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Archive for the ‘Discussion’ Category

Stations: Argumentation Around the Web, vol.1

Posted in Connections, Discussion, tagged 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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Critical Thinking; Creative Thinking

Posted in Connections, Discussion, Teaching, tagged , , , , , on April 12, 2010| 4 Comments »

Many of us teach service courses called “Critical Thinking” in our colleges and universities.  Exactly what ‘critical thinking’ means, however, is and has been the source of much vexation.  Reading this blog post by neuroscience researcher and popularizer Jonah Lehrer put me in mind of a discussion I’ve sometimes heard bits and pieces of in this context: on whether and how critical thinking bears any relation to creative thinking.

Broadly speaking I’d suppose that most people understand critical thinking as a br0adly analytical enterprise.  Whether one is extracting an argument for evaluation, analyzing a discussion according to pragma-dialectic rules or critiquing a speech according to rhetorical canons of interpretation, the effort seems to be one in which the task is to “look underneath” the surface phenomenon of the linguistic artifact (the argument or dialogue as it is found “naturally”, in its own discursive “habitat”, say) to structural, prescriptive, and other such properties.   Creative thinking seems less to be about analyzing images or bits of text, and more about the realization of hitherto un-thought-of possibilities that arise from them, or perhaps about the ability to associate freely between different sorts of families of word or image.

It would be easy to pigeonhole critical thinking and creative thinking into wholly different mindsets by saying that critical thinking is about analysis and creative thinking is about expression, but I think this would be misleading.  Critical thinkers learn to prize clarity of expression and to be clear when the occasion requires it.  Creative thinkers also engage in analysis, for example, in the visual analysis of whether a composition or a choice of color is apt given what the artist is trying to express.  Despite the apparent differences, I’m inclined to think that creative and critical thinking aren’t wholly disparate.  Important to both, for example, is the ability to resist framing problems and other dynamics that artificially close off avenues of interpretation or understanding.  Both, I think, also require the development of character traits like intellectual independence. Certainly neither is possible without a good deal of open-mindedness. Freedom of thought and expression seems essential for developing both sets of skills too.

This is not to say that we can collapse the two.  I don’t think we can or should.  I do think, however, that it might be interesting from a pedagogical point of view to consider what critical thinking would look like if taught from a creative perspective, and vice versa.  What kind of classroom environment would best combine both?  What skills, ideally, would the student leave such a class with that he or she doesn’t leave a critical thinking class with now?

Though I am here thinking mostly of pedagogical concerns, I can’t help but wonder if thinking along these lines might not be helpful in sorting out the relationship between rhetoric and argumentation too.

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Snopes, Authority and Objectivity

Posted in Connections, Discussion, Informal Logic, News, Rationality, tagged , , , , , on April 6, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Upon opening my e-mail this morning I found a forward of this article from the New York Times on the popular fact-checking website snopes.com. I found the article interesting for more than a few reasons.

What has always fascinated me about Snopes is how it evolved organically online out of a felt need for objectivity. Since the beginning the web has always been a fertile breeding ground for rumors, urban legends and half-truths, and people (who I think are more sophisticated than we often believe) know this.  They are well aware of the multiple, conflicting biases that color the information they find online.  They know that these biases can lead to slanting and distortion, and to some degree they expect it.  For those who are not simply looking for confirmation of their own viewpoints, this is a problem.  Simply knowing that bias abounds on the web, however, is not a sufficient defense.  People with this kind of interest don’t want just any story, they want the story.  They want to know what really happened.  The multiple, conflicting accounts available online don’t tell them that.  The result is that people who want to use the web for information gathering purposes have to have some way of sifting the facts out of the voluminous chaff of rumor, exaggeration, and partisan cheerleading in which they lay hidden.

Enter Snopes, which as the article explains, evolved into its role as a “fact-checking” site.  (It did not start out that way.)  Nevertheless, it is now regarded by many as an authority on which stories are and are not credible on the web.

To my mind two things stand out from the article. The first is this quote:

For the Mikkelsons, the site affirms what cultural critics have bemoaned for years: the rejection of nuance and facts that run contrary to one’s point of view.

“Especially in politics, most everything has infinite shades of gray to it, but people just want things to be true or false,” Mr. Mikkelson said. “In the larger sense, it’s people wanting confirmation of their world view.”

