The certainty of conviction sheltered medieval polemicists from fearing their own arguments.

Evidence

It was not of course an approach that Muslims would be likely to share. In the last resort it was the fervour of utter conviction that secured Christian writers from any suspicion of the dangers of their stand. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1451

Categorization

• QUESTION: This claim about conviction insulating a speaker from the reciprocal application of their own logic is a compact mechanism worth developing in the vault’s framing of how the West’s self-image survives self-evident rebuttal.