the latest superhero movie, or some a new romantic comedy. Everybody pauses, uncertain how to proceed. You decide to get everyone to see the thriller. You won't force them – after all, they are your friends and unlikely to remain so if you threaten them. You could bribe them by offering to buy the tickets – but movie-going is expensive enough as it is, and you don't want to set a precedent. So you decide to try and persuade them – to get them to really want to go. But how?

You could begin by telling your friends about reviews you have read recommending your chosen film and trashing the others – or by pointing out the relative box office success of the movies on offer. But what reviewers do your friends trust? Do they want to see a hit movie or are they the sort of people who like to "discover" hidden gems?

Perhaps you should remind them that on previous visits to the cinema your choices have been good ones. And all you want is for everybody to have a good time. Alternatively you might explain just how much you have been looking forward to the movie after a really bad week. Are your friends likely to be moved by pity or should you appeal to other feelings?

Perhaps these appeals – to the authority of reviewers, your own character, and to your friends' emotions – seem too manipulative. You could try logic. Movie-going may not be an exact science but there are degrees of reasonableness. If a director's movies have been dire since that first breakout hit then it's a good bet that the new one will be weak. You might argue that the superhero blockbuster is good but the genre can never be truly great; that one of the movies has a lead actor with a bad track record; that the comedy is so long the bar will shut before it ends.

However strong your convictions about quality cinema may be, these alone will not win the day. You need to make an argument. And a successful argument must appeal not to just anyone in general but to your friends in particular. It must be adapted to their estimations of movie reviewers, feelings and beliefs about you and your character, and rely on rational claims of a kind they will recognise.

What is true of the cinema is – in this case – also true in public and political life. In a democracy, rather than force or bribe people to assent to our ideology, we try to win them over through persuasion. That can be a challenge. It requires us to understand where other people are coming from and to develop arguments that are outward-facing.

Not everyone thinks as we do. People have different experiences and possess different information; they have different values and do not always share our criteria of judgment. To persuade them we have to make connections with our audience – with what they might think, feel and be familiar with. This is not about tricking people or fooling them. It is about truly persuading them to share our views on a particular issue – and that means developing a relationship.

A glance at the newspapers and much of the internet demonstrates, however, that many people think the purpose of public communication is to reflect well on themselves – to announce their own importance, specialness or cleverness. An infamous academic chooses not to be convincing but to increase his brand value by performing provocatively; a troll communicates publicly but seeks only private "lulz"; shouting things your audience already believes, yet pretending that you're not allowed to say them, seems to be an easy route to success on talk radio or the op-ed pages. But the only thing such people are saying with their arguments is "look at me!"

Online communication makes easy the simple affirmation of our beliefs, the monetisation of strident "opinion" and the anonymous onanistic expression of inchoate hostility. And that means more arguments – but less persuasion.

True persuasion is democratic. In giving people reasons to act with us we recognise that they aren't inferiors who can be compelled but thinking, feeling and speaking beings. And true persuasion is an art. Contrary to the books on the self-help and business psychology shelves there are no magic "words that work". You have to cultivate an "eye", developing a feel for situations and empathy for those you want to persuade. The name of that art is "rhetoric".

Of course, you don't need to bother with any of this if you and your friends just go and see your favoured films separately. But that is to give up on society, politics and progress. If people cannot persuade or be persuaded then there can be no shared beliefs, co-ordinated collective action or intellectual evolution. The only change will come from force, bribery or manipulation.

In defiance of such a bleak outcome, Comment is free will over the coming week run a series on how to argue in the spirit of Isocrates, the ancient Greek philosopher and rhetorician: "the kind of art which can implant honesty and justice in depraved natures has never existed and does not exist … But I do hold that people can become better and worthier if they conceive an ambition to speak well, if they become possessed of the desire to be able to persuade their hearers."

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How to judge your audience and remain true to your arguments

Being two-faced has had a bad rap recently. But to convince people of your argument you have to adapt it to your audience

• 
• • Protagoras
  • theguardian.com, Tuesday 10 September 2013 13.20 BST

'On BBC Question Time Russell Brand is never going to persuade Melanie Phillips, and she will never sway him. They'd be foolish to try.' Photograph: Matt Crossick/PA

One of the greatest achievements of reality television gameshows has been the promotion of a distinctive ethical principle: that almost the worst thing you can do is be "two-faced". To say one thing to one group of people and something else to another is widely regarded as the epitome of dishonesty. And the very worst thing? The failure to be "true" to yourself – to moderate or modify your public appearance in response to the expectations of others.

