Do PIPA and SOPA threaten to reverse legal burden of proof in the US? Clay Shirky argues they do. I don’t know enough about the legal system, or the proposed legislation. However, this is a serious allegation with implications far beyond the US.
Archive for the ‘Connections’ Category
Burden of proof and intellectual property
Posted in Connections, Discussion, Rhetoric, Teaching, tagged Black Label Movement, dance, dance your phd, explanation, explanations, John Bohannon, Michael Gilbert, visual argument on January 19, 2012| 1 Comment »
Trolls
Posted in Connections, Discussion, Fallacies, Rhetoric, tagged fallacies, internet, internet culture, internet etiquette, netiquette, Rhetoric, trolls on January 6, 2012| 1 Comment »
The increasing popularity of on-line discussions has given rise to an argumentative neologism that may be more widely applicable: “trolls.” Trolls commit an inappropriate move in an argument, saying something unreasonable that derails the discussion. (I recall analogously in my highschool biology class we learned to ask the teacher, Mr. Houghton, about living through the London Blitz in order to steer the conversation away from the work at hand.)
These unpleasant people are not trolling the web in the sense of carefree fishing, or surfing, but today Mike Elgan, who bills himself as “the world’s only loveable technology writer,” suggests that trolls are seeking something, namely attention. That quest does not particularly distinguish trolls from the rest of us, but it does explain the behaviour as depending on that exclusive or predominant motivation.
Trolls are argumentative, and they may be either deliberate and malicious or inadvertent and well-intentioned. Egan’s distinction, borrowed from Matt Honan, between deliberate and inadvertent trolls corresponds to Walton’s distinction between fallacies that are sophisms and those that are paralogisms.
Yet Elgan points out that those who are well-intentioned and argumentative (the academy is so full) are not always trolls. Passionate advocacy frequently may be trying but it need not be ugly, and it is often beautiful and worthwhile.
How then do we identify trolls? Might this be a species of fallacy that can be identified as deviating from an otherwise acceptable form of argumentation, that is to say forms of advocacy? Perhaps we could articulate the appropriate critical questions (using the Walton / Tindale model of fallacies) for identifying such trolls.
If the desire for attention is the cause of the misstep, then what is the missing (or side-lined) motivation that would be appropriate? How ought we to be motivated? That is a central question of argumentation theory, and answers include resolving disagreement (pragma-dialectics) and developing understanding (epistemology). Fabricated disagreement and errant claims thus would be paradigmatic troll moves, but that is only to say they are fallacious.
If trolls fit no particular pattern of fallacious reasoning, they may nonetheless indicate a new need for fallacy instruction: preventing trolls from derailing discussion. On-line trolls have made available for instructors a new wealth of examples of fallacies. Students should also learn that the fallacies approach to argument evaluation may be a good defense against trolls, a way to defuse a diversion by naming the problem. While this rhetorical power of the fallacies approach can be misused, it can also be valuable in dealing with trolls.
