Are people born with charisma?

Both camps describe real people, so the honest account includes both

Question: Are people born with charisma?
Position‹3 of 3: It depends - some people are born with charisma, some learn it
Argument‹2 of 2: Both camps describe real people, so the honest account includes both

The argument

This argument is methodological. Proponents observe that each rival position is supported by cases that the other cannot explain away. The innate account cannot accommodate the person who was socially hopeless at twenty and magnetic at forty, and who can name what they changed. The learned account cannot accommodate the child who had the quality before any plausible training, and whose siblings in the same household did not. Both sorts of people exist and are not rare. Proponents argue that when two accounts each explain part of a phenomenon and fail on the other part, the correct inference is that the phenomenon has more than one route to it, not that one body of evidence must be wrong. Charisma is a description of an effect a person has on others, and effects can be produced in several ways. One person's effect may rest largely on temperament, another's largely on hard-won skill, and most people's on some mixture, which is why charismatic individuals are so unalike in manner. Proponents add that the practical stakes favour this reading. Treating charisma as purely innate tells people who lack it that nothing can be done, which the evidence of those who improved contradicts. Treating it as purely learned implies that anyone who is not magnetic simply failed to practise, which is unfair to those working against their temperament. The combined account describes both groups accurately and gives sound advice to each. Because each single-cause account fails on cases the other explains, this argument concludes, charisma depends on nature and nurture together rather than on either alone.

Premises

[P1]There are people who acquired charisma later in life after visibly lacking it, which an innate account cannot explain. [P2] There are children who showed charisma before any plausible training, and whose siblings in the same setting did not, which a purely learned account cannot explain. [P3] When each of two accounts explains the cases the other cannot, the phenomenon is best explained as having more than one route to it. [C] Therefore charisma arises from both inherited disposition and learned skill, and which predominates depends on the person.

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that a position assembled to accommodate every case risks being unfalsifiable: if both inheritance and development are always invoked, no observation could count against it, and the account predicts nothing. They add that the cases offered are not symmetrical on inspection — the apparently inborn child had years of unrecorded socialisation, and the late developer's progress was deliberate and describable — so one explanation may cover both without the dual account being needed.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The acquisition cases are asserted, and a person who becomes charismatic later may have held the disposition all along while lacking the confidence or the occasion to show it. The premise needs late appearance to establish late origin, and it does not. [Rejecting P2] Siblings in one setting do not have the same experience, so a child who shows charisma early while a sibling does not is no evidence that learning played no part. Ruling out any plausible training rules out tacit learning by assumption. [Rejecting P3] That each account fails on cases the other explains supports a mixed account only if both sets of cases are correctly described. Where the evidence on both sides is contested, the inference to two routes may record the state of the dispute rather than the structure of the phenomenon.