Adapt to circumstances

But if you want to persuade people, or simply communicate clearly, the last thing you should do is say the same thing to everyone and refuse to adapt to circumstances. On the contrary, the first step in developing a good argument is to think about how to fit it to the situation in which you find yourself. It used to be that skill in this was considered a virtue. Rhetoricians called it "decorum".

Today we think of being "decorous" as conforming. But all it means is being "fitting" – using words and arguments that are "apt" given the situation. It is generally a bad idea to give an expletive-packed wedding speech that endlessly insults the bride, not because expletives and insults are always bad but because they are at odds with the mood of collective celebration characteristic of weddings.

Similarly, an economist explaining the Phillips curve ought to do so differently if talking to a niece taking business studies GCSE, the retired sales executive next door or a room full of trade unionists.

Know your audience

In making an argument you are trying to bring three things into alignment: yourself, your words and your audience. You are trying to move your audience so that it is in agreement with you – but to do that you need to move too. And between you – what moves you both – is a form of words and a set of arguments. If you are inflexible, using words and making references that are completely at odds with your audience you won't persuade anybody of anything (except of the view that you are unconvincing and unintelligible).

In practical terms this simply means that you need to know your audience. Cicero, the Roman philosopher, rhetorician and politician, believed that the perfect orator would have to master everything to do with the life of other citizens: laws and customs, traditions and general outlooks, "the way people usually think". In becoming familiar with the general outlooks of other people, as well as the particular outlook of specific groups, you are better placed to adapt your argument as needed.

A problem in the present day is that contemporary communications media make decorum extremely difficult, if not completely impossible. Politicians have long been aware that words said in one context may be rebroadcast in quite another. They have tended to deal with this by being bland and non-commital or by supplementing what they say with briefing and spin. In adopting such positions on the basis of opinion polls and focus groups politicians make the opposite mistake to the foul-mouthed best man. They forget their argument and give themselves over entirely to the audience (who, in turn, succumb to boredom).

It's not only politicians who can find their words taken and used in a quite unexpected context. These days any of us might be live-tweeted or filmed and put online. The examples are piling up of those who forgot that what they said on social media was not private but being said to everybody. On below-the-line comments boards – where most are anonymous or pseudonymous – it is difficult to be sure who one is talking to. This is one reason why people on Guardian comment threads often try to appeal to the (possibly imaginary) audience they know that exists: the moderators, subeditors, or "Guardian readers".

Pitching to the third party

But if you want to persuade you need to have a better idea of the audience you mean to reach. And it isn't the person whose comments you are attacking. On BBC Question Time Russell Brand is never going to persuade Melanie Phillips, and she will never sway him. They'd be foolish to try. They are trying to persuade the people watching them. It is the same online. Persuasive arguments will be pitched to a "third party" – the audience of readers.

Of course you don't know who that audience is. Are they old or young, male or female, new to the topic or experienced? Yet all of us, when we start to compose some kind of general argument, has in mind an "ideal" or "typical" audience. It is worth being clear to yourself who you think this is. It shouldn't be people who think exactly as you do – since those aren't people you need to persuade. Nor should it be a bunch of idiosyncratic types who think like nobody else.

Let's be reasonable

It needs to be something like generally "reasonable" people, neither fanatical nor obstinate, informed but not specialist. What views or outlooks can you assume they share? What are they likely to think decent, kind and reasonable and what might they think is unacceptable, unkind and daft? Be clear on this and you can start to think about how to argue your case. That means paying attention to, and thinking about, other people, their feelings and experiences. If you want to have a chance of persuading people then you need to have a lot more than two faces. Don't be true to yourself. Be true to your arguments.

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How to use your anecdotes well – and sparingly

There's an art to telling stories to complement an argument without overdoing it – or making yourself the centre of attention

• 
• • Protagoras
  • theguardian.com, Wednesday 11 September 2013 11.01 BST

David Cameron, left, Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown all used anecdotes about people they had met during the 2010 leaders' debate. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA

The most memorable moment of the 2010 general election leaders' debate was when David Cameron tried to justify a point about immigration by citing the agreement of "a 40-year-old black man" he had met in Plymouth who had served in the Royal Navy for 30 years (thus enlisting at the age of 10).

