what would it take to change your mind?

WHAT WOULD IT TAKE TO CHANGE YOUR MIND?

PETER THIELKE

Abstract: Most of us have settled views about various intellectual debates, andmuch of the activity of philosophers is devoted to giving arguments that aredesigned to convince one’s opponents to change their minds about a certain issue.But, what might this process require? More pointedly, can you clearly imaginewhat it would take to make you change your mind about a position you currentlyhold? This article argues that the surprising answer to this question is no—youcannot imagine what would convince you to change your mind, since in doing soyou would actually have to find those reasons compelling. The article then brieflylooks at some implications of this conclusion.

Keywords: argumentation, change, conceivability, imagination, methodology,persuasion.

Take a specific issue in philosophy which remains contentious, and aboutwhich you are both well informed and have settled views. The area isn’timportant; the key is just that you are confident your view is better than itscompetitors, though presumably your opponents feel the same way abouttheir own side. The positions at issue here need not be ones that youwholeheartedly believe to be true; they are only ones that you take to havebetter argumentative support than their alternatives. You might defend alibertarian account of free will, say, without actually being committed toit as one of your core beliefs. What I’m interested in, here, primarilyconcerns the adequacy of philosophical positions and arguments, ratherthan whether one really believes they are true.

Now, think what it would take for you to change sides in the debate. Insome areas of philosophy, empirical evidence might suffice to bring thisabout—discovery of a note in Kant’s hand unequivocally endorsing adouble-aspect account of transcendental idealism would almost certainlyend that debate—but in most cases it likely would not. Ever more detailedmaps of the brain’s architecture, say, would probably still not movecommitted dualists away from their positions, nor is it clear that anyfurther scientific inquiry could provide empirical evidence that moralrealism is correct or not. The same, I propose, holds of most other philo-sophical debates. Perhaps some empirical investigation could produce

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evidence that would settle these questions—if scientists somehow discov-ered that consciousness is an irreducible and nonphysical part of nature,or that the brain’s causal mechanisms included some inexplicable gaps,these findings likely would have deleterious effects on various views aboutmaterialism or determinism. It’s not clear, though, whether such casescount as anything more than merely stipulating a possibility, for reasonsthat I hope will emerge below.

All of this suggests, then, that any such philosophical conversion wouldrequire not empirical but a priori considerations—some argument orintuition or thought experiment that would prove so compelling that itwould lead you to change your view in a substantive way. Perhaps thismight come in a moment of epiphany, or it might be the result of a slowaccretion of arguments; the details are, for now, largely irrelevant.However they are described, such wholesale conversions seem fairly infre-quent in philosophical circles, but there does not appear to be anythingpeculiar about them, since for various reasons people sometimes simplychange their minds. Indeed, it’s not unlikely that in the past you sub-scribed to views that you no longer hold, and perhaps you can even pointto the argument that changed your mind. But—and here’s the twist—canyou imagine1 a priori evidence that would convince you that your settledview about your preferred debate that you currently hold must be aban-doned?2 I want to argue that in an important way you cannot, and that weought to find this surprising result rather disconcerting.

1. Imagined Persuasiveness

In urging you to imagine an argument that would move you from one sideof a debate to the other, I’m not asking you to conceive of what it wouldbe like just to change sides, nor simply that you abandon your position.Instead, the task is to imagine the actual argument or evidence thatchanges your mind. So, it’s not good enough to picture a closed journalthat you describe as “the volume that contains the paper that convertedme,” unless in doing so you also have some conception of the actualarguments presented in the imagined article. The details here matter: thetask is to imagine the steps of an argument that might move you toanother side of a debate, rather than this happening in some unspecifiedmanner.

1 I will use “conceive” and “imagine” interchangeably here, though I’m not committed toany strong claims that they need be identical; if their equation is objectionable, simply choosethe one that seems most apt.

2 The task, then, is not to imagine returning to a previously held view, nor to rememberhow you arrived at your current position by means of arguments that changed your mind.The question is rather whether—given your current views—you can imagine an argumentthat would lead you to abandon your position.

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Nor is it enough to imagine yourself having different attitudes towardarguments you now deem to be inadequate or unpersuasive. I’m notasking you to imagine that your rational or psychological makeupchanges in some fashion such that you become the sort of person whofinds, say, dualism attractive, though now you are a committed reductivematerialist; rather, I want you to hold your capacities and makeup rela-tively constant but imagine that you are convinced by a new argument toradically change your view. The demand here is not, for example, toremember past instances of cases where your views have shifted, and to asit were imaginatively return to that state; since you no longer subscribe tothose views, you presumably now take them to be lacking in argumenta-tive support. Instead, given the actual views that you currently hold, I’masking you to imagine an argument that you conceive could lead you tochange your mind now.

