Strengthen the Opposition Before Answering It

Most nonfiction handles the other side in a few stock sentences. “Critics claim.” “Some argue.” “Skeptics say.” They gesture at a position while describing its worst version, in language its holders would never use, and they come easily because the writer’s own side supplies the summary of the other side. A reader who holds the other view meets your account of it first, and a caricature can tell her the rest of the book cannot be trusted.

John Stuart Mill described the failure exactly. In On Liberty he says that whoever knows only his own side of the case “knows little of that.” It is not enough, he adds, to hear opposing arguments from your own teachers, “presented as they state them”; you must hear them from people who actually believe them and “do their very utmost for them.” A real opponent is not needed to begin. If opponents of all important truths do not exist, Mill says, it is “indispensable to imagine them.” The imagined opponent is a start, and the real advocate’s own text is the correction.

The test is recognition. Would the strongest relevant advocates of the other view read your account and say yes, that is what we hold, and for these reasons? Relevant means those who have actually made the argument, with evidence, as opposed to the loudest or the most convenient, and it is where false balance is avoided and also where abuse hides, so check that you are not using relevance to dismiss the inconvenient (Practice 73). Strongest and balanced are different things. Open polemic is a legitimate form, since its reader knows the contract, and you may give the other view little space and keep your conclusion, provided your answer addresses the argument that exists. A claim that has been tested and has failed can still have its best advocate represented accurately, what they say and why it persuades, without any pretense that the question is open.

Practice. Write the opposing case in three hundred words, as one of its advocates would put it. Then find three passages in which a real advocate states it, in their own books or essays, not in summaries by their critics or by you, and compare. Mark everything in your version they would not recognize, and every strong argument of theirs that you left out. Rewrite until nothing remains in either category. If you can, put the result ahead of your answer in the draft. Over two to three hours you end up with a statement an advocate could sign, and three source passages.