Introduction

The term steelman entered popular use as a deliberate inversion of straw man. A straw man is a weakened version of an opponent’s argument, easy to knock down because it was constructed to be knocked down. A steelman is the strongest version of that argument, constructed with the same care one would give to one’s own position, so that whatever one then says in reply is said against the real thing rather than against a substitute. The image is one of armor: where the straw man is brittle and burns easily, the steelman is forged to withstand impact, and an argument that defeats the steelman has accomplished something the straw man defeat could not.

The practice predates the term. Aristotle’s Topics assumes that genuine argument moves between positions taken seriously. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae begins each question with the strongest objections he can find, then offers his determination, then responds to each objection. Talmudic argumentation preserves the positions of those who lost the ruling as well as those who won it, because the loser’s reasoning is held to clarify the winner’s. Modern philosophical practice expects a literature review that gives the opposing case its due before the rebuttal begins. The scriptures themselves model the practice in the Acts 15 council, where the contending positions are stated and engaged before the decision is issued, and in the disputations of Paul recorded in Acts, where reasoning is conducted with opponents in synagogues and marketplaces rather than against absent caricatures.

This paper sets out what is actually required to steelman an opposing argument well, the kinds of failure that pass for steelmanning but are not, and the substantial benefits that accrue to one’s rhetorical credibility when the discipline is genuinely practiced. The argument is that steelmanning is not a stylistic flourish or a concession to politeness; it is a constitutive feature of serious argument, and writers who develop the habit acquire credibility that writers who skip the work cannot.

Part I: What Steelmanning Actually Requires

The first requirement is reading the opponents in their own words. This sounds elementary and is constantly neglected. A great deal of what passes for engagement with an opposing position is engagement with what one’s own side has said about that position, filtered through summaries written by people who already disagreed with it. The summaries tend to compress, to emphasize the features that look weakest, and to omit the considerations that the opposing position uses to answer the standard objections. A steelman built from secondhand sources is almost always weaker than the actual argument, because the secondhand sources were produced by people who were not trying to make the position look strong. Reading the primary sources—the books, articles, sermons, treatises, or papers in which the opponents make their case at length—is the indispensable first step, and there is no substitute for it.

The second requirement is understanding the opposing position from the inside. This means being able to articulate not only what the opponents claim but why those claims feel compelling to people who hold them. Every position that attracts thoughtful adherents does so because it answers some question well, addresses some concern that the alternatives do not, or makes sense of some evidence that the alternatives strain to accommodate. To steelman a position is to identify what it is doing well, what work it is performing for its holders, and why a reasonable person operating with the available evidence might land on it. If one cannot say this—if the opposing position appears in one’s writing as merely wrong, with no account of why anyone would hold it—the steelman has not been built.

The third requirement is stating the argument in its strongest form. This is the discipline that the term steelman most directly names. There is almost always a weaker and a stronger version of any contested position. The weaker version is the one that the careless or polemical holders of the view advance. The stronger version is the one that the most thoughtful holders advance, often with qualifications and caveats that the weaker version lacks. A steelman engages the stronger version. It does not select the most vulnerable formulation in order to make the rebuttal easier; it selects the formulation that the position’s best advocates would themselves choose, and it works against that.

The fourth requirement is fair use of the opposing evidence. Most contested questions involve evidence that the opposing positions weigh differently. A steelman engages the evidence that favors the opposing view, including the evidence that one’s own position handles less well. It does not silently omit the difficult texts, the inconvenient data, or the historical examples that complicate the preferred reading. The reader who knows the dispute will notice these omissions and will draw the appropriate conclusion about whether the writer is engaging the question or merely advocating for a predetermined answer. The reader who does not know the dispute will be poorly served, because they will have been given an incomplete picture of what the question actually is.

The fifth requirement is the test of recognition. The steelman is well built when a thoughtful holder of the opposing position, reading the steelman in the paper, would say: “Yes, that is essentially the argument I would make; the writer has understood what I am claiming and why.” This is a high bar and a useful one. If the opponents would say “that is not really my position” or “the writer has missed the central point,” the steelman has failed, however confident the writer may have been about its quality. Where it is practical to do so, showing a draft to someone who actually holds the opposing view is the best way to apply the test. Where it is not practical, the writer must apply the test imaginatively, and the imagination must be disciplined by genuine knowledge of the opposing case.

