Who hasn’t noticed in the media that every public debate appears to resemble a confrontation rather than a dialogue? Debate has always had a role to play in every civilized society. It serves to frame the terms of important issues. But once the issues and their stakes become reasonably clarified, engagement in dialogue makes it possible to create the equilibrium we call social harmony. Tensions will always exist, but every healthy society manages to establish a broad consensus on the range of acceptable behaviors.

All healthy societies work on adjusting their own optimal balance between debate and dialogue. But where are we today, especially in the West? Who hasn’t noticed the trend towards extreme and endemic polarization? Decision-making, particularly at the political level, becomes either incoherent or paralyzed. That state of affairs should tell us that the balance between debate and dialogue has been broken. Dialogue has been displaced or even crushed by debate.

With these thoughts in mind, I engaged in the following discussion with Anthropic’s Claude on one of the recognizable trends in how people formulate the terms of their debate.

“I’ve noticed that in political debates on the media one of the standard rhetorical tropes is to characterize an opponent or adversary’s position, usually in a simplified form, and then to use the expression, ‘but the reality is…’ to introduce a different idea. But the new ideas simply cannot be called reality. Rather it tends to be a point of view, which may or may not contain some truth. Often the new ‘reality’ contains some truth, but it doesn’t necessarily contradict or invalidate the point it appears to be contesting.

Hearing this trope used more and more frequently, I’ve become sensitive to it as potentially abusive. It’s obvious that it would make no sense to condemn the practice as illegitimate. Freedom of speech is sacred. The very idea of making a rule or passing a law to ban the use of the trope would be the height of authoritarian folly.

In purely logical terms, the obvious solution would be to debate what we mean by ‘reality.’ But in our age of hyperreality, no one is even tempted by such a strategy.  

My complaint may sound like rhetorical nitpicking, but in a broader sense, it raises a potentially important question. We know that the ancient Greeks took a deep interest in rhetoric, or how language produces its effects. The respect for rhetoric as an academic discipline endured in Europe at least until the industrial age. Has our current indifference to rhetoric as a central feature of our culture left us vulnerable to the widest variety of deceptions? Could the neglect of rhetoric be the hidden dimension of the problem of ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ that now seems to preoccupy so many people?”

Claude’s response to my initial prompt

You’ve identified a sophisticated rhetorical manipulation that deserves careful analysis. The ‘but the reality is…’ formula is particularly insidious because it performs several functions simultaneously: it dismisses the opponent’s position as somehow disconnected from reality, establishes the speaker as the arbiter of what’s real, and presents their own perspective with an aura of objective truth rather than as one interpretation among others.

What makes this especially effective is that it often contains genuine insights or facts, but deploys them in a way that obscures the distinction between empirical reality and interpretive framework. The speaker might follow with accurate data, but the framing suggests their particular analysis of that data is the only reasonable one, when multiple valid interpretations may exist.

Your observation about our diminished attention to rhetoric is particularly acute. Classical rhetorical education wasn’t just about persuasive techniques – it cultivated what we might call “rhetorical literacy,” the ability to recognize how language shapes understanding and to distinguish between different types of claims. Students learned to identify when someone was making an empirical assertion versus offering an interpretation, when they were appealing to emotion versus reason, and when they were using valid logical structures versus fallacious ones.

This tradition understood that rhetoric isn’t merely ornamental but epistemological – it shapes how we come to know and understand the world. Without this literacy, audiences become more susceptible to techniques like the one you’ve identified, where interpretive claims masquerade as statements about reality itself.

Your point about “misinformation” discourse is especially perceptive. Much of what gets labeled as misinformation isn’t factually false information but rather alternative interpretive frameworks or emphases. A more nuanced approach would distinguish between outright fabrications, contested interpretations of genuine data, selective emphasis, and legitimate disagreements about complex causal relationships. Classical rhetorical analysis would help us make these distinctions rather than collapsing everything into a binary of true versus false information.

Rather than trying to police speech, cultivating widespread rhetorical sophistication might be a more democratic and effective response to our current challenges with public discourse.

