Happened across this lovely conversation on Philosophy TV this morning. (Oh the things one finds in one’s Twitter feed of a Sunday morning…) Nice to hear a logician of Priest’s caliber and notoriety (some would say infamy) in the mainstream philosophical world saying some of the same thing many argumentation theorists have said about formal logic and it’s presentation in the classroom. Of course Priest winds up in a different place than informal logic, rhetoric, or pragma-dialectics but that doesn’t diminish the interest here. Fair warning: this discussion is about an hour long. It is, however, really interesting and surprisingly wide ranging. Enjoy!
Archive for the ‘Connections’ Category
Defense Against the Dark Arts
Posted in Connections, News, Teaching, tagged critical thinking, dark arts, Jody McIntyre, journalism ethics, mass media, Rhetoric on January 3, 2011| Leave a Comment »
The folks over at the blog Less Wrong use the term ‘dark arts’ to refer to the usage of knowledge about heuristics and biases, fallacies, and human rationality generally in a manipulative, destructive or otherwise sinister way. A recent post there focuses on this manner of using presuppositions:
An excellent way of doing this is to embed your desired conclusion as a presupposition to an enticing argument. If you are debating abortion, and you wish people to believe that human and non-human life are qualitatively different, begin by saying, “We all agree that killing humans is immoral. So when does human life begin?” People will be so eager to jump into the debate about whether a life becomes “human” at conception, the second trimester, or at birth (I myself favor “on moving out of the house”), they won’t notice that they agreed to the embedded presupposition that the problem should be phrased as a binary category membership problem, rather than as one of tradeoffs or utility calculations.
This sort of thing is nothing new to argumentation theorists, of course, but the explicit labeling of such maneuvers as “dark arts” may well be. Argumentation theorists, rhetoricians, and informal logicians often think in terms of fallacies, mistakes or blunders instead, usually meaning to impute no moral status to such things. In the main I think this is wise, as highly developed skill at arguing and avoiding fallacies and other such mistakes is rare. That being the case it would be deeply problematic to assume nefarious motives lying behind every fallacy.
Argumentation and Visual Information
Posted in Connections, Discussion, tagged argument diagramming, David McCandless, information design, information mapping, visual arguments on August 30, 2010| 5 Comments »
Have a look at this short talk by David McCandless on data visualization:
There are a number of interesting things for argumentation theorists to think about here. For one, if McCandless is right then clearly what he says is wind in the sails for those who rate argument diagramming highly among our various tools of analysis.
While watching this presentation I also found myself wondering if McCandless’ technique might provide aid and comfort to the cause of those who believe in visual arguments too. To be clear, I don’t think that any of the visuals he presents here is an argument. He makes visual statements, sure, and at times draws inferences from them, but that would make his arguments (in my book at least) arguments with visual elements–not visual arguments per se. Still I found myself wondering if maybe purely visual arguments might be a possible innovation that could come from the kind of work McCandless is doing, somewhere down the line.
Deep Disagreement: A Lesson from the Jewish Tradition
Posted in Connections, Discussion, Informal Logic, tagged Deep Disagreement, Judaism, Michael Gilbert, Richard Friemann, Walter Fogelin on August 8, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Mulling over deep disagreement (again) I came across this nice little piece by David Suissa at the Huffington Post from a little over a year ago. In it he talks about the traditional Jewish narrative of the houses of Shammai and Hillel, who differed over how to interpret the Jewish law (Shammai insisted on strict adherence, while Hillel counseled in favor of compassion):
This idea of looking at more than one “truth” is at the heart of the epic debate in the Talmud between the house of Shammai, which represents the strict, uncompromising voice of Jewish law, and the house of Hillel, which represents the more lenient voice.
Rabbi Moti Bar-Or, who runs Kolot, a bridge-building Torah study institution in Israel, explained to me that “the uniqueness of Hillel is that he truly believes there is validity in the Shammai approach, although he totally disagrees with him.”