But can such a case be imagined? Perhaps surprisingly, it seems not.For if you can conceive of such a persuasive argument—and not just theeffects the argument would have on you—then you would have to actuallyfind the argument persuasive. In other words, imagined persuasiveness, atleast in the case of a priori evidence, reduces to actual persuasiveness. It’snot enough merely to entertain an argument and assume that there is apriori evidence for taking it to be adequate, for it’s precisely this latterelement that you currently take to be lacking in the position you do nothold.3

Suppose, for instance, that you are a committed materialist trying toimagine that Descartes’s divisibility argument in the Sixth Meditation isconvincing. It’s not enough to conceive what it’s like for a dualist to bemoved by the claim that since matter is divisible and minds are not, thetwo are essentially different; instead you need to imagine that the argu-ment is in fact compelling to you in your current situation. Perhaps in thepast, when you actually held Cartesian views, such an argument struckyou as good. But it does not now move you, and you no longer see anyreason to abandon materialism in favor of dualism on the basis of thedivisibility argument—given your current commitments, Descartes’s argu-ment cannot lure you back. Rather, you need to imagine the argument asactually persuasive, which is different, I propose, from conceiving orremembering what it was like back in the days when you were a rabiddualist. Here, it seems, the modalities of “real” and “imagined” drop outof the picture, since in order to conceive of the argument as persuasive itmust actually be so to you. Since you are a committed materialist,however, it is not convincing, for otherwise you would not be defending

3 In a way, this point echoes those raised in Gendler 2000, which proposes that we havegreat difficulty imagining morally deviant cases, even if they can be clearly described. In thepresent case, while we can clearly describe a rival position, we have a very hard timeimagining it to be persuasive.

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materialism! You can imagine how others might be moved by it, or con-ceive of counterfactual cases in which—were you a person of the dualistpersuasion—you too would find it plausible.4 But you cannot imagine theargument itself to be convincing, even if it was in the past. And this seemsto hold for all of the other dualist arguments you might have run across,since to imagine them as capable of changing your mind, they too wouldnow have to be convincing to you. But since you remain a materialist, it’simpossible to imagine any argument you’ve run across as being compel-ling. The only way to clearly imagine changing sides would then requireconcocting an argument previously unknown to you, which, given theconditions specified above, you would nonetheless have to be able to layout in sufficient detail such that it would convince you—no small taskindeed!

Moreover, the same goes for those on the other side of the debate aswell. To the committed dualist, no extant argument she is aware of canbe conceived of as capable of converting her to materialism. And wereshe able to conceive of a previously unknown argument that wouldchange her mind, here too she seemingly would be actually moved toalter her view.5

2. Implications

Of course, many people have changed their minds about things theyonce felt sure about, and for all we know this might well happen to usin the future. The same seems true of one’s opponents, who by parity ofreasoning stand in the same position with regard to conceivable changesto their convictions as we do to ours. What, then, do we hope to accom-plish when we make arguments on behalf of our views, and against thosewho hold different positions? In what ways might we seek to changeothers’ minds? And in what ways do they attempt to win us over to theirside of the debate? In light of the peculiar fact about the difficulty ofimagining ways in which your views might change, I want to look atwhat this might tell us about engaging in philosophical argumentationmore generally.

It seems that there are really only two ways in which philosophicalconversions might occur. The first is that, independent of rational argu-mentation, our attitudes and preferences shift over time, so that we

4 This might be a bit too simplistic, since it could suggest a kind of “conclusive-argument-takes-all” model of philosophical investigation, when in fact debates often proceed incre-mentally, and positions are determined through an agglomeration of evidence, rather than bya single decisive claim. I will say a bit more about this point below.

5 Although I won’t pursue the issue, this points to a seeming peculiarity in the modalityof conviction, as opposed to belief. While I can rather easily conceive of myself believing that12,357 is prime, it’s hard—if not impossible—to conceive of the argument that could con-vince me that this is the case.



become the type of person who will endorse what we currently reject. Theother is that some new argument—one that we have yet to encounter—would be sufficiently persuasive to make us change our views.

