In this article I have endeavoured to show that any attempt to understand Mill’s work after 1826/7, and thus the period in which all his important works were written, needs to take cognisance of the fact that most of the texts we may want to study are persuasive texts, and that Mill had a very specific, and individual philosophy of persuasion. Importantly, this philosophy of persuasion was concerned to bring people to a better understanding of their own point of view, and then to incrementally change that point of view until they not only held better opinions, but held those opinions authentically. In order to bring about this incremental, authentic, change, Mill abandoned his earlier practice of argumentative debate, in which other people’s opinions were picked apart and proved wrong or irrational (or both), and one attempted to replace these erroneous ideas with one’s own logical arguments, which people were forced to accept simply because they could not deny the truth of them. Rather, he sought to reveal only so much of his own beliefs as would be usefully challenging to public opinion—‘usefully’ here meaning either having a chance of being accepted after some thought, or of at least bringing people to slightly better opinions without appearing so opposing and argumentative as to make people cling to their erroneous beliefs through misplaced pride.
(Helen McCabe, "John Stuart Mill's Philosophy of Persuasion," Informal Logic 34 [2014]: 38-61, at 57-8)
Note from KBJ: I enjoyed this essay very much, and would read other essays by McCabe. Perhaps because Mill was not a professional philosopher (or, like Kant, a professor of philosophy), he cared about making a difference in the world. As I have maintained for many years, if you want your argument to persuade person P, you must employ premises that P accepts. This is known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin for "argument to the person"). What good does it do to employ premises that one's interlocutor doesn't accept? The argument gets no grip on such a person, who will simply walk away or stop reading. Philosophers are kind of doltish about such things, which suggests that they don't really care about persuasion (even if they say they do).