In Shammai’s world, there’s “no room for pluralism” because it’s the world of “true or false.” It is Hillel’s ability to see the other side, Bar-Or says, that makes Judaism follow his approach today — not the fact that he was “smarter or right.”
Jonathan Haidt on Liberals and Conservatives
Posted in Connections, tagged conservatives, deep disagreement, Jonathan Haidt, liberals, politics, TED on August 7, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Jonathan Haidt, is a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia. In this short talk he outlines what he takes to be the basic axes of human morality and describes, using his own research, how liberals and conservatives tend to line up on those axes. His conclusion is an interesting one and one I think should be of interest to anyone working on political argumentation.
You can get more information about Haidt and his work at his website.
Is Punditry Ethical?
Posted in Connections, Discussion, Rhetoric, tagged Deep Disagreement, journalism, politics, pundits, Rhetoric on July 16, 2010| 1 Comment »
An interesting distinction is made by Andrew Cline in this recent post on his rhetoric and journalism blog, Rhetorica, between “punditry” and “opinion journalism”.
According to Cline, opinion journalism is reporting informed by or explicitly written from a particular political perspective. It includes acting as a “custodian of fact” and observing a “discipline of verification”. The offers this description of that discipline via a link to an older post:
A discipline of verification should be basic to any practice that we would understand as journalism. Practicing such a discipline means that journalists must be custodians of fact, i.e. journalists should get to the bottom of civic disputes by gathering and verifying facts rather than simply allowing interested sources to spout off. Journalists should protect the facts from those who would spin them, ignore them, or distort them. When journalists don’t practice this discipline, they are guilty of spinning, ignoring, and distorting, often in the name of fairness and balance.
As to being a custodian of fact, Cline has this to say in another older post on Rhetorica:
What I’m getting at here is this: facts are not necessarily easy things to nail down unless we’re measuring (and even then we can run into problems). […] There can be no argument over facts in themselves. We argue about how facts are measured and what facts mean. And we argue about assertions of fact until such assertions are established as fact. Reporters should consider the statements by sources as assertions of fact until such time as the reporter can establish them as facts. The news organization, then, should not publish unverified assertions without disclaimers or qualifiers.
In contrast to opinion journalism, according to Cline, punditry is simply about “winning politically” and does not include the imperatives to be a custodian of fact or to follow a discipline of verification.
Cognitive Dissonance, Deep Disagreement, and the Loch Ness Monster
Posted in Connections, Discussion, Rationality, Rhetoric, tagged cognitive dissonance, Deep Disagreement, Goldacre, ISSA, Kraus, polarization, Sophists, Sunstein, Zarefsky on July 9, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Cognitive dissonance is one of the best established notions in psychology. Simply put (perhaps too simply) the idea is that people in general will go to almost any length to hold onto a cherished belief, no matter how strong the evidence against it is, and no matter how irrational the attempt to do so may seem (or actually be). In a recent posting on his blog Ben Goldacre talks about a recent article in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology that focuses on this effect in cases where subjects dismiss well-founded scientific data that contradicts their beliefs.
While reading this discussion I kept returning in memory to a session I attended at ISSA a couple of weeks ago on deep disagreement. Two of the papers presented focused extensively on strategies for resolving deep disagreements. David Zarefsky presented a battery of strategies none of which, interestingly, involved a direct attack on the belief(s) at the heart of the disagreement. Manfred Kraus’s proposal was that deep disagreement be dealt with by “anti-logical” reasoning after the fashion of the Sophist, Protagoras. I’m no expert on the Sophists but as I understood the paper Kraus seemed to be suggesting that in anti-logical reasoning it’s not so much the partisans of the contradictory views that work out their disagreement as it is the audience to the dispute, who act in the role of judge.
ISSA 2010: A Note
Posted in Connections, Discussion, tagged ISSA on July 3, 2010| Leave a Comment »
So, about that “live from ISSA” thing…
Yeah, that kinda didn’t happen. Perhaps it was the punishing heat, abnormal for Amsterdam at this time of year. Perhaps it was jetlag. It may even have been that the papers were so incredibly interesting that the poor writer’s brain simply collapsed under the strain at the end of each day. Or it might have been bewitchment at the charm and beauty of this famous city. Perhaps it was all of these. We will never know. All that can be done at this point is to beg the good reader’s indulgence. It was rather more challenging to find the time to write than I expected.