The sixth requirement is separating the strongest argument from the strongest advocate. The strongest version of a position is not always the version advanced by its most prominent or most rhetorically gifted holder. A steelman is a steelman of the argument, and the writer’s job is to find the best version of the argument wherever it appears, including in less famous sources or in qualifications that the famous holders have made in passing. This requires reading widely enough to know where the best version of the argument actually lives.

The seventh requirement is charity about motive. The steelman discipline includes the assumption that the opponents have arrived at their position through honest reasoning from the evidence as they see it, not through bad faith, ignorance, or moral defect. There are real cases of bad faith and ignorance in the world, but they are usually evident without being asserted, and the writer who asserts them up front has bypassed the argumentative work and replaced it with character impeachment. A steelman addresses the argument that a thoughtful and honest holder of the opposing view would make, and it does so on the assumption that such holders exist.

The eighth requirement is placement and proportion. A steelman is not adequate as a sentence buried in a footnote or as a paragraph at the end of the paper. The opposing position must be given enough space, early enough in the structure, that the reader can see the writer has actually grappled with it. The classical model in Aquinas places the objections at the beginning of the question, before the writer’s own answer, precisely so that the reader knows from the outset what is being contended with. Modern academic writing places the literature review and the strongest opposing arguments in the early sections of the paper for the same reason. A steelman placed where it cannot be missed signals to the reader that the writer is doing the dialectical work rather than gesturing at it.

These eight requirements are not separable; they reinforce one another. Reading the opponents in their own words feeds the ability to understand the position from the inside, which makes possible the statement of the argument in its strongest form, which permits the fair use of the opposing evidence, which gives the steelman a chance to pass the test of recognition, which presupposes the discipline of separating argument from advocate, which rests on charity about motive, and which requires placement and proportion to be visible to the reader. Skipping any one of them tends to compromise the others.

Part II: What Passes for Steelmanning but Is Not

Because the steelman discipline has acquired a certain reputation as a mark of serious thought, there are now characteristic ways of appearing to do it without actually doing it. These are worth naming, because they are easy to fall into and they undo most of the credibility that the genuine practice would have produced.

The first is the polite straw man. The writer states the opposing position in neutral and respectful language, but the position stated is still the weaker version, or is missing the qualifications that its actual holders would insist on. The politeness creates the impression of fairness without the substance, and a reader who knows the opposing position will recognize what has happened.

The second is the brief acknowledgment. The writer notes that there are those who hold a contrary view, names the view in a sentence or two, and then proceeds with the case for the preferred position. The acknowledgment is too compressed to function as engagement; it is a gesture rather than an argument, and it leaves the opposing case essentially untouched.

The third is the selective steelman. The writer engages one or two of the opposing arguments at length while omitting others that the position depends on. This produces a paper that looks careful in its handling of what it addresses but that has nonetheless evaded the heart of the dispute. The selectivity is sometimes unconscious; the writer engages the arguments that he or she knows how to answer and passes over those that are harder.

The fourth is the dated steelman. The writer engages a version of the opposing position that was held a generation ago, or that has since been refined in response to earlier objections. The opposing camp has moved on, and the rebuttal is now of historical interest only. This is especially common in disputes that have a long literature, where it is easy to engage the famous early statements without reading the more recent and more carefully qualified ones.

The fifth is the categorical steelman. The writer treats a category of opposing views as if it were a single position and engages the category as a whole, missing the internal differences that matter to the actual holders. A dispute that has several distinct dissenting camps cannot be addressed by treating them as one camp; the steelman must distinguish them where the holders themselves distinguish them.

The sixth is the bracketed steelman. The writer states the opposing position fairly and then, instead of engaging it, simply asserts that it is wrong and moves on. The position has been characterized but not answered. This is sometimes called “the appearance of fairness,” and it can fool a casual reader, but the careful reader will notice that the writer never actually said why the position is wrong.

