How to Understand Your Audience

Have you ever debated someone, presenting your most powerful arguments, only to be met with a brick wall of resistance? If this is you, chances are you're speaking a language your audience doesn't understand.

Note: The following is based on Aristotle's observations. It's generalized to help you understand how people think, but nothing here is 100% applicable in all situations. I'm also not saying rhetoric is bad. Having gotten that out of the way, we continue...

There are three modes of persuasion:

Dialectic: through reasoned arguments.
Rhetoric: through appeals to emotions.
Pseudo-dialectic: looks like dialectic, but is really rhetoric.

William Lane Craig's "Kalam Cosmological Argument" is dialectic. It presents two justifiable premises and syllogistically combines them to arrive at a conclusion. https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/popular-writings/existence-nature-of-god/the-kalam-cosmological-argument/

This meme is rhetoric. The best rhetoric always contains at least an element of truth, otherwise it wouldn't be persuasive. But its power is in its emotional impact.

This response by Richard Dawkins on why he refuses to debate William Lane Craig is pseudo-dialectic. It superficially looks like a reasoned appeal to truth, but it's really meant to appeal to readers' emotions.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/20/richard-dawkins-william-lane-craig

Most people are rhetorical thinkers. Here's how to recognize them.

1. They aren't persuaded by reasoned arguments.
2. They can't explain rationally why they reject an argument; they resort to emotional appeals.
3. They use talking points, but can't defend them.

...

Rhetorical thinkers also tend to:

4. Respond with memes.
5. Respond with hostility, snark, or mockery.
6. Claim they're "laughing at you."

Why? Because these things would work on THEM. They don't understand that these things have little impact on dialectical thinkers.

Rhetorical thinkers often show their vulnerabilities in their responses. If they say they're "laughing at you," they probably feel emotional discomfort when they're the ones being laughed at. If they question your credentials, credentials are important to them, and so on.

This, btw, is why I present my credentials up front on Twitter. It's rhetoric. I don't personally find credentials persuasive when arguing with someone, but a lot of people do. Putting "PhD astrophysicist" in my profile reduced the amount of Atheist nonsense I got.

Dialectical thinkers are straightforward to identify. They prefer to use facts and reasoning to make their arguments, rather than appeals to emotions. William Lane Craig and J. Warner Wallace are dialectical thinkers.

Dialectical thinkers make the same mistake as rhetorical thinkers in trying to persuade everyone the same way. They become frustrated when their perfect logic pings off their audience like a super ball, not realizing that to rhetorical thinkers they're using a foreign language.

Dialectic is gibberish to a rhetorical thinker, the way rhetoric is gibberish to a dialectical thinker. That’s why Atheists call William Lane Craig’s reasoned arguments "duplicitous" and "trickery." They know Craig wins debates, but they don't know how. It's magic to them.

If you want to be persuasive, you should respond to:

- dialectic with dialectic.
- rhetoric with rhetoric.
- pseudo-dialectic with dialectic, exposing it as false dialectic, and follow up with rhetoric.

But you have to correctly identify your audience first.

Caution: Some dialectical thinkers are also skilled in recognizing and responding to rhetoric. Don't automatically assume a rhetorical response means a person doesn't think dialectically.

None of this means rhetorical thinkers can never follow a logical argument, or that dialectical thinkers are never persuaded emotionally. It means every person has a primary mode of persuasion. If you want to persuade a person, appeal first to his primary way of thinking.