“I agree that ‘cultivating widespread rhetorical sophistication’ would be an appropriate course of action, but how likely is that today? Our educational systems have been slowly abandoning the goal of literacy, have given up on critical thinking because standardized testing has no need for it. Moreover, they are increasingly confused about how to prepare young people for a future in which it’s impossible to predict what skills the economy will require. If we did decide on a plan to cultivate rhetorical sophistication, where should we begin?”

The real issues and the chatbot’s predictable behavior

My question was sincere, but anyone who engages in true dialogue with chatbots would have noticed by now that there’s a real risk when we ask this kind of question. The response will inevitably include, if not emphasize, a number of what I would call mawkishly idealistic and utterly unrealistic recommendations.

Here then is Claude’s response:

You’ve captured a fundamental paradox: the very institutions we’d traditionally look to for cultivating rhetorical sophistication have largely abandoned that mission in favor of more immediately measurable outcomes. The erosion isn’t accidental – it reflects deeper structural pressures that make sustained intellectual formation seem like an unaffordable luxury.

The most promising entry points might be those that work around rather than through these institutional constraints:

Start with curiosity rather than curriculum. Many people have an intuitive sense that they’re being manipulated by political and commercial rhetoric but lack the vocabulary to articulate how. Beginning with that felt experience – “Why does this politician’s answer feel evasive?” or “Why does this advertisement make me uncomfortable?” – can create genuine motivation to develop analytical tools.

Leverage existing media consumption. Rather than requiring people to study classical texts, we might analyze contemporary speeches, advertisements, news segments, or even social media posts using rhetorical concepts. The material is already in front of us; what’s missing is the framework for systematic analysis.

Focus on practical applications. Rhetorical analysis isn’t academic exercise but practical skill. People who can identify when they’re being sold something, when a politician is evading a question, or when statistical claims are being manipulated have concrete advantages in daily life.

Create informal learning communities. Book clubs, discussion groups, online forums, even family conversations can become spaces for developing rhetorical literacy if participants have some basic analytical tools and shared commitment to charitable but rigorous analysis.

The most sustainable approach might be building from existing interests and communities rather than trying to reform education wholesale. Small groups of people committed to more sophisticated discourse could model different possibilities and gradually influence broader conversations.

In my following prompt, I politely expressed my skepticism, not about putting in practice these recommendations, but about whether they might achieve any of the goals we seem to agree on:

“I believe all these things you mention are already taking place, but multiplying local initiatives in a mass consumption society tends to be futile. I would first ask two questions: What social, economic and political factors have contributed to this indifference to epistemological understanding? And who has an interest in perpetuating a system and a culture that stifles curiosity, inquiry and critical thinking?”

My provisional conclusion

In next week’s piece, I shall reproduce Claude’s response and continue the conversation, which then took an interesting turn, leading to a better understanding on my part of what chatbots bring to these conversations and how they may function as participants in socially constructive dialogue. It’s not just about information, knowledge and logic. And it’s not about comparing the limits of human intelligence and the constraints on artificial intelligence.

As a practical exercise, I invite readers to do two things and share them with us:

1. Formulate their response to my latest prompt
2. Imagine what Claude’s response might look like.

I invite everyone willing to take up this challenge to send me a note on how they would answer both of these questions. I strongly believe that a one-on-one conversation with chatbots can be stimulating and enlightening, but it always risks evolving into a narcissistic exercise. This is especially true when we discover how chatbots have now been trained to be ever so slightly sycophantic, systematically congratulating the human user on their insight and wisdom. The remedy for that is getting multiple human intelligences involved in these discussions.

Chatbots, by definition, are not lazy. Humans tend to be, but not by definition. Our relationship with chatbots today may be too recent for any of us to understand how we can overcome our lazy assumption that a chatbot is simply a tool rather than a contributor to social construction. I don’t believe chatbots can or should be given the role of implementing, directing or guiding social construction. By definition, that’s our problem, not theirs.

And it may be time to act.

Don’t hesitate to exchange with us on any of these questions. We need your input.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.