The seventh is the steelman followed by a non-sequitur rebuttal. The writer states the opposing position well and then responds to something else—to a different version of the position, to an implication the holders would not accept, or to an argument that does not actually engage what was just said. This is more common than one might expect; it happens when the writer has the rebuttal ready before the steelman is constructed, and the steelman is then fitted around the rebuttal rather than the rebuttal being shaped by the steelman.

Recognizing these patterns is useful both for the writer who wants to avoid them and for the reader who wants to assess whether a paper has done the work it claims to have done.

Part III: The Benefits of Genuine Steelmanning

The case for the discipline does not rest only on its being honest, though it is that. It rests also on the substantial benefits that accrue to a writer who develops the habit. These benefits are interlocking, and the gain from any one of them tends to multiply the others.

The first benefit is credibility with skeptical readers. Every contested question has readers who already hold the opposing view, and these are precisely the readers a paper most needs to reach if it hopes to change minds rather than merely confirm what its allies already believe. A reader who holds the opposing view and who recognizes, in the paper’s statement of that view, an accurate and respectful account of his own reasoning is a reader who is willing to keep reading. He is willing to consider the rebuttal because the writer has shown that he understands what is actually being claimed. By contrast, a reader who sees his position misstated or weakened in the early pages will stop attending to the argument, often by the second or third paragraph. He has learned that the writer is not actually engaging him, and he has no further reason to engage the writer.

The second benefit is credibility with neutral readers. A reader who does not have a strong prior view on the contested question is trying to assess the writer’s reliability as a guide. A writer who states the opposing position fairly demonstrates competence and good faith in a way that no amount of asserted neutrality can substitute for. The neutral reader thinks: this writer has read the other side, has understood it, and has done the work of engaging it; whatever conclusion the writer reaches is more likely to be trustworthy than the conclusion of a writer who has not done that work. The reverse is also true: a writer who plainly misstates or omits the opposing case has revealed something about his reliability that the neutral reader will not forget.

The third benefit is credibility with one’s own side. The thoughtful holders of one’s own position are also, often, the most demanding readers. They know the dispute. They have read the opposing literature. They want to see their side defended against the real opposing case, not against a substitute that is easier to defeat. A defense that engages the strongest version of the opposing view and answers it is more useful to one’s own side than a defense that engages a weaker version, because the stronger defense actually equips its readers to encounter the dispute as it exists rather than as one might wish it existed. Writers who consistently produce such defenses become trusted resources within their own intellectual communities in a way that writers who produce easier defenses do not.

The fourth benefit is the discovery of where one’s own argument is actually weak. The discipline of constructing a real steelman almost always exposes places where the writer’s own position is less secure than he had assumed. This is uncomfortable in the moment and valuable in the long run. A writer who learns, through the work of steelmanning, that his position handles a particular text or piece of evidence less well than he had thought has two honest options: to qualify the position appropriately or to think harder about how the position handles the difficulty. Either is better than the third option, which is to proceed as if the difficulty did not exist; that path produces papers that are confident where they should be careful, and the careful reader will notice.

The fifth benefit is the improvement of one’s own argument. Closely related to the previous point but distinct from it: engaging the strongest opposing case forces the writer to develop responses that he would not otherwise have developed. The argument that emerges is sharper, better qualified, more attentive to the considerations that the opposing case raised, and more useful to the reader than the argument that was in hand before the steelman was built. Writers who routinely steelman tend, over time, to produce stronger work than writers who do not, because every paper they write is a paper that has been tested against the real opposing case.

The sixth benefit is the formation of intellectual virtue. The discipline of steelmanning, practiced over years, cultivates habits of mind that have value beyond any particular paper. The writer who steelmans regularly becomes someone who instinctively asks what the strongest opposing case is, who reads opposing literature with attention rather than for ammunition, who is suspicious of his own first formulations when they seem to defeat the opposing view too easily, and who can think with rather than merely against people he disagrees with. These habits are themselves credibility-conferring. People who have spent time with the writer recognize them, and they extend trust accordingly.

