The art of argument | Jordan Peterson Video Lecture | Understanding the art of Public Speaking: Become a better speaker - Self Help Learning

So how do you deal with situations where your
words are likely to be used out of context,
let’s say.
And that’s a situation I’ve encountered.
Well, you see, you encounter a situation like
that very frequently.
Everyone does in their life.
If you’re having a discussion with someone
you live with, for example, so someone you
have to be with for a long time – a lover,
boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, husband—sibling
for that matter.
You’re going to have contentious discussions
about how to move forward and it’s very
frequently the case that your words will be
– that you’ll be straw-manned.
Your words will be taken out of context.
The other person (and you too!) will try to
win instead of trying to solve the problem.
What you have to kind of decide is – well
two things.
The first thing is: you’re probably wrong
in some important way.
And you might think “Well, so what?”
But no, it’s not so simple.
Being wrong in some important way is like
having a map that doesn’t correspond to
the streets.
If you’re wrong in some important way, when
you go to where you’re going you will get
lost and you might end up in a neighborhood
that you don’t want to visit!
So it actually matters if you’re wrong.
And so now if you’re talking to someone
who is acting in opposition to you, it’s
possible that during your contentious discussion
they will tell you something—about how you’re
wrong—that’s accurate.
Now you’re not going to be very happy about
that, because like who wants to discover that
they’re wrong?
But it’s better to figure out that your
map is inaccurate than it is to get lost.
And so one of the things you have to remember
when you’re discussing things with people,
even if they’re out to defeat you, let’s
say, is that there is some glimmering of the
possibility that you could walk away with
more knowledge than you walked in with.
And that’s worth – that can be worth paying
quite a price for.
And so I’ve had the opportunity to engage
in public debate of an exceptionally contentious
nature for let’s say 18 months nonstop,
fundamentally.
And it’s been very stressful.
But the upshot of that is that my arguments
are in much better shape than they were, and—I
shouldn’t say that.
My THOUGHTS are much more refined than they
were at the beginning of this process.
It’s not my arguments are in better shape.
That’s not the right way to think about
it.
It’s that I’m clearer about what I know.
I can articulate it better.
And that’s all forged in the heat of conflict.
If you’re discussing a contentious issue
with someone you love and that you have to
live with and put up with, you want to listen
to them.
Because what you really want to do is establish
a lasting peace, and you might even have to
make their arguments for them.
Maybe you’re more verbally fluent than your
partner (which doesn’t mean, by the way,
that you’re more right, it just means you
can construct better arguments on the fly.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re
more accurate).
You might have to help your partner formulate
their arguments so that you can really get
to grips with what it is that they’re trying
to say.
So that you can alter the way that you’re
constructing your own narrative and your joint
narrative, so that you’re not butting heads
unnecessarily as you move forward through
life.
It’s not a very good idea to win an argument
with your wife.
That isn’t what you want, because then you
have a defeated partner.
And a defeated partner is not happy.
And a defeated partner is often out to reclaim
the defeat.
And so as a strategy for moving forward with
someone who you’re going to wake up beside
5,000 times it’s not a very advisable strategy.
It’s better to listen, to flesh out the
argument on both sides, and to see if you
can come to a mutually acceptable negotiated
settlement.
And that’s the case in most encounters in
life if you can manage that.
But it’s easy to want to win.
One of the things I do in my psychology seminar
is I assign papers to students and then I
extract out propositions from the papers.
And they’re propositions that are debatable.
And so then I outline the Pro side and I outline
the Con side.
Like “if you agreed with this, this is what
you’d think”.
If you disagreed with this, this is what you’d
think.
Then I divide the students into groups, like
four people per group.
“You four are pro.
You four are con.
You’ve got 20 minutes to make a pro argument.
You’ve got 20 minutes to make a con argument.
We’ll go around the table and we’ll see
how, you know, we’ll have each group rate
the other and we’ll see who comes out on
top.”
Well, what you want to do as an educator is
you don’t want to put forward a specific
point of view.
Not when what you’re trying to do is to
discuss a contentious issue!
What you want to do is teach people how to
take an argument apart and formulate a response.
And to do that it’s actually extraordinarily
useful to arbitrarily assign positions to
people.
It’s like, I don’t care what you think,
you’re “pro” on this topic, generate
an argument.”
And what that does is it vastly widens people’s
conceptualizations of the argumentative space.
Because most really contentious issues – gun
control, abortion, those sorts of things—there
is a lot to be said on both sides.
They wouldn’t be contentious issues otherwise.They’re
issues that don’t go away.
Well why?
Well because they’re so complex.
They don’t lend themselves to easy unitary
solutions.
One of the things you want to learn if you’re
educated is that on any complex subject there’s
a lot to be said.
And that you’re going to come at that with
your particular ideological bias, let’s
say, your temperamental bias.
Maybe even you might even come at it with
things you’ve actually thought about, although
that’s pretty damn rare.
But you need to learn just exactly how localized
your viewpoint is.
There’s psychology experiments that demonstrate
this quite clearly.
So imagine that you come into my lab and I
ask you whether you’re “pro abortion”
or “pro life”.
And I get you to rate that on a scale.
Maybe you say, “Well, on a scale of one
to ten, I’m eight prolife.”
And I say “Okay, now you have to write a
500 word essay that’s opposed to your position.”
Okay?
That’s the experiment.
And then I bring you back two weeks later
and I ask you to rate your position on the
same scale.
It will have shifted substantially to the
position that you delineated in your written
report.
And the reason for that is that most people’s
arguments are unbelievably shallow.
They’re not arguments, they’re just perceptual
biases.
That’s one way of thinking about them.
And if you get people to delineate out the
space in any rigorous manner then their attitudes
shift.
What you really want and if you’re going
to engage in a discussion about say something
like gun control is you want to be familiar
with the entire range of arguments—deeply
familiar.
And have some respect for them.
I mean it’s pretty clear that guns kill
people.
They’re dangerous.
But then it’s also not self-evident that
the only entities that should be allowed to
be dangerous are the state entities.
So there’s things that can be said that
are intelligent across that entire distribution
of opinion.
And if you’re educated then you should be
conversant with the entire range of opinions.
So that’s one approach as an educator, is
to teach people how to analyze an argument
and to formulate their opinions.
You do people a great service by – that’s
teaching them how to think.
Not what to think, but how to think.
Now when I lecture my psychology courses which
is a different approach let’s say, I take
a position on the literature because I have
to.
There’s no being neutral about the literature.
What am I going to do, pick random studies?
It’s like that isn’t how people work.
I have a body of knowledge and it stems partly
from my biases and from my temperaments.
But it’s an informed body of opinion.
But what I presented to the students as is,
like look, this is my take on the literature.
That doesn’t mean I’m right!
It means that I’m an informed observer.
I’m an informed, singular observer.
And what I’m doing then is modeling how
an informed, singular observer would deal
with a complex body of literature.
So it’s partly, in that role I’m not exactly
providing facts and I’m not exactly teaching
people how to think.
I’m saying, “If you’re a psychologist,
a research psychologist, and you want to engage
with the literature, here is one way that
you would do it.”
And so then I’m a model and I’m a model
of a way to be in a particular domain.
Now that doesn’t mean that you have to emulate
me from top to bottom, but at least you have
a sense of what it’s like to be a person
doing that.
And that’s a different form of pedagogy.