Understanding convictions, your own included

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.

Some questions provoke immediate resistance: one would like to answer both, or refuse to answer. That reaction is information, not a defect of the questionnaire.

Nobody defends a tolerance without limit, and nobody defends its absence. The whole debate bears on where the limit lies and on the authority that sets it.

Finding a different result a few years later is not a sign that one of the two measurements was wrong. Three distinct causes can explain it.

A ballot does not say why it was cast. Three different logics produce the same act, and the electoral system largely determines which dominates.

Owning is not a simple fact, but a set of distinct rights, which the law distributes differently according to the goods. That is where most disagreements lodge.