so often, one finds that a person's entire argument rests upon premises they believe to be true but which turn out, upon inspection, to be no more than assumptions. and often instinctual ones at that.
when these assumptions appear to others to be damaging, we call these prejudices. and we tend to be dismissive of folks who stubbornly stick with them against the social trends that wash through a society.
looking back at history, it is easy to identify some of those assumptions. the assumption written into the us constitution in the eighteenth century by white men that women and black men weren't equally capable in their political judgement is an obvious example. another we recently discussed involved the cosmology of the universe and certain things that were assumed about its architecture based upon received notions about the intentions and qualities of a god.
in the clash between different ideas, few of the combatants submit to the others' ideas. a society makes a judgement over time and the losers are defined. we move on. and yet sometimes the underlying assumptions are preserved in new forms.
when we think of our own time, it is sometimes possible to see similar assumptions underlying the arguments people fight about in the public domain. but there are numerous others which we hardly notice but which shape our behaviour all day long. trust in our families, neighbours, police, leaders, army - to varying degrees. belief in a god and his/her commands. these can feel positive. sometimes they withstand the tests of time. there are also the sorts of assumptions that express the edges of a person's accommodation with the world: unemployed people are lazy rather than unlucky or vice versa; it's my money; markets are always right and governments are always incompetent; god made the rules so i don't care what seems right to you etc.
seen much the same thing in catastrophic processes used to analyse the potential of stocks - in which investors permit faith and belief in their own prescience to defy reality. can you get them to change the way they approach the issue? nope.
these kinds of assumptions often have a lengthy shelf-life and are shared, unchallenged, by large populations of believers. indeed, i wonder whether there aren't a great bundle of such assumptions within all of us.
some folks argue we are a blank slate when we begin our lives. others not so much. but somehow by the time we grow up, these assumptions seem to control our decisions.
sometimes these assumptions are useful and accurate (or reasonably so). sometimes they are not useful and are inaccurate. and sometimes one hears of ideas that were inaccurate but useful all the same.
i believe that one reason it is so often difficult to change a person's mind is because these underlying assumptions form an architecture within a person's thought process upon which many things depend. you can argue with a republican about climate change and think it is a discussion about the likelihoods of a series of potential scientific occurrences. but if you don't realise that underlying this discussion might be assumptions about the role of god and free markets, attitudes to experts and tribal loyalties, then you won't understand why the conversation makes no progress. sometimes, clever people even seem to manipulate those prejudices for financial reasons or to maintain their power.
these bundles of assumptions are often a large part of how we think of ourselves and how we relate to the world. do we ever change them? yes. at damascene moments. and also perhaps gradually. but mostly, we don't over the short run.
at any rate, this is my explanation of why it is often impossible to persuade a person to change their mind. you can't get someone to challenge their underlying assumptions. so much depends upon them.
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