10. Defensibility and Criteria

Several things can remain convincing at once without pointing in the same direction.

Suppose two witnesses describe the same event differently, and both seem credible.

Neither report disappears because the other exists, and both exert pressure.

Or suppose a doctor recommends a treatment that appears likely to help but carries serious possible side effects.

This is advisable in one respect and troubling in another.

Sometimes nothing settles immediately.

We remain uncertain.

We may lean one way while still finding opposing considerations difficult to dismiss.

Conviction formation can involve more than something simply convincing or failing to convince. Different considerations can convince in different directions.

Weighing

Ordinary language already has a useful word for what often follows.

We weigh what speaks for one possibility against what speaks for another.

The metaphor should not be taken literally. There need not be a hidden scale in the mind.

It captures something simpler: several considerations can remain active at once and bear differently on what eventually becomes convincing.

Suppose you are unsure whether a colleague deliberately excluded you from an important conversation.

You remember earlier tensions.

You also know that the colleague was under strong pressure that day.

Someone tells you the omission was accidental.

You can remain with the situation as it stands.

But you can also do things.

You can seek further information, ask what else might explain what happened, inspect an assumption, or introduce another possibility. You might look for an objection to the view you currently favor, or return to the question later.

What you cannot do in the same way is decide where the weight will fall.

You can choose to inspect an objection without being able to choose whether it will cease to trouble you. You can reconstruct an argument without being able to command yourself to find it convincing.

Deliberation is both active and receptive.

We can influence what enters the weighing and how carefully it is examined.

We cannot directly assign convincing force.

Criteria

Sometimes parts of orientation become stable enough to organize later weighing.

Suppose you are choosing a car.

Price matters to you.

So does safety.

Reliability has become important after years of repairs.

Running costs matter because your budget is limited.

Once they have acquired enough force, they can function as criteria in the comparison.

Making them explicit can reveal why one option appears preferable and where different considerations conflict.

Criteria do not remove weighing.

They structure it.

They remain within conviction formation.

You can propose a criterion, apply it, compare it with another, and examine what follows. But you cannot simply decide that it will matter to you.

Once criteria become convincing enough, they can operate as relatively settled parts of an inquiry without being reconsidered at every step.

Different people and practices may settle on different criteria.

Criteria can also become unsettled again.

A criterion may conflict with another.

Its use may produce results that disturb confidence in it.

Someone may ask why it should matter at all.

When that happens, the criterion itself can become part of the inquiry.

Nothing requires this questioning to continue indefinitely.

Criteria can settle locally just as other convictions can.

Shared Criteria

Criteria do not have to be shared in order to guide a person's own weighing.

But when people assess something together, shared criteria can provide common terms for comparison.

Suppose two people disagree about which of two explanations is better.

They may already agree that an explanation should account for a particular observation.

That agreement does not settle the question.

They may still disagree about which explanation fits the observation better, how much weight it should carry, or what else matters.

But they do not have to reopen that criterion at every step.

Where enough criteria have become sufficiently stable for the people involved, they can organize a shared inquiry without becoming final or universal.

Where that overlap is missing, the disagreement may shift.

One person may appeal to a criterion that does not convince the other.

The criterion itself can then become part of the inquiry.

Shared criteria do not take inquiry outside conviction formation.

They are cases in which enough of what has become convincing overlaps for people to examine something together.

Defensibility

A conviction can be challenged.

Suppose you are convinced that another person acted maliciously.

Someone asks why.

Being convinced does not answer the question.

If you take up the challenge, you have to offer something in defense of the conviction.

You might point to what was said, what happened before, or what alternatives seem unlikely.

The other person can examine what you offer, accept some of it, reject some, or ask for more.

The conviction is now being assessed from another perspective.

It no longer operates only within the orientation in which it formed.

It has become answerable to another perspective.

A defense introduces a relation between people.

Someone offers considerations in support of a conviction.

Someone else assesses what is offered.

The person assessing the defense need not be neutral, authoritative, or final.

They may already disagree.

They may share some criteria with the person offering the defense and reject others.

This allows several things to come apart.

Convictional strength concerns how firmly something convinces a person.

A defense is what someone offers when that conviction is challenged.

Defensibility concerns how that defense fares under the criteria operative in the assessment.

Persuasion concerns whether the defense actually changes what the other person finds convincing.

These are not the same.

A defense may fare well under criteria shared in an inquiry and still fail to convince the person assessing it.

Another defense may convince someone while faring poorly under those same criteria.

Successful persuasion is not the measure of defensibility.

Nor must the considerations offered in a defense be the same things that originally made the conviction convincing.

What formed or stabilized a conviction may carry little weight under the criteria now being used to assess it.

A challenge can make that difference visible.

Someone may discover that they are strongly convinced of something but have little to offer under criteria they themselves accept. That may or may not change the convincing force of the conviction.

Or they may find that considerations they had scarcely noticed before become important once the conviction has to be defended.

Defensibility is local and relational.

A defense is offered here, to these people, under these criteria, for this challenge.

Where enough criteria are shared, the defense can be assessed without every standard being reopened at once.

Where they are not, part of the disagreement may shift to the criteria themselves.

Defense also creates another opportunity for deliberate participation.

We can clarify what we are claiming, offer further considerations, answer objections, compare alternatives, and apply criteria already operative in the inquiry.

What we cannot do is decide that the defense will convince the person assessing it. Nor can that person.

The same applies in self-examination. We can ask ourselves to state the case for a conviction and examine what we produce. We cannot command ourselves to find that case convincing.

The fundamental claim applies here as well. A group can agree on procedures and criteria, invite criticism, and require claims to be defended. These arrangements can shape what happens next, but the group cannot simply decide what its members will find convincing.

A conviction can become answerable beyond the orientation in which it first formed. Where enough criteria are shared, people can examine the defense together. But shared criteria still do not place what becomes convincing under either side's control.