Prior to coming here I had heard many things about what to expect, and it turns out that all of the nice things I heard were true. The Dutch are friendly and relaxed, the cafes are excellent, and the city truly is beautiful by day and by night, offering enough history, art, and architecture to make one wonder just why there is so much activity in that one part of town, anyway. The city certainly deserves to be on everyone’s travel agenda. It is lovely.
ISSA too, was pleasant and highly rewarding. I spent most of my time over the three days in sessions on rationality and reasonableness and argument schemes. I heard quite a few interesting papers. I may write about some of them later here once I’ve had time to sit down, look over my notes, and think through them again. In addition to the papers, there were a great many conversations, at lunch and at receptions and informal gatherings too at which I learned a good deal. These, in addition to being remarkably pleasant despite the heat, and a testament to the fundamental good will of argumentation theorists generally, were often as enlightening as the sessions themselves.
All in all it was a great conference in a fine city. With any luck I’ll be able to make a return trip in 2012. That is, of course, provided the Aztec god doesn’t jump out of the Mexican jungle and devour the world before then. It would be a shame if that did happen. Those pancakes really are fantastic. 🙂
Stations: Argumentation Around the Web, vol.1
Posted in Connections, Discussion, tagged Argumentation on May 21, 2010| 5 Comments »
What do you do when you’re too busy to write a blog post? You link to great posts that others have written, of course! To weakly atone the fact that I am, in fact, being consumed by my current research obsessions, I shall therefore take this opportunity to launch a new occasional feature here on RAIL: “Stations”, a sort-of-monthly (or so) digest of the neat, cool, and generally click-worthy among recent articles and blog posts about argumentation. Suggestions and additions in the comments are always welcome! Though argumentation is the focus, I’ll also be including posts from blogs about other issues and disciplines that I think are relevant (or at least that have potentially interesting connections) to the study of argumentation. Here are some of the more interesting posts of the last couple of months that deal with argumentation or argumentation-related themes. Without further ado then, here are the selections for this go around:
Argumentics: The Problems of Irony Part I and Part II
A really interesting and insightful look at irony and its uses in rhetoric from our good neighbor blog just across the street. Do check it out. Then stay and browse around see how great the rest of the blog is too.
Between Citizens and Scientists: The David/Goliath Fallacy
Jeanne Goodwin here puts her finger on a fallacy whose time I think has clearly come. The dynamic she aptly names here is pervasive in politics, and in my (perhaps not so humble after all) view, is worth a lot of study.
These next three aren’t centrally about argumentation, but I think they have interesting applications that make them worthy of a look.
Less Wrong: Short Studies on Excuses
After a description of a few short hypothetical cases the author of the piece goes on to draw some lessons about rule-following, deviations from rule-following, and excuses. Those of you out there working in a pragma-dialectic vein may find these observations interesting.
Bad Science: Evidence Based Smear Campaigns
Ben Goldacre is a doctor and an occasional writer for the Guardian in the UK who focuses his blog on issues around science reporting. His blog is typically well written and might be generally interesting to those who attend to the rhetoric of science. This particular post is of more general interest, however, as it discusses recent research from a political science journal in the UK that suggests that being corrected on our facts can actually reinforce the original (erroneous) belief targeted by the correction. If this is true, it does seem to pose a pragmatic problem of some importance for at least some modes of communication.
Predictably Irrational: The Long-Term Effects of Short-term Emotions
And lastly there is this entry from the blog of behavioral economist Dan Ariely. While it isn’t, strictly speaking, about argumentation, I think it contains observations of interest to those who study argumentation from a game-theoretic or strategic perspective. In this post, Ariely reports on an experiment the results of which suggest that people will often choose more costly strategies than they need to because those strategies inflict damage on others who are seen to be in need of punishment for some transgression. Tu quoque anyone?
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