Makessense Stop!

“except by going to sleep! or watching TV!) ”

No that doesn’t work either. I still analyse what is happening on TV and what might be wrong with it, and I solve many problems while I sleep.

The one fallacy everybody seems to know is ad hominem, which I find is a really useful heuristic.

I don’t get it.

Makesense – Stop! from Flanders and Swann The Reluctant Cannibal:

“If the Juju had meant us not to eat people, He wouldn’t have made us of meat.
… They’ll eat YOU, even if they can’t digest your opinions”

Just because some philosopher has to complain about this, and it might as well be me: the naturalistic fallacy is not, as represented in the ‘Fallacy Man’ comic, the error of thinking that ‘carrots are better than candy, because it comes from nature’ (let’s call that the organic fallacy). The naturalistic fallacy is loosely used to mean the (supposed) error of deriving an ought from an is (better to call that a violation of Hume’s law), or precisely used to mean the error (according to G. E. Moore) of trying to define ‘good’.

and believe me, a fresher with apparently nothing but contempt for theories of justice can turn out to have a highly-tuned sense of fairness when it comes to whether his football men are being treated right by their coach and their owners.

I do wonder whether such students actually regard fiction that tells instead of showing as feeling worse to them as readers, rather than writers. If they don’t share the same sense of the literary good as the norm, then everything being taught to them may as well be a bafflingly arbitrary magic incantation.

My trick is to get them to come up with a thesis in response to a research question–but only let them pick a question that they don’t know the answer to, especially ones that they recognize as having more than one answer. They are more likely to look for more evidence and take it seriously, when they are not quite sure what it means yet.

… would a student who doesn’t have the same sense of epistemic duty necessarily be capable of recognizing and explicating this to an intimidatingly senior tutor? Eh.

Certainly there are students who would stand up and cry “that isn’t a sonata, this is a sonata!” but such hidden musical prodigies would surely be few and far in between. Rather: Is that a sonata? Well, if you insist, Professor.

I’m going to shut up about writing now. It’s a thread derailment, and I’d rather learn what I’m learning by attending to John H.

Picking your thesis is kind of like being given a coffee mug. Suddenly, you like your thesis. You are a bit biased towards it. Even though that’s crazy.

If, say, you work with students doing moot court (or possibly debate), you see this in spades. In a well done instance, the case is worked up so that there is no winner as a matter of law, so that you can’t just depend on the law winning for you. It’s meant to be a test of advocacy. People are assigned sides randomly. But, teams become very invested in their “side”, and quite passionate that their side is “right”. It’s very strange and a bit disturbing to watch.

Certainly misc problematic undergraduate #135,551,281 is not actually objecting due to a preference for Slavic oral tradition. That is a level of sophistication which is far too un-basic; most students will not have read enough world lit to be able to make intelligent comparative study.

I mean, I see what you’re getting at – you don’t have to like, e.g., stream-of-consciousness narrative in order to execute it well, with enough study and appreciation. So a hypothetical rejection of the dominant mode of narrative is likewise not a respectable reason for incompetence. But this presumes a level of intuitive empathy for other modes of narrative construction, and I’m wondering whether that empathy really universally exists to begin with – even only amongst the subset of the student population that self-selects into writing classes.

You (and I) would think: this is pretty darned basic. And yet here we are wondering why yet another cohort of freshmen includes a handful who, by any indication, apparently only a very dim idea of what constitutes an argument, instead of what feels like an argument. These may not be stupid people; if anything, deliberately reading a philosophy course through strenuous imitation without understanding seems harder, not easier. But they might be lacking the appropriate qualia, so to speak. You can compel a blind student to memorize that roses are red, but then you would hardly be surprised when they can’t work backwards to a model for figuring out the colours of non-rose objects.

(And not being able to understand what distinguishes an argument from rhetoric is not actually universally crippling, either – it is itself a product of a political culture that places nominal importance on rationalism and human reason. If the dominant mode was 9th century Asharite occasionalism, an invocation of reason would mark you as a fool; it is tribal unity that wins the day, especially unity in the form of two hundred thousand Mongol horsemen. In such situations, it is Aunt Flo arguments which actually matter; one doesn’t need to be postmodernist to see that rationalist seeking of relationship-destroying truths is not always immediately rewarding. It might not be rewarding for centuries.)