Each of these alternatives, however, is attended by some odd features.(i) If we take intellectual conversions to be the result of changes in attitudeor psychology that are simply the result of some natural shifts in ourmakeup, it’s hard to see what role philosophical argumentation plays—oreven could play—in changing our minds. On this view, it’s not that anargument is better, or more convincing in establishing its conclusion; it’sjust that, for reasons independent of the argument’s strength, our attitudetoward it has shifted. This in turn would suggest that argumentation itselfis largely tangential to persuasion; the key is instead to somehow effectpsychological changes in one’s opponents. But this is surely an oddaccount of the philosophical endeavor, since it might just as easily bebrought about through devious neurosurgery or psychotropic drugs as itwould through carefully reasoned claims.

We could, of course, also imagine ourselves becoming smarter, orat least becoming better practitioners of philosophy. As we improve inour reasoning—by, say, becoming more rigorous, diligent, and care-ful—we might come to see the errors that attend our past views, andrevise our positions in light of these revelations. Such a psychologicalchange can be seen as one of the more valuable benefits of engaging inphilosophical thought, and it could well provide an avenue towardmaking sense of how to conceive of changing one’s mind throughargumentation.

The problem here, however, is that it’s not clear that imagining oneselfbecoming smarter or more diligent tracks the standards of conviction setout above. Even if I conceive of myself as smarter than I am now, thisdoesn’t help me in formulating what evidence I would take to be compel-ling enough to make me change my mind—for all I know, the smarter Ibecome, the more sure I will be in my present convictions. There is also therelated worry that being smarter doesn’t always mean that one is right; itis not uncommon to hear someone say, “So-and-so is so very smart, buthis views are simply wrong!”6 It certainly cannot hurt to become smarter,but this strikes me as too rough a proxy to serve as a means of conceivingwhat would change one’s settled views.

(ii) The other option is to hold out hope that a previously unrecog-nized argument will come to light that will settle a matter beyond alldoubt, or would at least show that dissenting from its conclusion wouldinvolve some kind of rank irrationality or contradiction. But this toofaces some serious obstacles, for it flies in the face of the fact that most

6 This relates to what Frances 2010 calls a renegade epistemology, in which one acknowl-edges others as one’s intellectual superiors but nonetheless rejects their views.

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philosophical debates have been raging for decades, if not centuries, andthere is, in most cases at least, seemingly little progress that has beenmade in devising new arguments for the various sides in these conflicts.At best, it would require the naiveté or hubris of thinking that your viewand your argumentative skills are capable of achieving what has previ-ously eluded scores of very smart people over long stretches of time.At worst, it seems to turn on the blind hope that there must be someargument—whose details cannot be specified at all—that will dissolve aproblem that has persisted for ages. Of course, such an argument seemspossible, but it also looks suspiciously like saying that it’s possible toprove Goldbach’s Conjecture without being able to give any explanationof what the solution would involve. It rests, in short, on a kind ofstipulative faith, and seemingly nothing more. And the reasons for thisunfortunate state of affairs again turn on the difficult, if not impossible,task of conceiving or imagining what would change your mind, and whatcould change an opponent’s mind.

It’s important to emphasize that I am not suggesting that it’s impos-sible that one’s view will ever change; this has happened in the past, andwill likely occur in the future as well. The point is rather that thisprocess remains utterly mysterious, and, in the case of future changes,literally inconceivable. Retrospectively, one can of course providereasons for why one’s viewed changed—these will likely involve appealsto being convinced by a new set of arguments—but such reasons cannotbe cited in explaining what could change our minds in the future, giventhe conditions on persuasiveness sketched above. So, if we were tochange our minds in the future, whatever it was that effected this trans-formation is from our present perspective wholly inconceivable. And,given the parity of our situations, the same can be said about whateverit might be that will change our opponents’ minds as well—in arguingagainst them, it seems a matter of sheer luck if our view were to prevail.Minds might change, but why and when they do so will remain, Ipropose, mysterious.

3. What to Do?

If there is indeed a concern here, what should we do? Several possibilitiescome to mind, though none of them is—as perhaps fits with the theme ofthis article—wholly compelling.

(i) First, one might attempt to avoid the problem by persisting in tryingto find that unique yet elusive argument that would finally succeed inbringing one’s opponents over to one’s side. Or one might continue tobolster one’s own position by adding further dialectical epicycles inresponse to criticisms from one’s opponents. This, I suspect, is what mostof us in fact do in our philosophical lives and careers, but—for the reasonsgiven above—it seems a rather tenuous exercise. Since most of one’s



opponents’ views are already firmly entrenched, such a course of actionrequires the assumption that one is capable of coming up with an argu-ment that would meet the conceivability test outlined above, despite thefact that generations of previous thinkers have failed to do so. At the veryleast, the dangers of misplaced vanity certainly loom large here, since onewould have to attempt to win over opponents who quite literally cannotimagine an argument that would change their minds.7

(ii) Second, instead of treating single arguments as potentially decisiveone might see the philosophical enterprise as largely incremental; argu-mentation need not be taken as an all-or-nothing proposition but shouldinstead be viewed as making small steps toward moderate conclusions.The model here might be something like a convergence on the truth, whereeach of us plays her own small part in bringing this about. Rather thanseeing argumentation in antagonistic terms, we would instead embrace amore communal view, in which we each try to contribute to the overalledifice of knowledge.

