Asking for the reasoning

"How do you see that there?" No other sentence a client says will change an hour as much as that one, and most people, I think, go home without having said it. The question is not an accusation and does not have to sound like one. It asks the person across the table to turn a finished statement back into the steps that made it, which is the only form in which you can carry a statement out of the room and still do anything with it a week later.

The man in what follows never sat in anybody's room. I have assembled him out of the shape this hour usually takes, and the reason to watch him twice is that both versions are equally ordinary.

He is 41. He wants to put most of his savings into a two-year part-time degree, which would mean dropping to four days a week at a job he does not hate. He has been circling it since February. He books an hour, gives his birth details, and about 22 minutes in, after some accurate and slightly unsettling remarks about how he handles money, the practitioner says: the next two years are not the years for this.

Take the first version. He writes it down, more or less in those words, and the conversation moves on to his mother's health. He pays, thanks the man honestly, and drives home with a sentence in his pocket.

Watch what that sentence can and cannot do over the next fortnight. It cannot be checked, because there is nothing in it to check. It cannot be weighed against the fee structure or the intake dates or his wife's own plans, because it does not touch them at any point. It cannot be repeated accurately, so when his brother asks, it comes out as "he said it's a bad time", which is not what was said. And it cannot be disagreed with in parts. It is one solid object. He can swallow it whole or throw it away whole, and because it arrived with the weight of a difficult system behind it, throwing it away whole feels like arrogance. So it sits there. Two months later he has not applied and could not tell you exactly why.

Now go back to minute 22 and change one thing.

He says: "Can I ask how you are seeing that? I want to understand what it rests on." And the practitioner, who has been waiting most of his working life for somebody to ask, puts his finger on the chart.

You are in a long stretch ruled by Saturn, he says, and a sub-period inside it turns over in March. In this chart Saturn sits in the house I read for work and standing, and it also owns the house I read for debts and obligations. The rule I am working from is the ordinary one in Parashara: you read a daśā (दशा) period, a named stretch of years, from the house its lord occupies and the houses that lord owns. Both of those point the same way here, which is why I put it as strongly as I did. What that gives me is a period that seems to ask for consolidation before expansion. It does not tell me anything about this particular course, or these fees, or whether your employer will hold the job. And I will say plainly that another practitioner might weigh the same two placements differently.

Nothing about that reply is soft. It is more definite than the first version, not less. But look at what the man now has in the car.

He has something he can repeat to his brother in the same words it was said in. He has a claim with a joint in it: he can accept that Saturn sits where the practitioner says, which is arithmetic, and still doubt whether consolidation is the right word for what it asks. He has a period with a date on it, which he can set beside the intake dates and the notice period and the instalment that leaves his account regardless. And he has a limit, said out loud by the person who gave the reading, which quietly hands the decision back to him.

What an answer sounds like

An answer to this question has three honest shapes, and only one dishonest one, which is a better ratio than most people expect.

The first is what you just heard: a placement named, a period named, a rule named, and the reasoning laid out in a way you could in principle look up. The second is the same thing said with less confidence in it. A practitioner who tells you that the text supports this reading but that he has seen it fail often enough to be careful has given you a real answer, and a more useful one than a tidy one would have been. The third sounds like a retreat and is not. "That part is not in the chart. That is my own judgement, from having heard this question many times." When a person separates what the method gave him from what he is adding, he has told you exactly how much weight to put on each, which is what you were asking for in the first place.

The dishonest shape is a refusal, and it arrives wearing several coats. There is offence, which makes your question the problem. There is fog, where the words multiply and the reasoning does not appear. There is the appeal upwards: my teacher taught me this, the tradition is deep, it cannot be put into words for a layman. Ankit has written about why the arithmetic stays open and I will not re-argue the ethic here. In the room you do not need the ethic. You need only notice that you asked what a claim rested on and received something about yourself instead.

The second thing the question does

There is an effect of asking that has nothing to do with the practitioner, and it lands on you.

Somebody has to put the question into words, and the somebody is you. That turns out to be a small test of how much of the reading you actually followed. This is not a moral failing peculiar to consulting rooms. Two cognitive scientists, Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil, published a set of studies in 2002 in which people rated how well they understood everyday devices, a zip, a flush toilet, a cylinder lock, then wrote out full explanations of how each one worked, then rated themselves again. The second rating was lower. Attempting the explanation was what did it. They called the gap the illusion of explanatory depth, and the ordinary version is that we mistake familiarity with a thing for knowing how it works.

An hour with a chart is unusually good at producing that feeling. The words are half known, the manner is confident, and it is genuinely about you. So you follow along and it all seems to hang together, right up until you try to say back what was just claimed and find that you cannot locate the joins. That is useful information, arriving free, and it arrives only if you open your mouth.

There is a plain way to see what you are actually asking for. A philosopher called Stephen Toulmin set out in 1958 what a working argument is made of. He named six parts; the three you need here are the claim, the facts it appeals to, and the rule that permits you to move from the facts to the claim. He called the third the warrant, and it is the one everybody leaves out, because to the person making the argument it is too obvious to say. "How do you see that there?" asks for the facts. The follow-up that finishes the job is quieter and rarely needed twice: "and what does that give you?" One asks what is on the table. The other asks what allows him to get from the table to the sentence he said.

The whole difference between opening a practitioner up and putting him in the dock lies in what you do with the answer, and it is a matter of etiquette rather than technique. Ask, then let it work. Take the reasoning down and sit with it. Do not put the same question to every sentence in the hour, which converts a consultation into an examination and teaches the man in front of you to say less and hedge more. If you disagree with a step, say so once and plainly, which is a separate permission this series has already set out, and then let him answer it. The question is not a trap you are setting. It is you joining in.

Most practitioners will meet you there. A few will not, and you will know inside a minute. And when it goes as well as it can go, what comes back sounds like this:

"This is Parashara's rule about reading a period from where its lord sits, and Parashara never claimed it could tell you what a course of study is worth."