In a variety of contexts I have found this to be the case. Often as the recipient of the argument. To quote Bono, “A change comes slow. It’s not a hill but a mountain, when we start out the climb.”
As the recipient of argument, I have sometimes be utterly blindsided. In one case, in a lifetime of hindsight, I understand the need for it in the context, but the process of understanding came long, long after the event. Sometimes the swift fist out of nowhere is not so much for the benefit of the recipient, but of the onlookers; there may not be time to explain in the context, when the ignorance must be quelled to prevent more damage.
In less desperate circumstances, however, the arguments that have changed my thinking, that is changed me, were not carefully constructed, rationally-presented chains of propositions. They were disjointed, unrelated, life-oriented talk, in many forms, about experience. Sometimes mere experience with no talk. Learning about other people’s experiences has been life-altering for me. No argument has been necessary, but knowing more about experiences from many different independent sources over years. Yes, these “claims and support” are subjective things. Some can be verified, but I have to evaluate other things by a sense of feel, or have the patience to see how something develops over time. In the end, I am evaluating the truthfulness of the thing that has functioned to convince me, as well as the thing of which I have become convinced.
Which sounds very much like evaluating the truthfulness of claims in an argument as well as the truthfulness of the thing it was supposed to convince me of. Yet it came about through an entirely different, non-rational means.
Putting the shoe on the other foot, though, I could try to say, “I know what I know.” But I find it more accurate to say, “I know better today what I don’t know, than I knew yesterday.” What I find I don’t know expands exponentially, daily. That’s a lot of compound interest.
Which makes using argument harder all the time, to say the least. Listening to people, really listening, can be hard on certitude. I often recognize that people are telling me the truth, and the truth they’re telling me about themselves simply doesn’t fit the categories I hold (or have held). It’s hard to argue much, when the presuppositions I had had in mind are no longer useful. At this point, which has been in process for a long, long time, there are a good many things I don’t know how to argue for or against, and I suspect that it’s simply not possible to handle them in the way of argument. If I desire to convince someone of the verity of a thing I hold, a thing that is not a matter of the rational, then I must find some other way to make it clear, to demonstrate it to be something worth considering much less believing.
And why would I say this? Believing many things that I do, that I believe would be invaluable for others as well? Not being an orator or apologist, I have no experience in convicing or not convincing people by these means. But I do have experience of not being convinced myself. Or of understanding the reasoning that demonstrates how unconvincing my attempt has been.
There is an enormous cost to listening to other people and learning from them, I find. Most of the coin is in certitude, which I cannot conjure with wizard-like power.