Alternately, one could adopt something like a “buffet” model of phi-losophy, in which a variety of views are on offer, and everyone is free tochoose those that are found most attractive. Arguments wouldn’t be takento oppose one another; they would simply be seen as different alternatives.Philosophy, on this view, would primarily be in the business of mappinglogical space, without any demand to endorse any particular view. Wherethe incremental view hopes for a convergence on the truth, the buffetmodel sees the aim of philosophical argumentation to be the increase ofavailable options rather than a single position that will win over one’sopponents.

Whatever merits such models have—and I think they have many,including a reduction of the often gratuitously antagonistic attitudes aca-demics adopt toward one another—it’s not clear that they can avoid theworries about conceivability outlined in the previous sections. In the caseof the incremental system, we must assume that we are converging on akind of philosophical consensus—but this is precisely what’s at issue inmost debates. Moreover, it’s not clear that we can even conceive of whatan incremental change of position would involve; we might be able toimagine that our minds change but, just as above, we could not provideany specifics about how this could happen. And while the buffet model hasthe virtue of being pluralistic, it also is hard to square with the idea thatone choice precludes the viability of others; in adopting a materialistaccount of the mind, for example, one also takes its dualist alternatives tobe wrong, and cannot conceive of how one could find them attractive.Unless one is willing to adopt a wholesale relativism, to the point of saying

7 The difficulty is compounded by the fact that very often those on the other side of adebate are acknowledged as very smart people, and in many cases as one’s philosophicalsuperiors. Again, the discussion in Frances 2010 is helpful on this front.

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that materialism is true for me but false for you—and that’s just fine!—theproblems about conceiving what could change one’s mind will persistunder the buffet model.

(iii) Third, one might try to resolve the tension between competingpositions not by seeking further a priori evidence or argument but ratherby looking at the empirical assumptions and claims underlying variousdebates. This, I take it, is one of the motivations behind recent movestoward an “experimental philosophy,” which interrogates the bases of theintuitions that ground many arguments. So, for instance, if it turns outthat the vast majority of nonphilosophers do not find a zombie worldconceivable, this might suggest that dualist arguments that appeal to thepossibility of such a case can or should be called into doubt. And it seemsperfectly feasible for such a dualist to conceive of a situation in which suchan empirical result obtained, which in turn would mean that the dualistcould imagine—in not just a stipulative sense—evidence that mightchange his mind. On this line, the solution to the seeming intractability ofphilosophical debates might be found in moving from a priori to empiricalevidence.

But it’s not clear that the introduction of this empirical evidencewould do much of anything to change one’s mind, unless one were ante-cedently predisposed to think that such evidence is probative.8 Even ifthe committed dualist’s intuitions are out of line with those of the vastmajority of the population, this will likely make little difference inwhether the dualist changes her mind—unless she already has endorsedthe move away from a priori evidence. To take an analogous case, Icannot conceive of changing my mind that 173 is a prime number, evenif survey after survey revealed that the majority of the populationbelieved that it is not. Absent some proof that 173 is not prime—without, that is, some a priori evidence—the results of such experimentalphilosophy seem unlikely to move anyone to change his mind, if he isnot already committed to the experimentalist’s position. Here, it seems,the limits on imagining changing one’s mind trump the force of theexperimental data.

(iv) Fourth, a more radical—though perhaps more credible andhonest—alternative would involve rejecting the idea that argumentationcan or should seek to change anyone’s mind. On this view, one of courseresponds to criticisms, and seeks to build as strong a case as possible, butthe central goal in argumentation is to vindicate one’s position to oneself,rather than trying to convert others to one’s view. This is perhaps reflectedin David Lewis’s claim that philosophy should not be in the business of

8 In cases where you alone held a view, perhaps there would be good reasons to think thatit is mistaken. But almost all interesting philosophical debates have a good number ofpartisans on each side, and here it’s less clear that empirical data drawn from polling ofintuitions would make much difference.