CFP: Persons and their Brains
Posted in CFP, Connections, Rationality, tagged calls for papers, Ian Ramsey Centre, identity, neuroculture, neuroscience and philosophy, personhood on December 8, 2011| Leave a Comment »
“PERSONS AND THEIR BRAINS”
CONFERENCE REGISTRATION AND CALL FOR PAPERS:
11-14 July 2012, St Anne’s College, Oxford
Organised by the Ian Ramsey Centre, University of Oxford
www.ianramseycentre.ox.ac.uk
Email: irc.admin@theology.ox.ac.uk
_____________________________________________
BACKGROUND
It is now over 20 years since Churchland’s book Neurophilosophy was published, and in its wake whole disciplines have sprung into being, proudly sporting the prefix ‘neuro-’ by way of attaching themselves to Churchland’s banner. We have entered a new period in which philosophy, among a substantial community of its practitioners, might be seen as the handmaiden of neuroscience, whose role is to remove the obstacles that have been laid in the path of scientific advance by popular prejudice and superstitious ways of thinking. Brain imaging techniques, which enable us to allocate mental functions to precise cortical areas, and in some cases to establish the neural pathways through which information is processed and decisions formed, have cast doubt on the reality of human freedom, have revised the description of reason and its place in human nature, and caused many people to suspect the validity of the old distinctions of kind, which separated person from animal, animal from machine and the free agent from the conditioned organism. In addition, the more we learn about the brain and its functions, the more do people wonder whether our old ways of managing our lives and resolving our conflicts – the ways of moral judgment, legal process and the imparting of virtue – are the best ways, and whether there might be more direct forms of intervention that would take us more speedily, more reliably and perhaps more kindly to the right result. (more…)
Dancing an Explanation
Posted in Connections, Discussion, Rhetoric, Teaching, tagged Black Label Movement, dance, dance your phd, explanation, explanations, John Bohannon, Michael Gilbert, visual argument on December 3, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Some readers of RAIL may already with John Bohannon’s brilliant competition Dance your PhD. In the video below, given at a TED event in Brussels, Bohannon generalizes the point that Dance your PhD essentially makes: Explanations can be effectively delivered in any number of ways. Though the suggestion that dancers might replace the ubiquitous and dreaded PowerPoint is a bit tongue-in-cheek to be sure, I think that the observations Bohannon makes here about it’s pitfalls are spot on and worthy of consideration.
I have to admit that I’m also seized with curiosity as to how or even whether this could be done with arguments. At the very least the results would put a whole new “spin” on Michael Gilbert‘s theory of visceral argument. 🙂
Enjoy.
On Being Your Own Argument
Posted in Connections, News, Rhetoric, tagged occupy demands, Occupy Movement, Occupy Wall Street, OWS, political discourse, political rhetoric, Rhetoric, Rhetorical Citizenship on November 18, 2011| 2 Comments »
Occupy, out of focus
Let’s be honest about this, coverage of the Occupy movement has neither been fair nor balanced in most cases. What coverage there has been has usually centered on 1) how much of a mess these sites are making, 2) on how the absence of explicit demands makes them “incoherent”, and 3) on how the major political parties may or may not try to turn the frustrations of the protesters to their advantage in the coming national election cycle. Much of the coverage that I’ve seen has focused on the second of these items, on how the protests seem to be just a sort of collective “acting out”. “With no clear message”, so goes the refrain, “how can the Occupy protesters hope to achieve their aims (whatever they are)?” (more…)
Improvisation and Argumentation
Posted in Connections, Discussion, Rhetoric, tagged argumenation, communication, dialectic, George Lewis, improvisation, speech acts, Vijay Iyer on November 6, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Ah, the wonders of Twitter. In a chain of argumentation that wandered around quite a bit today, the question of improvisation (what it is, how best to characterize it, etc.) came up. For those RAIL readers who are classically trained rhetoricians, this question will no doubt call to mind Book Ten of Quintillian’s Institutio Oratoria, which deals with extemporaneous speech. This led to the contribution of the video below by one of the participants.
The expansive talk herein is by George E. Lewis, the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. The general gist of it is that much of human interaction is understandable as improvisation (as understood in a manner analogous to the sort that occurs in musical performance). If this were right, then interesting consequences would follow for argumentation, at least when argumentation is considered as a dialectical process between two or more persons. For starters, one such consequence would be that argumentation needs to be seen more as a cooperative than a competitive phenomenon. Accordingly, many of the “moves” of various participants would have to be understood outside the scope of strategies for “winning”. There are other potential results too, I think, but they’re likely to appear differentially according to the approach to argumentation one takes. (For example, I find myself wondering with great interest how those working within the framework of normative pragmatics would understand improvisation in argumentation, but I’ll leave the answering of that wonder to those more qualified than I to speak on it.)
It is an interesting talk, but be warned: it is a little on the longish side and it’s general orientation from within a Continental philosophical framework may not be everyone’s cup of tea. If, knowing that, you’re not scared, then have go at it!