(more…)

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Rhetoric and Responsibility

Posted in Discussion, News, Rhetoric, tagged , , , , , on March 30, 2010| Leave a Comment »

It is common knowledge that political extremism is on the rise in the U.S..  I was listening to a radio broadcast in this series this morning, and the question came up of whether or not talk radio and television personalities who play to political extremes are morally responsible for the acts that some of their unbalanced listeners or viewers might do.  A case in point was the murder of George Tiller, a doctor in Kansas who Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly had several times condemned by name on the air for performing abortions. Tiller’s murderer apparently had been a fan of O’Reilly’s show.

Whether or not one thinks O’Reilly is implicated in Tiller’s death, it does seem to raise the question of whether and to what degree persons in his line of work bear responsibility for the attitudes that they model, and the overall quality of public discourse in the U.S..

My sense of things is that  people like Michael Moore and Bill O’Reilly probably don’t cause people to pick up guns unless those people are already deranged.  They do, however, signal that it is acceptable to be intolerant and abusive of people who disagree with one’s view of the world. It also encourages the polarization that is such a serious difficulty at this moment in American politics.  For these reasons it’s hard for me not to think that people who model intolerant or abusive political attitudes bear at least some responsibility for the political climate we have here.

The defense that what these folks do is all entertainment rings false to me.  I wouldn’t excuse a bully for haranguing a person in a public place on those grounds, and I don’t think the Glenn Becks of the world can get off the hook so easily either.  Even if all they wish to do is entertain, the fact is that their particular brand of entertainment has some very damaging consequences to which they ought to own up.

But if they bear responsibility, then this suggests that rhetorical activity is subject to moral constraints–perhaps not constraints on what a speech can contain in terms of ideas, but constraints on the manner in which the speech is given.  Perhaps another way to think of this is that there are moral limits to what one may do in adapting one’s speech to a particular audience.  Perhaps the notion of “pandering” captures those limits, but I’m not sure it’s the right moral category (rhetoricians, help me out).  What the talk radio people seem to me to do is something more akin, by degrees, to inciting riot. In an economic and political climate like the U.S. has right now, that seems to me to be decidedly immoral, and practically unwise.

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Another Vote for Narratives

Posted in Connections, Discussion, Rationality, tagged , , , , , , on March 16, 2010| Leave a Comment »

A while ago I posted a short entry here entitled Nice Argument. I’ll Believe You When You Have a Story.  That post linked to a post about the endowment effect on Dan Ariely’s blog in behavioral economics.  In that post I wondered if something like the endowment effect (the increased perception of value that comes from association with a personal narrative) might not do some explanatory work in argumentation theory, perhaps in terms of explaining why people hold and argue for the positions that they do, or why people can be resistant to changing their minds even when presented with evidence that should do so, etc..

Here now is another entry along those lines, this time by the redoubtable popularizer of all things brain science, Jonah Lehrer.  In a recent entry on his blog Lehrer goes so far as to say that in order to be effective argumentation–especially moral argumentation–ought to be aimed at exciting the emotional systems in the brain; that argumentation that appeals to rational considerations simply won’t get the job done when it comes to morality.  Let’s see now, if he’s right then moral argument is effective when it appeals to our sentiments, but is idle when it appeals to reason.  Seems like I’ve heard that one somewhere before…I wonder if Lehrer can do a Scottish accent.

What is interesting here for argumentation theorists in these developments coming out of the social and now the hard sciences are (1) that emotions apparently play a much larger role in reasoning, and by extension in effective argumentation than has traditionally been thought and (2) that arguments or not, narratives have what increasingly looks like a proven power to convince that in some cases can exceed rational appeals.  (Of course to some in rhetoric that won’t seem like news, however, considering that this observation is coming from the hard sciences I’d wager that even the toughest rhetorician may find something to smile about there). Though obviously related, these two points each have a significance of their own. The first point is in some ways a vindication of the more nuanced view taken by most argumentation theorists of what were traditionally seen the “emotion-based” fallacies (e.g. ad misericordiam, etc.). The second point certainly seems like wind in the sails of those who favor the notion that narratives can be arguments.

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Does Arguing Make Us Better Reasoners?

