# Contrary verdicts can reveal the observers' standards

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH06.P016](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH06.P016/#char=504,532): "He might be the right shape."

The analogy changes the status of the evidence. Tall and short are comparative descriptions: contrary verdicts need not report incompatible facts about the same person if the observers use different standards. Applied to Christianity, this makes opposed accusations compatible with a coherent object. It does not by itself establish that the object is correct. A person intermediate between two observers is not necessarily the right height, and a religion criticized from opposing directions is not thereby true.

Chesterton marks the distinction through the sequence of his own language: first a possibility, then a proposed test of the accusers, then the example of luxury and clothing. His stronger claim depends on showing independently that the critics' standards are distorted. The movement from contrary judgments to a new hypothesis is intelligible; the hypothesis still requires the historical and moral assessment supplied by the example. This is an interpretation of the argument's structure, rather than an attribution of a named philosophical method to Chesterton. [Text: chapter VI](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/16769/pg16769-images.html#CHAPTER_VI).

## Sources

- [G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/16769/pg16769-images.html#CHAPTER_VI), Chapter VI, paragraph beginning 'And then in a quiet hour'; Project Gutenberg #16769, transcription displaying John Lane / Week-End Library printing history through 1934; work first published 1908

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