I would be remiss if I did not thank consummate jazz musician Vijay Iyer 1) for getting involved in our Twitter conversation at all and 2) for posting the above video in the hopes of enlightening us as to the nature and power of improvisation. In return, I post this video of his wonderful trio covering Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” in which they, yes, improvise delightfully.
Items of Interest in The Reasoner
Posted in Connections, Discussion, tagged A Minh Nguyen, creative thinking, critical thinking, formal philosophy, open access logic publications, The Reasoner, Wilfrid Hodges on October 29, 2011| 2 Comments »
For those who may not be aware of it yet, The Reasoner is wonderful, interdisciplinary, monthly publication devoted to matters that fall largely within the sphere of formal logic and research on reasoning. Because the focus is so often on formal methods this may not seem, at first, to be the kind of thing that most argumentation theorists naturally would be inclined to look at, but I find it often contains vignettes, short articles, and interviews that ofter serious food for thought to those with interests in informal logic, argumentation, and critical thinking.
A case in point is the most recent issue (vol. 5 no. 11), which contains a fascinating interview with mathematical logician Wilfrid Hodges and a sharp little essay attacking the distinction between critical and creative thinking by A. Minh Nguyen. (Readers of this blog may recall similar ruminations offered in this post from April of 2010). To whet your appetite, here’s a quote from the Hodges interview:
I have no patience at all with the view of Kant, followed by Frege and some modern writers, that logic studies how we ought to think and psychology studies how we do think. A logician can tell you that if you reason by rule X, then you will sometimes find yourself deducing false conclusions from true premises. It does follow that if you want never to deduce false conclusions from true premises, you ought not to use rule X. So for example you ought not to use rule X in a research paper in pure mathematics. But in real life, where time and memory are often limited and premises are often dubious in one way or another, rule X might be for practical purposes exactly what you need. One of the major achievements of logic of the last fifty years is to start taking seriously the constraints under which we reason, and the different aims that we can have in our reasoning. This expansion of logic gives many openings for collaboration between logicians and cognitivists [i.e. cognitive scientists].
The interview moves from considerations like this one to a discussion of the relationship between logic and cognitive science, and includes an interesting discussion of the logic of the medieval Arab philosopher Ibn Sina.
The Reasoner is an open access publication. Its present and past issues as well are all downloadable in .pdf format free of charge.
In Praise of the Doodle (and Visual Literacy and Critical Thinking through Creative Means)
Posted in Connections, Critical Thinking, tagged cognitive psychology, creative thinking, critical thinking, doodling, Sunni Brown, TED, visual argumentation, visual literacy on September 28, 2011| 3 Comments »
As anyone who has attended one of Erik Krabbe‘s talks knows, doodles, sketches, and cartoons are signs of great genius. I first had the pleasure of seeing his drawings in a CRRAR summer seminar a few years ago. I have to admit that being engaged by the various drawings he used there, and in the talks of his that I’ve had the good fortune to attend since then, has inspired me to re-incorporate that sort of visual element in my own classes. Being a former art major with a drawing background before converting to philosophy, I had used drawings as what I then thought of as a crutch when I first started teaching. I later abandoned the practice when I felt more secure in my role as a teacher. It turns out that I may have been terribly wrong to toss out such a powerful pedagogical tool. My drawings, it seems, were in no way a crutch. On the contrary, if Sunni Brown (the speaker in the video) is right, they are a pedagogical enhancement. Not only are doodles often funny and engaging, she claims, but they enhance focus as well as other dimensions of critical thinking too.
While the pedagogical dimensions are interesting, equally if not more interesting is the claim that human beings may have an innate “sense” of visual literacy that develops in a regular and predictable way. Those working on visual argumentation may find this part of the talk very salutary indeed.
All in all, it’s an interesting 6 minutes of video. Enjoy.
Edit: Today this video popped up in my Twitter feed courtesy of @LilyLivingstone. It perfectly illustrates the pedagogical power of the doodle in mathematics. Good stuff!
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