This impossibly young seaman was not the only person called as a witness in that debate: Nick Clegg had been talking to a ward nurse in a short-staffed hospital and a burglary victim from London; Gordon Brown had met a trainee chef and received a letter from a recovered cancer patient; Cameron had also recently met a crime victim from Crosby, a drug addict from Witney and a man suffering from cancer of the kidney. The latter reappeared in Cameron's 2012 speech to his party conference, and in a recent speech on social security Ed Miliband told stories of meeting a young unemployed man in Long Eaton and "somebody who had worked all his life, for 40 years" in the scaffolding business.

Are such stories a good form of argument? They seem to be popular with political speech writers and advertising copywriters who often use them to lend colour and "human interest" to a speech. But as the leaders' debate demonstrated, they can also sound such a false note that they distract from the claims you want to advance. To work well, stories must be in harmony with, and contributing to, your overall argument.

One way they can do this is by bringing to your argument "witnesses" who provide evidence that supports a particular claim. In school we learn to quote supposed "authorities" – writers who lend support to our case not simply because of the veracity of their findings or the eloquence they lend to our words but also because they have some kind of recognised standing which we hope to add to our own.

Know your witnesses

Outside school such citations are useful, but the range of potential sources is greater and the usefulness of any single one cannot be taken for granted. Different audiences value different sorts of "authorities" and a fundamental mistake is to refer to something your audience cannot evaluate or will not evaluate positively. Far from strengthen your case this will weaken it.

Use your anecdotes sparingly

Even good witnesses should be used sparingly and carefully. Excessive and obvious reliance on them will make it seem as if you can't think for yourself. And it can easily seem pretentious. Someone trying to persuade you simply by dropping names of powerful people they have met or of authors they have read is, to put it mildly, annoying.

Make anecdotes tell stories

Stories can also serve as examples – instances of reality which are presented as proofs of some kind of norm. They invite people to make an induction – to conclude that there is some kind of general underlying rule at work and of which we must take heed. When a child points out that their friend doesn't have to go to bed so early, or a teenager insists to a parent that "nobody else has to visit Grandma every weekend", they are trying to illustrate the presence of a rule or a norm from which their parents are unreasonably or bizarrely departing. In a similar way Cameron wants us to conclude from a single dramatic example that the NHS is bad for patients and Miliband that apprenticeships are working out well.

Anecdotal examples of this sort are a necessary and valuable part of everyday, public and political argument. That is because (climate change partially excepted) such arguments are rarely about the nature of physical reality but often about social reality. They concern partial and practical judgments about some aspect of our varied and complex cultures: whether or not people are on the whole trustworthy; the likelihood that people receiving social security are "striving" or "skiving"; whether exams are getting easier or harder.

To make strong claims about the social reality of these things you will need to present examples and these can be made vivid if expressed in the form of stories. The most effective – combined with other evidence and information – help bring clearly to mind something you want the audience to think about more, to sympathise with or to see in a new way. They help to establish a picture of a situation and a definition of reality on the basis of which conclusions may be drawn.

Stories come in many genres. They may be little comedies or tragedies, homely confirmations of what "everybody knows" or unexpected revelations. It is important to be sure that your story is emotionally in tune with the rest of your argument (rather than a substitute for it). And it certainly must not dominate.

Don't make yourself the story

One of the more annoying techniques of politicians is to use purely personal experience as an anecdotal exemplar – as if, just because the politician "got on their bike", we must accept that everyone could or should do likewise. Stories about the speaker may be fine for entertaining dinner speeches (on the way to which a really funny thing happened), but they have a limited place in argumentative speeches where the good character of a speaker should be evident and not need explicit mention.

The problem with Cameron, Clegg, Brown and Miliband's stories is that often they aren't a contribution to the main argument but an attempt to convince the audience that these are great guys, men of the people, on our level. They have forgotten that a good argument is always about the audience to whom it is addressed and not the person making it. If you make yourself the story your argument will fail.

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Ask yourself: what are you arguing about?

Life is not a well-set exam – the questions we ask may be ambiguous. Defining the dispute is itself part of the argument

• 
• • Protagoras
  • theguardian.com, Thursday 12 September 2013 15.30 BST

'When your flatmate accuses you of eating the last of the cheese your first reaction might be to refute the conjecture.' Photograph: CS-Stock / Alamy

The New Statesman columnist Mehdi Hasan recently addressed his online interlocutors thus: "Dear thickos on Twitter, for the 100th time: opposing arming the rebels does not make one 'pro-Assad'."

