Understanding convictions, your own included

Posing the question as a choice between two camps prevents it from being dealt with. Almost nobody wants to give up either, and everybody is constantly making trade-offs.

Finding oneself in the middle of a scale does not have a single meaning. Three very different situations produce the same point, and it is worth knowing which is yours.

The centre denotes at least three different things depending on context. That is what explains how it can be declared both a majority and nowhere to be found.

A famous experiment showed that a majority manifestly in error could change an otherwise obvious answer. The result is not anecdotal for public debate.

The question is not whether you love your country. It is at what level a decision should be taken, and what makes that level legitimate.

A well-built test measures something real. It does not measure what is often attributed to it, and it is more useful to say so than to let people believe otherwise.

A constitution is not a neutral text organising debate from outside. Each mechanism it installs decides between values that conflict.

We readily tell ourselves as coherent people applying principles. Work on introspection suggests the order is often the reverse.

Agreement on the objective says nothing about the instrument. Yet it is on the instrument that almost all disagreements are played out, and each instrument has its serious supporters.

A question can produce the answer it expects without anyone having cheated. Here are the defects that suffice to create an opinion out of nothing.

Part of political disagreement does not set two positions against each other, but two definitions of the same term. These are the longest, because they appear to bear on substance.

The idea that a contrary argument always reinforces convictions is very widespread. Recent work partly contradicts it, and that is rather good news.

Conserving and reforming are presented as opposite attitudes, one prudent and the other bold. In reality, each invokes prudence, against a different risk.

Situating yourself in relation to someone whose positions you know makes a result speak. The exercise is useful on three conditions, and misleading if they are forgotten.

The feeling that proposals converge while voters diverge is frequent. Several documented mechanisms explain it, without any need to suppose a collusion.