The seventh benefit is durability over time. An argument that has been built against the strongest version of the opposing case is more durable than an argument that has been built against a weaker version. The opposing case will continue to exist, will continue to be advanced by thoughtful holders, and will continue to be encountered by the writer’s readers. A paper that engaged only a weaker version of the opposing case will appear, in retrospect, to have been written for a different argument than the one that actually exists. A paper that engaged the strongest version remains useful for as long as the dispute does. Writers who think of their work as contributing to a continuing conversation rather than to a single moment have particular reason to value this durability.

The eighth benefit is the cultivation of charitable disagreement in one’s readers. A writer who consistently models the steelman discipline teaches readers to expect it of themselves. Communities of readers who learn from such writers come to recognize when a paper is doing the dialectical work and when it is not, and they hold their own writers to the same standard. Over time, this raises the level of argument within a tradition or community, and the gains are general rather than confined to any particular writer.

These benefits are substantial, and they are why the discipline is worth the cost. Steelmanning is harder than not steelmanning. It takes longer. It requires more reading. It exposes the writer to considerations that may unsettle his own position. It produces papers that are sometimes less rhetorically satisfying in the short term because they have given so much space to a view the writer ultimately rejects. But the credibility that genuine steelmanning produces is of a kind that no other rhetorical strategy can substitute for, and writers who develop the habit acquire a standing with readers that writers who skip the work cannot.

Part IV: The Costs Worth Naming

Honesty about the discipline requires naming its costs as well as its benefits, because the writer who decides to steelman should know what he is undertaking.

The first cost is time and labor. A real steelman requires reading the opposing literature, often at length, and the reading is sometimes tedious or distasteful because one is engaging arguments one believes to be wrong. The writer must do this anyway, and must do it with the same care he would give to literature he found congenial.

The second cost is the discomfort of taking opposing arguments seriously. To steelman well is to spend time inside an opposing view long enough to feel its appeal. This can be unsettling, especially when the opposing view is one with implications the writer finds troubling. The unsettling is not a sign that something has gone wrong; it is a sign that the writer is doing the work. But it has to be borne, and writers who are not prepared to bear it tend to revert to weaker engagements with the opposing case.

The third cost is the risk of unintended persuasion. The strongest version of an opposing argument is, by definition, strong. Engaging it seriously sometimes results in the writer revising his own position, either in detail or in substance. Writers who are committed to their position regardless of evidence will find this prospect threatening and will tend to avoid the genuine practice. Writers who are committed to truth will accept the risk and will treat any resulting revision as a gain rather than a loss.

The fourth cost is the suspicion of one’s own side. A writer who steelmans opposing views sometimes attracts suspicion from his own camp, especially from those who do not steelman themselves and who interpret careful engagement with the opposing view as softness or as a step toward defection. This is a cost to be endured, and it is generally outweighed by the credibility gains with other readers, but it should be expected. The writer who would steelman must be prepared to defend the discipline itself when his own side finds it puzzling.

The fifth cost is rhetorical satisfaction in the short term. A paper that gives the opposing position its full due is sometimes less immediately stirring than a paper that does not. The reader who wanted blood will not get it. The paper trades a certain kind of rhetorical excitement for a different kind of credibility, and writers who prize the excitement over the credibility will not take to the discipline. Writers who prize the credibility will accept the trade.

These costs are real and worth counting. They are also, in nearly all cases, worth paying, because the alternative is to produce work that does not actually engage the disputes it claims to address and that loses credibility with every reader who notices.

Part V: The Steelman in Biblicist Practice

The discipline has particular weight in writing on biblical and theological questions, because the materials in dispute are scriptures held to be God’s word and the disputes themselves often bear on matters of obedience. A biblicist writer engaging a contested question owes the opposing view the most careful treatment he is capable of, both because the question is consequential and because the opposing holders are typically brethren whose conscience before God deserves the same respect his own does. The Bereans are commended in Acts 17:11 for examining what Paul taught against the scriptures, and the form of that commendation presumes that teaching is to be examined rather than merely received. A biblicist writer who steelmans the opposing position is offering his readers the materials to do that examination, and a writer who does not is asking for a kind of reception that the Berean commendation does not warrant.