In the age of the Internet and automated spellcheck, there’s plenty of un-edited bad writing out there. Grammatical, spelt coherently, but delivered badly. Do these get no readers whatsoever? On the contrary, I’ve seen some of these receive non-sarcastic support like: I like this, you should write more of these. And then the hapless writer goes to college and takes writing classes, I presume.

I just want to say that I enjoyed this post and the comments more than I thought possible given the topic. So bravo to all.

On a purely pedantic note, …

Everyone can make an argument, even though everyone can’t write a sonata.

This is clearly wrong, since I can present not one (Mozart), not two (and Beethoven), not three (and Haydn) but many, many (and a lot of other composers) have written what are generally recognized as sonatas. I think Professor Holbo’s intended point is more accurately stated as,

Everyone can make an argument, even though not everyone can write a sonata.

I was actually thinking of closely-related topic of fanfic, particularly the (possibly universal?) patterns that show up between highly disparate communities of writers. Take the example of wish-fulfillment fantasy. The Trekkies invented the label of a ‘Mary Sue’ in the 70s, and every American pop-cultural phenomenon since has made the same observation of their own waves of amateur fan-written fiction. But it’s not obvious, I think, that the disapproval is actually universal, particularly amongst the writers thereof.

In a world where there are museums for naïve_art, it’s possible that the most accurate remark to these writers is not that their writing is fundamentally bad, but that almost all readers would find it repellent, for reasons which are hard to pin down but eh, the universe is unfair. Perhaps another course would be more suited to you, o student. Try accountancy.

But your example is a better one, I think. If there’s a field of narrative writing where personal tastes as to good delivery clearly vary extremely widely, it’s erotica.

This is probably a sign that I’ve gotten old and tired of thinking at all, but I think the example of a bad argument (Aunt Flo and the minimum wage) is actually about the best argument possible for raising the minimum wage. The only thing wrong with it is that it’s completely unanswerable, and so probably useless — where would academics be if issues were settled?

But as I said, I’ve reached the life stage of re-reading all the books I know I like, so I’m probably not the guy to ask.

@37

Can everyone distinguish an argument from persuasive rhetoric? @36 seems to be volunteering as Exhibit A for the prosecution…

I suspect resolution of disagreements via physical threats backed up by family/friend networks, i.e., William Timberman’s #3, are more common in the lives of some of our students than is generally perceived.

Not very common, of course – this is the industrial life – but it does exist.

Really, “no, Virginia, anecdata from your cousin’s life experiences doesn’t constitute knowledge” is only a sensible standard if you are culturally inclined toward believing instead in supposedly neutral experts making incomprehensible manipulations of data gathered by allegedly non-partisan bureaucracies – in particular, that this bureaucracy will also protect you if word gets out that you’re going around publicly doubting your cousin. Likewise, you’re not also supposed to endorse anything on the mere basis that your relatives will benefit materially from it being the case – rhetorically, at least, you are supposed to allude to universal and shared experiences.

Surely the importance of accurately describing a underlying shared physical reality, rather than flattering an existing web of human relationships (which happens to be backed with the underlying threat of force), is something that is context-dependent?

“Better just to say: P. Repeatedly.”

LOL. That view was memorably presented in my 2nd-favourite political cartoon of all time: http://bizarrocomic.blogspot.com/2008/11/bizarro-is-brought-to-you-today-by.html.

I would be curious to know how your students’ writing changed (if at all) if you hammered home the point from your very first class that when you say “argument” it bears NO RELATION to the common meaning of the word.

I do policy advocacy and communications for a living — which is to say I work to convince people of things and get them to act on them — and I make arguments all the time. But I’m pretty sure that I haven’t made a philosophical-type argument since I left Intro to Philosophy ~20 years ago.

Shorter me: If you want students to learn a new-to-them style of argument, you have to make it cognitively easier for them to set aside what they already know, and what works in every other corner of their lives, about “making an argument.”

