Joe Hitchens provides a breakdown of the key steps to guide successful conversations about beliefs, essential for anyone looking to practice Street Epistemology with confidence.

19 July 2022

Have you ever had a conversation with someone that just didn’t go to plan? You knew what you wanted to say going into the conversation but somehow, at some point, the plan fell apart, and you were left frustrated, not knowing how you could and should have proceeded.

Having a solid understanding of the key steps to follow in a typical conversation about beliefs is essential in order to feel confident and motivated to start practicing Street Epistemology with others. To begin with, you should feel comfortable that you have at least a basic knowledge of what the key steps are. We cover these steps in much greater detail in our free, self-directed course Navigating Beliefs: A Learning Course for Rational Conversations.

The following represents the typical steps of a Street Epistemology conversation:

• Step 0: Pre-Conversation Considerations
• Step 1: Establish Rapport and Informed Consent
• Step 2: Identify and Clarify Claim
• Step 3: Identify and Clarify Confidence Level
• Step 4: Identify and Clarify Main Reasons
• Step 5: Evaluating the Quality of Reasoning
• Step 6: End the Conversation
• Step 7: Post-Conversation Considerations

Understanding these steps will help you become better positioned to make progress during your interactions with your conversation partner, but these steps are not fixed in stone. Slight deviations are to be expected and could even be beneficial, depending on your situation.

Step 0: Pre-Conversation Considerations

We've dubbed this preliminary stage as 'Step 0' because there are many things you may want to reflect on in advance. While you can jump right into a talk without such considerations, we think it’s more responsible to give sincere thought about what you are attempting to do before doing it because, among other things, Street Epistemology interactions have the potential to profoundly impact everyone involved.

Step 1: Establish Rapport and Informed Consent

One of the most important parts of establishing and maintaining rapport is ensuring that we have informed consent from our conversation partner. We can demonstrate our desire for rapport and obtain informed consent through active listening, repeating back what we’ve heard, and providing genuine encouragement when deserved. It is crucial to have established trust and make your interaction a genuine partnership. When we have built a sufficient level of rapport we give ourselves a better chance of being more aware of each other's feelings and ideas, helping us to communicate better.

Step 2: Identify and Clarify Claim

Once we have established rapport and informed consent, the next key step is to identify and clarify their claim by asking questions in a respectful and friendly way to confirm we have a sufficient level of understanding about what it is that they actually believe is true. It's uncommon for a claim to be initially presented clearly, so it's helpful to ask clarifying questions to make it clear and interesting for a discussion. It is okay if the claim you end up exploring has evolved from the initial one.

Step 3: Identify and Clarify Confidence Level

Once we've identified and clarified what your conversation partner is claiming to actually be the case, it can be beneficial to help our conversation partner to identify a level of confidence in their belief before proceeding. It's possible to construct a variety of different scales to help measure your conversation partner's level of confidence, just make sure that whatever scale you come up with is understandable by both parties. Further, a useful scale for this purpose should allow for a range of positions to help your IL think about their confidence on a gradient instead of a binary true/false dichotomy. One can even use words like "really sure" and "not really sure" to represent these positions if your conversation partner prefers it.

Step 4: Identify and Clarify Main Reasons

Once we have a good idea of what our interlocutor believes and how confident they are in the truth of that belief, we should next identify and clarify their main reasons for holding their belief. Our conversation partner can have one or more different reasons (justifications, supporting evidence, arguments, etc.) for what they think caused them to be at a certain level of confidence. Reasons that actually impact a person's confidence, real reasons, are the most important ones we are most interested in when doing Street Epistemology. People can have many reasons for believing what they believe and often it can be difficult to isolate what actually impacts a person's confidence. Once one or more reasons have been identified, it's useful to ask these kinds of questions to assess if a reason actually impacts the conversation partner's confidence. We call this a Real Reason Check. In Street Epistemology, we conduct a check of our interlocutor's reasons so we can make efficient use of everyone's time and focus our attention on the reason that is propping up the conversation partner's confidence in their belief the most. If not, you might spend considerable time pursuing reasons that have no bearing on their confidence.

Step 5: Evaluating the Quality of Reasoning

Once we've identified and clarified the main reasons our interlocutor has for their belief, the next step is to identify and assess the epistemology used that influences their level of confidence. In Street Epistemology, we want to identify the methods our conversation partner used to weigh their reasons for thinking something is true and assess its quality to our conversation partner's standards, not ours. Reliable methods are ones that work for different independent observers, can be consistently repeated by others and therefore may allow us to consistently demonstrate what's likely to be true. Perhaps there is some overlooked error, maybe their evidence is insufficient, or their claim is not testable. Maybe their reasoning turns out to be better than you would have expected, in which case you might learn from them. Either way, try to identify what would constitute a good test, and what results of such a test would cause reasonable people to revise their confidence. In other words, collaborate to assess the quality of the reasoning being used to support our conversation partner's confidence that their claim is true.

Step 6: End the Conversation

All conversations have to end at some point, so you might as well try to make the most of it. Knowing when and how to end the conversation is the final step of a Street Epistemology discussion. If done properly, a friendly ending can result in future discussions and possibly help your IL recall key moments later. In any of those cases you might want to quickly recap the most interesting and important takeaways from the conversation and suggest ending the talk. Depending on the situation, you might also want to agree to continue the discussion at a later time.

Step 7: Post-Conversation Considerations

This final step centers around the things that you can do personally to reflect, learn from, and improve your Street Epistemology talks. After your conversation has ended, consider running the discussion through your head and review any notes, audio, or video, if available. In addition to some internal reflection, you can share your experiences with others in the various Street Epistemology communities. There are people from around the world with varying degrees of expertise in Street Epistemology who can offer you advice or learn from your stories so they can grow as well.

These steps, how they function together, and which ones should be prioritized are covered in greater detail in our free, self-directed course Navigating Beliefs: A Learning Course for Rational Conversations.

Note: The blog post from 2016 that listed Street Epistemology steps has been archived but is still accessible here for the time being.

Source: Joe Hitchens

The Street Epistemology Podcast and The Street Epistemology Blog is a production of Street Epistemology International. The views, guests, and topics expressed here (or not expressed here) do not necessarily represent those of the organization.

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