Posted in Connections, Discussion, Rationality, tagged , , , on March 15, 2010| 2 Comments »

Apparently the gang over at Less Wrong think so, and they’ve got a paper that backs them up.  From the blog:

Mercier and Sperber argue that, when you look at research that studies people in the appropriate settings, we turn out to be in fact quite good at reasoning when we are in the process of arguing; specifically, we demonstrate skill at producing arguments and at evaluating others’ arguments.

Interesting stuff, especially given that by ‘argument’ here Mercier and Sperber, the paper’s authors, intend the attempt to persuade, not to rationally convince.  In a nutshell, their contention is that we reason better when we are trying to persuade others to adopt our point of view. Conversely, when we aim at the truth we do worse at being reasonable.  Hmmm.  🙂

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Is This an Argument?

Posted in Discussion, Rhetoric, tagged , , , , , on March 12, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Have a look at this interesting sequence of images by David J. Staley over at Kairos.  When you get there give it a few minutes to cycle through all the images.  This series of images is put forward as a visual argument.  Clearly it’s visual (well mostly, at any rate), but is it an argument?  If so, what is the conclusion of the argument and what are the premises?

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Frans van Eemeren on Pragma-Dialectics and Social Science

Posted in Connections, Discussion, Pragma-dialectics, tagged , , , on March 9, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Clicking here will take you to an interview with Frans van Eemeren, where he covers a number of topics regarding the applicability and usefulness of the pragma-dialectic method for folks working in the social sciences.  Though the blog is in French, the interview is in English.

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Argument Diagramming/Mapping in the Classroom

Posted in Discussion, Teaching, tagged , , , , , on February 16, 2010| 5 Comments »

I’ve recently begun experimenting with diagramming arguments in my classes–and not my Critical Thinking/Informal Logic classes, but the other more traditional philosophy classes that I teach.   I’ve tried using a few different programs to set my diagrams up (Araucaria, Carneades) but so far what works best are color-coded, free-hand “VanGelder-style” diagrams done on a transparency and projected via a document camera. (I’d love to have ReasonAble, but so far I can’t seem to talk anyone into getting it into the budget for me.)

What I’ve found is that diagramming arguments actually seems to work better than setting the arguments out in classical standard form (i.e. premises numbered sequentially with a line under the last premise as in an arithmetic problem, followed by the conclusion, etc.).  When I diagram the argument students seem to get a clearer idea of the argumentation in the text, and a better appreciation for the overall structure of the article or chapter. I haven’t been doing it long enough to back it up with trends in test scores or anything like that, but the students tell me it really helps them get a grip on what’s going on in the text. I’ve yet to hear anyone tell me that it confuses them even more.

Is anyone else using argument diagramming/mapping in this way outside of classes where a primary aim is to teach argumentation?  If so, how are you doing it and how is it working for you?

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Semantic Stopsigns

Posted in Connections, Discussion, Rationality, tagged , , , , , on January 29, 2010| 4 Comments »

Less Wrong is a blog sponsored by Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute: a research group devoted mostly to issues in AI development aimed at increasing human intelligence.  While many posts center on those issues, the folks over there frequently consider ideas about rationality and reasoning.  Essentially, hardcore Bayesianism rules the roost, and there seems to be an instinctive impulse towards formalism that is perhaps not as widely shared among likely readers of RAIL.  That said, at times they hit on ideas and ways of seeing things that are fascinating and useful to consider.

One of those ideas is that of a “semantic stopsign“, the mark of which is “failure to consider the obvious next question.” As the examples make clear, the upshot of this is someone’s tendency to over-rely on a particular answer to tough questions, to rely on it as something like a conversational deus ex machina.  If, for instance, I am willing to question the ability of any institution to solve social problems but seem mysteriously unable to apply the same scrutiny to “god” or “liberal democracy” or “the free market”, then those things are, for me, semantic stopsigns.  When a chain of discursive reasoning brings me to my stopsign I simply stop asking critical questions, automatically satisfied that nothing further need be said.

Semantic stopsigns seem to me to be a familiar phenomenon, but one I’ve not seen discussed very much or labeled with that sort of precision before.  One wonders what a list of common semantic stopsigns would look like, and more importantly, what argumentative strategies one might use to circumvent them.




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