trying to change opinions, since these are the things that we try to justify.Rather, “one comes to philosophy already endowed with a stock ofopinions. It is not the business of philosophy either to undermine or tojustify these preexisting opinions, to any great extent, but only to try todiscover ways of expanding them into an orderly system.” And, Lewiscontinues, “there is some give-and-take, but not too much: some of ussometimes change our minds on some points of common opinion, if theyconflict irremediably with a doctrine that commands our belief by itssystematic beauty and its agreement with more important commonopinion” (Lewis 1973, 88). On this line of thought, one’s views are notaltered directly by argument but are at best obliquely influenced by them.Argumentation, in short, seeks not to change others’ minds, only to showthem what bullets they must bite in order to retain the opinions theyalready hold.9

Such a perspective does avoid the problem spelled out above, but itmight come at a rather high cost, for it seems to license the retention of allsorts of apparently irrational beliefs and opinions, and makes themimmune from any critical reassessment, so long as their adherents remainfirm. Any position, it seems, could legitimately shrug off what to anopponent looks like a fatal objection by simply standing steadfast in itsopinion. In any event, it would require a radical reconception of whatargumentation involves—one, I suspect, that many philosophers would beloath to accept.

(v) Finally, one might try not to formulate a straightforward solutionto a philosophical problem but instead to seek a more indirect dissolutionof the grounds that give rise to the seemingly intractable debates. Thisstrategy might take several different forms. A first, positivist line woulddeclare all such philosophical controversies mere nonsense, and decreethat any such questions that do not admit of empirical solutions areempty and meaningless. Such an approach, however, has the unfortu-nate consequence of likely undermining itself, since any such positivistdecree would require just the kind of philosophical justification that isrejected as empty. Philosophy might be a mess, but it also cannot beavoided.10

A second path would not reject philosophical debates out of hand butwould ask about the foundations on which they rest. Just as in his attemptto resolve the Antinomies of reason Kant sought out a tacit assumptionshared by both sides of a seemingly intractable debate and argued that in

9 Though I won’t pursue the point here, this also raises some interesting questionsabout how philosophical positions are presented to students, and to what extent one’sphilosophical opinions are formed through one’s early professors and initial exposure tophilosophy.

10 In light of this, a more cynical alternative here would be to treat philosophical argu-ments like intellectual games or competitions—fun to engage in but ultimately not reallymeaning anything.

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dispensing with it the problem dissolved, so too one might take entrenchedphilosophical controversies as reflecting something like this antinomialstructure and seek to solve them by pursuing Kant’s strategy. If one couldshow that both dualists and materialists, say, shared certain contentiousassumptions about the nature of the mind—and if in our rejecting theseassumptions both positions looked untenable—perhaps a resolution ofthe problem could be achieved. Or one might adopt a Wittgensteinian-minded goal of taking argumentation as a kind of therapy and seek to cureoneself and others of the bad assumptions that give rise to its variousphilosophical ailments.

The difficulty, of course, lies both in finding what these assumptionsmight be and in showing that removing them would in fact lead to a clearsolution of the various debates. For it seems highly unlikely that eitherside in a debate would accept that the issue it took as crucial in factrested on a faulty assumption. The same attempt to dissolve a debatewould run into exactly the same perplexity sketched above: absent anargument that settled the matter, or that showed how a shared assump-tion was in fact false, neither side could even conceive what such anassumption would be.

All of this strikes me, at least, as leaving us in a rather unfortunateposition: the philosophical enterprise in which we are engaged—whenapproached coldly and honestly—has little to no chance of succeeding inbringing one’s opponents to one’s side through clear, careful, and irresist-ible argumentation. Though changes of mind will surely continue tohappen, they will unfortunately remain wholly mysterious, and we haveno power to predict what, if anything, will be persuasive to those whooppose our views. Of course, if this is correct, unless you already find thisa worrisome state of affairs, then likely nothing I have done will havesufficed to change your mind. Indeed, you likely can’t even imagine thatit’s right.

Department of PhilosophyPomona CollegeThe Claremont Colleges551 N. College Ave.Claremont, CA [email protected]

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Peter Kung, Yuval Avnur, the audience at the 2012 PacificAPA in Seattle, and in particular Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins for her veryhelpful and insightful comments at the session on this paper.



References

Frances, Bryan. 2010. “The Reflective Epistemic Renegade.” Philosophyand Phenomenological Research 81:419–63.

Gendler, Tamar. 2000. “Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance.” Journal ofPhilosophy 97, no. 2:55–81.

Lewis, David. 1973. Counterfactuals. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-sity Press.

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