I don’t want to assign argument papers because I just don’t have time to refute the misinformation in every sentence.

With misinformation validated in the larger media, how can it be discredited in a shaky undergraduate paper?

Sigh.

A relative who teaches or taught computer programming told me that, with each class that came along, there were a certain number of quite intelligent students who couldn’t get it, in the sense that they sort of knew what was going on, but could not do it themselves no matter how hard they tried. This was hard for us to understand because we’re ‘naturals’ — both of us could do it about as soon as we heard about it. Yet it’s a very peculiar form of thinking, breaking a problem down into very tiny, seemingly unrelated pieces while retaining the overall flow and direction of the work.

Probably similarly, there are people who can’t learn a new language, although they have no trouble at all with those they learned in childhood, and people who can’t learn to draw, even though they possess good vision and muscular coordination. or who can’t learn a musical instrument, although they can ‘carry a tune’ and know a lot about music.

I think making a good argument and telling a story well (according to our, or someone’s lights) are probably similar talents, largely intuitive faculties which are actually not well understood.

I don’t believe that it is necessary to start with an endowment of the “leaning one way or the other” type. Nor is lack of motivation a complete explanation. It may not seem so for those who enjoy argument, I but I think that the effort required to formulate an argument can be aversive in itself, and that in many cases this is sufficient explanation.

One sees this clearly in a neutral setting such as the bridge table, where there are no strong prior beliefs in play and declarer is generally strongly motivated to succeed. And yet, very often a weak declarer counts his likely tricks, sees, say, that a winning finesse will land the contract, and proceeds to take the finesse. Declarer is not positively arguing that the finesse is likely to succeed, merely observing that it offers a possibility of success. “Makessensestop.” This is an “endowment” only in the sense of ready availability.

The ability to go further involves many elements that go into formulating a good argument: generation of alternative hypotheses (“Is LHO really likely to hold the Queen?”, “Might the Queen drop doubleton?”, “Can I throw in RHO?”), consideration of the evidence supporting these hypotheses (“Is the bidding consistent with my picture of the hand? Is the opening lead?”), and contingent reasoning (“If the finesse does not succeed, I cannot make the contract; therefore I must assume it will succeed. What are the implications of this assumption?”)

None of these elements seems difficult and the poor player has likely seen (and indeed paid to see) many expositions of similar hands, and understood them after the fact. And yet he does not think this way at the table. I think that much of the difference between good and poor players is that the former enjoy this process of reasoning whereas the latter find it disagreeable.

If you could find a way to reverse this preference, you could turn bad players into good ones; yes, and turn many weak writers into strong ones too.

Really, “no, Virginia, anecdata from your cousin’s life experiences doesn’t constitute knowledge” is only a sensible standard if

Isn’t this a strawman argument? Though I couldn’t say I’ve never heard it before . . . so, is there a fallacy called something like “stick internet troll” [1] argument?

The statement of the anecdote strikes me as a very simplified version of trying to get students to understand why you need to know statistics, not a broad statement that facts about individual cases should have no bearing on conclusions about public policy. Though I would guess that someone who thinks “I know someone who can’t get by on minimum wage,” characterized the way it is, isn’t any kind of evidence for raising the minimum wage, is inclined against raising the minimum wage and has a possibly unreasonable standard for evidence in favor of raising it.

[1] as in the three little pigs: straw, sticks, brick

John Holbo : “It isn’t clear where the line is between story and argument – or even that there is one.”

Strongly disagree. A lot of people do draw a clear line between story and argument: people “bracket” [pull out, put aside, consider] a story as a fiction, with a beginning and an end. Not all people bracket arguments in that way.

Some people bracket arguments as if the conduct of real life depends upon it. It verges upon the “political tribalism” territory. To them, “argument” means “advocacy”. Thus to them, there is no “good” argument for utilitarianism, because utilitarianism has not been universally adopted: i.e., none of the advocacy worked.

Are these students clear that an argument must include both viewpoints, like the protagonist/antagonist in a story?

Maybe argument sometimes needs to be taught by putting it into a real story: i.e., by holding a debate.