Now, there's a lot happening in this short rhetorical moment – including invective and hyperbole aimed at the refutation of a false syllogism. But overall it is an argument about arguments. Hasan wants to argue over the question "Should the UK arm the rebels in Syria?"; others would prefer the question: "Should the UK support Assad?" Although connected, these are two distinct questions. Which one is asked makes quite a difference to how a discussion about policy towards Syria will unfold. In any argument what we are arguing about may be the most important thing to dispute.

What are you arguing about?

Life is not a well-set examination. Our problems are not clearly specified and the questions we have to answer to ourselves are rarely unambiguous. Even something seemingly simple such as an argument about what music to play at a family party might also, possibly, be an argument about what kind of party it is to be, who the party should be for, or which members of the family deserve most respect. If you think the debate is about the relative merits of Britpop over glam rock, you might be in trouble if your partner thinks it is about your inability to respect your in-laws. In short, the point of a dispute isn't clear or fixed before an argument begins. It is one of the things established in and through the argument.

Understanding this can be emotionally important when organising the family get-together. It is of immense political importance when there is going to be a vote. Voters think lots of different things and they think them in all sorts of different ways.

Consequently, a vote will work out differently depending on how voters perceive an issue. For example, the renewal of Trident might be presented as purely a defence issue. People's views will then depend on how they think about threats to security and how they assess the usefulness of Trident in warding them off. But the issue can plausibly be construed as one of cost. In deciding on that question, the same people might take a different position. "Should we seek to deter nuclear attacks on the UK?" and "Are nuclear weapons your No 1 priority for government spending?" will lead to very different outcomes.

Four kinds of argument

In arguing, then, we need to think carefully about the explicit and implicit questions we are addressing and about the kind of argument that we want to have about them. Roman rhetoricians had a useful way of thinking about this. They used the term "stasis" for the "point" around which a dispute could or should turn, and identified four general kinds.

1. Fact

The first kind is "conjecture". This is the argument about fact – whether something is or is not the case. When your flatmate accuses you of eating the last of the cheese your first reaction might be to refute the conjecture – you were at work, you are allergic to dairy, your flatmate ate them last night when he had the munchies.

2. Definition

But suppose you did take the cheese and there is no denying it? The argument might then shift to "definition" – the name that should be given to your action. You might have taken the cheese thinking it was yours – in which case it wasn't "theft" but a "mistake".

3. Quality

Your third option is to make the argument one of "quality"; you admit the crime but argue that your action was a good one. You were aiding your flatmate in a diet, the cheese was almost out of date and you were avoiding waste, you gave it to someone who was really hungry.

These are all ways of shifting the terrain of a dispute. How you use them depends in part on whether or not you are in the position of prosecution or defence. A prosecutor wants to keep things narrow, presenting an audience with a simple choice of yes or no, guilty or not guilty. A defendant will want to open up a variety of arguments so as to sow reasonable doubt. The political conservative might want to keep things at conjecture so as to avoid challenges to "traditional values" while the political radical may want an argument about "quality" so as to show how an unconventional action expresses a higher moral code.

You can see how different stases work in many contemporary political arguments. Debate about the EU is an obvious example. "Sceptics" have successfully made the argument about a conjecture. They ask, implicitly, "who has given away British sovereignty?". They then resist any sort of nuance seeking only to bring forward as many examples as they can to prove the fact that sovereignty has been lost. "Europhiles" try to move on to a debate about definition (talking about "partnership" and so on) or over "quality", where they like to argue that since sovereignty is weakened by globalisation, joining a larger bloc is to enhance rather than give away power.

4. Place

There is a fourth "stasis" that the Romans referred to as "place". Here, the dispute is over jurisdiction – whether or not the issue is one that can legitimately be addressed. In Rome that meant disputing that it was something the court could hear. In politics this is usually a "reactionary" argument since it is intended to ward off disputes.

Thus, we hear often that government has no right to decide on same-sex marriage or tell people who they can and can't employ, and that courts cannot judge the content of newspapers. But in our crowded and cacophonous virtual public spheres we (like Mehdi Hasan) might all make good use of the stasis of place. The art of arguing involves knowing which questions to ask and how to ask them, learning how to answer the questions put and deciding which questions to ignore. Sometimes, just before the guests arrive is neither the time nor the place to start an argument.

