7 Situating Arguments
Kristy Kelly
Arguments are all about context, and they’re designed for and by people. People have conflicting motivations, complicated views, wide varieties of values, and ideological commitments, and they carry assumptions, both examined and unexamined, that shape their receptivity toward a particular argument. If you are going to persuade anyone, you need to understand as much as you can about those values, motivations, and assumptions before you can get them to listen to you, let alone act based on your argument.
Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you’ve just moved into an apartment with three new roommates who’ve already lived together for a year before you moved in. Since you’re new to the living situation, you’d want to take some time to understand their preferences, routines, and opinions before you started making changes around the apartment. You certainly wouldn’t get a cat before realizing that one of your new roommates has a cat allergy—or if you did, it would be pretty rude.
But more subtly than that, you’d need to understand the internal dynamics of the roommate situation before you influence it yourself. Take a smaller example. Maybe your roommates have a friend that comes over frequently but acts really obnoxious in your opinion. They’re loud, they leave a mess, and they rely on your roommates to pay for food and drinks without making a contribution themselves. Can you stop bringing them here, or at least run it past me before they come over?” You think you’re being reasonable with this request, but one of your roommates gives you a look of shock and says, “What are you talking about? That person is the best”; the other roommate goes silent; and the third roommate storms out of the room.
You’re baffled. Your roommates become awkward around you until you finally pull the first roommate aside and ask, “What’s the deal? Why did everyone react like that?” You then learn that this friend helped your roommate who stormed out of the room through an incredibly tough time back in high school, to the point that they may never have even made it to college without this friend. The friend then went through some really big struggles themselves and had to start some medications that make their behavior really uneven—causing them to act a little strange when they visit the apartment. You feel a little bit sheepish about your attitude from before, realizing that this all makes a lot of sense now that you know the full context.
Like we said before: rhetoric is all about context. You can’t have a decent conversation, let alone persuade someone, if you don’t understand the various motivations, connections, and implicit values driving the situation you’re stepping into. So that’s what a good rhetorician does—they try to understand the internal dynamics of the audience she hopes to influence. You probably understand this on an instinctual level. We use this kind of sensitivity to navigate complicated situations with our friends,