how do you determine whether your partner “can envision anything that will change ones mind on this topic”
You could ask them. I had a long debate with my dad where I eventually came to asking him if he could envision anything that would make him change his mind on religion. It was then that I realized how pointless the discussion had been. Knowing something like this chart beforehand would have saved me plenty of grief.
Unfortunately, that only works if they assume you’re asking the question in good faith, which is rare; the standards of casual debate are so low that most people encountering a similar question are going to interpret it as an attack on their conviction, not as a prerequisite for discussion. In other words, “no, I can’t imagine anything that’d change my mind” probably doesn’t mean what it says on the box, but rather something along the lines of “I’m confident in my opinion; I don’t consider myself a seeker or a lapsed adherent, and I’m not trying to solicit reasons not to hold it”.
This is particularly true when belief in an orthodoxy is cast as virtuous in itself; then admitting vulnerability even in principle means you’re imperfectly orthodox and thus imperfectly moral, and that someone trying to get you to think of vulnerabilities is directly attacking your moral worth. Even without this, though, it’s pretty rare for people who haven’t internalized the notion of falsifiability to be comfortable with taking on their beliefs in this way.
Eventually I made a habit of this with religious friends. “What might happen that could even hypothetically change your beliefs in God?” “Nothing.” “Oh, ’kay then.”
I’m currently considering an approach with the most recent friend who is “researching” for the sole purpose of knocking it down. “Since you already know that what you read isn’t going to change your beliefs, why are you pretending that you care about evidence?”
I’m trying to come up with a way of saying that that’s likely to cause them to update (even if they’re updating in terms of “oh, yeah, as long as I know I’m not gonna change my mind it is pretty silly to pretend like it matters”)
IME, in these situations the answer is typically “Because I don’t want to accept the status-hit associated with being perceived as not caring about the evidence.” That is, I would rather think of myself as someone who evaluated the evidence and came to my conclusion, rather than someone who came to my conclusion without evidence.
Which makes it tricky to get people to admit to it when doing the latter, since that’s just yet another way to take the status hit.
Lowering the wall can help a little… that is, artificially reducing the perceived status hit of admitting to not caring about the evidence.
You could ask them. I had a long debate with my dad where I eventually came to asking him if he could envision anything that would make him change his mind on religion. It was then that I realized how pointless the discussion had been. Knowing something like this chart beforehand would have saved me plenty of grief.
Unfortunately, that only works if they assume you’re asking the question in good faith, which is rare; the standards of casual debate are so low that most people encountering a similar question are going to interpret it as an attack on their conviction, not as a prerequisite for discussion. In other words, “no, I can’t imagine anything that’d change my mind” probably doesn’t mean what it says on the box, but rather something along the lines of “I’m confident in my opinion; I don’t consider myself a seeker or a lapsed adherent, and I’m not trying to solicit reasons not to hold it”.
This is particularly true when belief in an orthodoxy is cast as virtuous in itself; then admitting vulnerability even in principle means you’re imperfectly orthodox and thus imperfectly moral, and that someone trying to get you to think of vulnerabilities is directly attacking your moral worth. Even without this, though, it’s pretty rare for people who haven’t internalized the notion of falsifiability to be comfortable with taking on their beliefs in this way.
Eventually I made a habit of this with religious friends. “What might happen that could even hypothetically change your beliefs in God?” “Nothing.” “Oh, ’kay then.”
I’m currently considering an approach with the most recent friend who is “researching” for the sole purpose of knocking it down. “Since you already know that what you read isn’t going to change your beliefs, why are you pretending that you care about evidence?”
I’m trying to come up with a way of saying that that’s likely to cause them to update (even if they’re updating in terms of “oh, yeah, as long as I know I’m not gonna change my mind it is pretty silly to pretend like it matters”)
IME, in these situations the answer is typically “Because I don’t want to accept the status-hit associated with being perceived as not caring about the evidence.” That is, I would rather think of myself as someone who evaluated the evidence and came to my conclusion, rather than someone who came to my conclusion without evidence.
Which makes it tricky to get people to admit to it when doing the latter, since that’s just yet another way to take the status hit.
Lowering the wall can help a little… that is, artificially reducing the perceived status hit of admitting to not caring about the evidence.