There, two viewpoints are argued against each other, to form the “conflict” of a story. By agreement, only one side wins the debate, and gets a prize, the MacGuffin. One way to teach argument might be to hold a debate, or five or six a year, before the full class audience, and impartial teacher judges the winner (the story “climax”) and then teaches the basis of the decision in the next lecture (the “denouement”).

Not easily done for MOOCs, unless someone gets to work on software that splits the screen and prints the argument points (and judge’s response) in prose, maybe in realtime, under the talking heads. Who knows, the internet might improve argument!

Some people with highly complex, integrated views of life will have a hard time applying formal logic to the so-called real world (I mean the one of lived experience).

Why would your students be better at making arguments than the pundits or politicians they watch on TV? Our culture simply doesn’t provide much of a positive model. What would you expect?

my 2nd-favourite political cartoon of all time:

I am slightly confused by that cartoon.

Does it assume that the reader knows that Plato was, in some cases, a proponent of the “noble lie” and that Rove is genuinely asking Plato for his support. Or is Plato just supposed to stand in for a generic “ancient philosopher” and “seeker of truth” and we are to read him as appalled by Rove’s complete disregard for Truth as a thing to seek.

david,

I’ve never taught (TAing mathy computer science classes, you don’t run into this problem much), so I haven’t had students. I’ve certainly seen classes get derailed by the kind of thing you describe, enough that I’m really puzzled by your statement that it’s only by people of a certain race who do it.

The two situations seem to have an important difference. The student who says “Aunt Flo [really?] can’t make ends meet” seems to me (as someone who, as an undergraduate, was not uninclined to make arguments like these) to be saying that she knows from personal experience that there is at least one person for whom the minimum wage is insufficient. To me, I think the distance from a simple statement of an anecdote to an actual argument is quite small (to someone who’s heard people argue that no one starves in the US, for example, an anecdote about one person starving would seem perfectly relevant). Obviously one piece of evidence is not an argument yet, but the claim (admittedly, probably taken out of context and thus seeming stronger than was intended) is that it’s not evidence. The student who says “they killed my grandparents’ friends” is not coming as close to an argument, that I can see, though I don’t know the context.

However, I don’t see why we’re slipping from “what is an argument” to “what kinds of statements should be discouraged in classroom discussion (or they’ll pull the class off-track).”

The “noble lie” as I understood it, involved, not a base and blatant deception, but rather a truth presented in a form that people could readily absorb and that was not only not incompatible with truth but rather would facilitate understanding of truth. Something like what is explained here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Lee

Rakesh Bhandari:

Dude, bizarro/Dan Piraro is/was my hero comix guy for years but then he disappeared from the usual outlet and I thought he disappeared from everywhere.
Current link found thanks to you
http://bizarrocomics.com/
Much gratitude.

Isn’t this education problem a more global version of Ben Goldacre’s point that ““You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.”

People have a whole host of not very well defined ideologies that other people have taught them to invest their sense of self in–replete with terminal arguments on all sorts of crazy things. A few people have a lot of trouble disassociating themselves from any sort of adversarial role. I mean, imagine a Seventh Day Adventist having to argue that the Polynesian concept of divinity is just as correct as their own. How many of them would be able to set aside their belief structure, just to argue? I imagine that 99% of the work is getting students not to go “if you say so…” defensiveness/cluelessness at any stage of the pedagogy.

Moreover, people with certain psychological pathologies, like what characterizes dry drunks, can have difficulties psychologically separating themselves from what they are doing. Other people, like me, for example, will have trouble with certain kinds of short term memory, and clear mental abstraction is very laborious. I only barely passed Set Theory back in the day, and I could understand circuits, but have severe trouble retaining that understanding. The only way around that sort of trouble is pretty much supervised “chop wood” until said student doesn’t have to load into that bad memory, if that’s the problem. Labor intensive, I think.

Hmmm, whole arguments? or sound out all the bits and pieces all tedious-like?

It’s not intrinsic to ‘people of a certain race’ – it was the first instance that came to mind where a Western academic might actually encounter a recognizably alien and proudly defended form of discourse, without any prior mental preparation to brush it off.