There is a further consideration. Paul’s instruction in 2 Timothy 2:24-25 is that the servant of the Lord must be “gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient, in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves.” The instruction presupposes that there will be opposition and that it is to be answered, and the manner of the answer is to be patient and meek rather than dismissive. A steelman is the rhetorical form of that patience: it gives the opposing view enough room to be itself before answering it. A writer who skips that step has, in the apostolic terms, failed in patience as much as in argument.

The Acts 15 council provides the institutional model. The disputed question is engaged through actual disputation; the positions are stated; the considerations are weighed; the decision is issued with reasoning that engages the substance. The written communication that goes out to the churches situates the decision in the discussion that produced it rather than simply announcing the conclusion. A biblicist writer working on a contested question has this pattern available, and adherence to it would produce papers that engage rather than merely declare.

Part VI: Practical Counsel

For a writer who wishes to develop the discipline, a few practical observations may help.

Read the opposing literature in seasons of relative calm rather than only when one is about to write against it. Reading under deadline pressure produces compressed and adversarial reading, and the steelman that emerges from it tends to be weaker than the steelman that emerges from reading done before the polemical work begins.

Keep notes that distinguish the opposing arguments by their strongest holders. When one comes to write, one wants to be able to find the best version of the argument quickly, and notes organized by argument rather than by source tend to surface the best version more readily.

Draft the steelman before drafting the rebuttal. A steelman written in advance, before one knows what one’s response will be, is more likely to be a genuine statement of the opposing view than a steelman written after the rebuttal is in hand, which tends to be shaped to make the rebuttal work.

Submit drafts to readers who hold the opposing view where it is practical to do so. Their corrections of the steelman are usually the most useful corrections one will receive, because they identify the places where the writer has missed what the position actually claims.

Be willing to revise the rebuttal when the steelman exposes weaknesses in it. The point of the discipline is not to demonstrate that one’s prior position survives the strongest opposing case; it is to engage the question honestly. If the engagement reveals that the position needs revision, the revision is the gain rather than the loss.

Resist the temptation to score points. A paper that engages the opposing view fairly does not need to do so. A paper that scores points has usually compromised the steelman in order to do it. Choose the steelman.

Conclusion

Steelmanning is the discipline of constructing the strongest possible version of an opposing argument and engaging it on those terms. It requires reading opponents in their own words, understanding the position from the inside, stating the argument in its strongest form, using the opposing evidence fairly, meeting the test of recognition by actual holders, separating argument from advocate, extending charity about motive, and giving the steelman placement and proportion in the structure of the paper. It is distinct from the easier practices that imitate it: the polite straw man, the brief acknowledgment, the selective engagement, the dated steelman, the categorical steelman, the bracketed steelman, and the non-sequitur rebuttal that follows a fair statement of the opposing case.

The benefits of the genuine practice are substantial. It builds credibility with skeptical readers, with neutral readers, and with thoughtful readers on one’s own side. It exposes the writer to the actual weaknesses of his own position and forces the improvement of his argument. It cultivates intellectual virtues that carry beyond any particular paper. It produces work that is durable over time, and it raises the level of argument in the communities that read it. These gains come at real cost—in time, in discomfort, in the risk of being persuaded, in suspicion from those of one’s own side who do not understand the discipline, and in short-term rhetorical satisfaction—but the costs are nearly always worth paying.

For the biblicist writer, the discipline has the additional weight of apostolic precedent. The Berean commendation presupposes examination, the apostolic instruction to instruct opponents in meekness presupposes engagement, and the Acts 15 model shows what the engagement looks like when a contested question is taken seriously. A writer who steelmans is doing in his own work what the scriptures display in the resolution of the disputes they record, and the credibility that follows from the discipline is the credibility of having done that work rather than having gestured at it. That credibility is not something a writer can claim; it has to be earned, and it is earned by the patient and unglamorous labor of giving opposing arguments the strongest form one can give them before answering them. There is no substitute, and the work repays itself many times over.