Daniel Dennett's seven tools for thinking

Cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett is one of America's foremost thinkers. In this extract from his new book, he reveals some of the lessons life has taught him

• 
• • Daniel Dennett
  • The Observer, Sunday 19 May 2013

Daniel Dennett: 'Often the word "surely" is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument.' Photograph: Peter Yang/August

1 USE YOUR MISTAKES

We have all heard the forlorn refrain: "Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!" This phrase has come to stand for the rueful reflection of an idiot, a sign of stupidity, but in fact we should appreciate it as a pillar of wisdom. Any being, any agent, who can truly say: "Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!" is standing on the threshold of brilliance. We human beings pride ourselves on our intelligence, and one of its hallmarks is that we can remember our previous thinking and reflect on it – on how it seemed, on why it was tempting in the first place and then about what went wrong.

1. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
2. by Daniel C Dennett
3. 

1. Tell us what you think: Rate the book

I know of no evidence to suggest that any other species on the planet can actually think this thought. If they could, they would be almost as smart as we are. So when you make a mistake, you should learn to take a deep breath, grit your teeth and then examine your own recollections of the mistake as ruthlessly and as dispassionately as you can manage. It's not easy. The natural human reaction to making a mistake is embarrassment and anger (we are never angrier than when we are angry at ourselves) and you have to work hard to overcome these emotional reactions.

Try to acquire the weird practice of savouring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, once you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully set them behind you and go on to the next big opportunity. But that is not enough: you should actively seek out opportunities just so you can then recover from them.

In science, you make your mistakes in public. You show them off so that everybody can learn from them. This way, you get the benefit of everybody else's experience, and not just your own idiosyncratic path through the space of mistakes. (Physicist Wolfgang Pauli famously expressed his contempt for the work of a colleague as "not even wrong". A clear falsehood shared with critics is better than vague mush.)

This, by the way, is another reason why we humans are so much smarter than every other species. It is not so much that our brains are bigger or more powerful, or even that we have the knack of reflecting on our own past errors, but that we share the benefits our individual brains have won by their individual histories of trial and error.

I am amazed at how many really smart people don't understand that you can make big mistakes in public and emerge none the worse for it. I know distinguished researchers who will go to preposterous lengths to avoid having to acknowledge that they were wrong about something. Actually, people love it when somebody admits to making a mistake. All kinds of people love pointing out mistakes.

Generous-spirited people appreciate your giving them the opportunity to help, and acknowledging it when they succeed in helping you; mean-spirited people enjoy showing you up. Let them! Either way we all win.

2 RESPECT YOUR OPPONENT

Just how charitable are you supposed to be when criticising the views of an opponent? If there are obvious contradictions in the opponent's case, then you should point them out, forcefully. If there are somewhat hidden contradictions, you should carefully expose them to view – and then dump on them. But the search for hidden contradictions often crosses the line into nitpicking, sea-lawyering and outright parody. The thrill of the chase and the conviction that your opponent has to be harbouring a confusion somewhere encourages uncharitable interpretation, which gives you an easy target to attack.

But such easy targets are typically irrelevant to the real issues at stake and simply waste everybody's time and patience, even if they give amusement to your supporters. The best antidote I know for this tendency to caricature one's opponent is a list of rules promulgated many years ago by social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport.

How to compose a successful critical commentary:

1. Attempt to re-express your target's position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: "Thanks, I wish I'd thought of putting it that way."

2. List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

3. Mention anything you have learned from your target.

4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

One immediate effect of following these rules is that your targets will be a receptive audience for your criticism: you have already shown that you understand their positions as well as they do, and have demonstrated good judgment (you agree with them on some important matters and have even been persuaded by something they said). Following Rapoport's rules is always, for me, something of a struggle…

3 THE "SURELY" KLAXON

When you're reading or skimming argumentative essays, especially by philosophers, here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for "surely" in the document and check each occurrence. Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word "surely" is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument.

Why? Because it marks the very edge of what the author is actually sure about and hopes readers will also be sure about. (If the author were really sure all the readers would agree, it wouldn't be worth mentioning.) Being at the edge, the author has had to make a judgment call about whether or not to attempt to demonstrate the point at issue, or provide evidence for it, and – because life is short – has decided in favour of bald assertion, with the presumably well-grounded anticipation of agreement. Just the sort of place to find an ill-examined "truism" that isn't true!

4 ANSWER RHETORICAL QUESTIONS

Just as you should keep a sharp eye out for "surely", you should develop a sensitivity for rhetorical questions in any argument or polemic. Why? Because, like the use of "surely", they represent an author's eagerness to take a short cut. A rhetorical question has a question mark at the end, but it is not meant to be answered. That is, the author doesn't bother waiting for you to answer since the answer is so obvious that you'd be embarrassed to say it!

Here is a good habit to develop: whenever you see a rhetorical question, try – silently, to yourself – to give it an unobvious answer. If you find a good one, surprise your interlocutor by answering the question. I remember a Peanuts cartoon from years ago that nicely illustrates the tactic. Charlie Brown had just asked, rhetorically: "Who's to say what is right and wrong here?" and Lucy responded, in the next panel: "I will."

5 EMPLOY OCCAM'S RAZOR

Attributed to William of Ockham (or Ooccam), a 14th-century English logician and philosopher, this thinking tool is actually a much older rule of thumb. A Latin name for it is lex parsimoniae, the law of parsimony. It is usually put into English as the maxim "Do not multiply entities beyond necessity".

The idea is straightforward: don't concoct a complicated, extravagant theory if you've got a simpler one (containing fewer ingredients, fewer entities) that handles the phenomenon just as well. If exposure to extremely cold air can account for all the symptoms of frostbite, don't postulate unobserved "snow germs" or "Arctic microbes". Kepler's laws explain the orbits of the planets; we have no need to hypothesise pilots guiding the planets from control panels hidden under the surface. This much is uncontroversial, but extensions of the principle have not always met with agreement.

One of the least impressive attempts to apply Occam's razor to a gnarly problem is the claim (and provoked counterclaims) that postulating a God as creator of the universe is simpler, more parsimonious, than the alternatives. How could postulating something supernatural and incomprehensible be parsimonious? It strikes me as the height of extravagance, but perhaps there are clever ways of rebutting that suggestion.

I don't want to argue about it; Occam's razor is, after all, just a rule of thumb, a frequently useful suggestion. The prospect of turning it into a metaphysical principle or fundamental requirement of rationality that could bear the weight of proving or disproving the existence of God in one fell swoop is simply ludicrous. It would be like trying to disprove a theorem of quantum mechanics by showing that it contradicted the axiom "Don't put all your eggs in one basket".

6 DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME ON RUBBISH

Sturgeon's law is usually expressed thus: 90% of everything is crap. So 90% of experiments in molecular biology, 90% of poetry, 90% of philosophy books, 90% of peer-reviewed articles in mathematics – and so forth – is crap. Is that true? Well, maybe it's an exaggeration, but let's agree that there is a lot of mediocre work done in every field. (Some curmudgeons say it's more like 99%, but let's not get into that game.)

A good moral to draw from this observation is that when you want to criticise a field, a genre, a discipline, an art form …don't waste your time and ours hooting at the crap! Go after the good stuff or leave it alone. This advice is often ignored by ideologues intent on destroying the reputation of analytic philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology, macroeconomics, plastic surgery, improvisational theatre, television sitcoms, philosophical theology, massage therapy, you name it.

Let's stipulate at the outset that there is a great deal of deplorable, second-rate stuff out there, of all sorts. Now, in order not to waste your time and try our patience, make sure you concentrate on the best stuff you can find, the flagship examples extolled by the leaders of the field, the prize-winning entries, not the dregs. Notice that this is closely related to Rapoport's rules: unless you are a comedian whose main purpose is to make people laugh at ludicrous buffoonery, spare us the caricature.

7 BEWARE OF DEEPITIES

A deepity (a term coined by the daughter of my late friend, computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum) is a proposition that seems both important and true – and profound – but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous. On one reading, it is manifestly false, but it would be earth-shaking if it were true; on the other reading, it is true but trivial. The unwary listener picks up the glimmer of truth from the second reading, and the devastating importance from the first reading, and thinks, Wow! That's a deepity.

Here is an example (better sit down: this is heavy stuff): Love is just a word.

Oh wow! Cosmic. Mind-blowing, right? Wrong. On one reading, it is manifestly false. I'm not sure what love is – maybe an emotion or emotional attachment, maybe an interpersonal relationship, maybe the highest state a human mind can achieve – but we all know it isn't a word. You can't find love in the dictionary!

We can bring out the other reading by availing ourselves of a convention philosophers care mightily about: when we talk about a word, we put it in quotation marks, thus: "love" is just a word. "Cheeseburger" is just a word. "Word" is just a word. But this isn't fair, you say. Whoever said that love is just a word meant something else, surely. No doubt, but they didn't say it.

Not all deepities are quite so easily analysed. Richard Dawkins recently alerted me to a fine deepity by Rowan Williams, the then archbishop of Canterbury, who described his faith as "a silent waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark".

I leave the analysis of this as an exercise for you.