The student who says “Aunt Flo [really?] can’t make ends meet” seems to me (as someone who, as an undergraduate, was not uninclined to make arguments like these) to be saying that she knows from personal experience that there is at least one person for whom the minimum wage is insufficient. To me, I think the distance from a simple statement of an anecdote to an actual argument is quite small…

Well, there are two problems here. The first is the failure to understand that personal testimony doesn’t qualify as an authority when writing exposition – that this skepticism isn’t a personal attack on one’s trustworthiness, but a standard that makes reasoned public deliberation in a diverse society possible. You know Aunt Flo, but the reader doesn’t, so all that has been achieved is to give the reader cause to suspect any professed neutrality. Again: universal values and shared experiences. Aunt Flo the starving minimum-wage two-job single mother is no more relevant than Aunt Flo the Cadillac-driving lobster-eating welfare queen, no matter how well you claim to know either.

And the second is the special pleading regarding the distance between anecdote and argument. The work is being done by the perceived shortness of the distance, not by the anecdote, so it is the mental framework of distances that has to be explained in the essay.

The student who says “they killed my grandparents’ friends” is not coming as close to an argument, that I can see, though I don’t know the context.

And here I think you are being deliberately obtuse. Take the open white supremacist (an admittedly much rarer creature on American campuses). If they go on and on about the black men who attacked their cousin, do you really feel utterly unable to guess what argument they are fishing for? Or do you wring your hands and say, well, assaults do happen, here are my sympathies for your cousin and condemnations of his/her attackers?

49: “Many, many high school writing assignments are not very demanding on this score; they allow students to veer off into strongly-held opinion or widely-held opinion; they allow snippets of internet research to stand in for authoritative sources; they don’t require any attempt to find countervailing evidence, etc.”

And the same is often true in college. Students don’t come up with these poor habits themselves, they have learned them somewhere.

As others have mentioned, your students are deeply embedded in the popular culture. And one phemomena of recent populat culture has been increasingly sophisticated psycological advocacy. Those who are seen on TV and on average increasingly exposed to this -particularly political junkies, but also commercial advertising. So they’ve had a couple of decades practice thinking -and reacting this way. Cluing them into the fact, that what for them appears to be natural thinking style can lead to dangerously wrong conclusions won’t be an easy process. And to be fair rigorous thinking requires a lot of discipline, for most it just isn’t fun.

First of all, John – didn’t you have thousands of MOOC students? HOW on earth can you possible give feedback/grade all those papers? I honestly don’t see how massive on-line courses can really help students understand the intricacies of the argument. So many voices! So removed from each other by the miracle of online communication!

I teach public speaking and persuasive writing (two separate courses.) I come from the private sector, after years in the communications field as a freelancer, where I had a good amount of work because many, many, many people have no idea how to string sentences together.

My biggest shock when I started teaching – how appallingly uneducated students are in 1) writing; and 2) arguing a cogent and persuasive case for anything. (What happened to the comma? Why doesn’t anyone understand how to use apostrophes? Or, as my students like to write: apostrophe’s!)

My students (primarily American, Southern, Christian – though I’ve had international students and some American Muslim students as well) are not stupid. They have, however, grown up in a world where there are no arguments, only broad claims stated as fact – in news media outlets that make it easy to hear only one side of a story (Fox, MSNBC, etc.) Some arguments my students may or may not have heard:

“47% of Americans will vote for the president no matter what.” When we look at Romney’s speech about moochers and takers in our class, I point out that all of us are at a state university, and thus fall within his definition of “moocher and taker.”

I ask when NSA spying started; most will say this started with Obama (it is all Obama’s fault – all of it!) I show them evidence that the NSA itself started more than half a century ago, when the enemy was communist. I also not that 9/11 (when Bush was president) expanded the nature of government spying. A shock to all in the room.

All of us have grown up in a world where arguments are never really anything more than statements strung together. No one makes a valid case for anything it seems. And this is not new to Millennials.

I think “Paying for the Party” makes a terrible case for the argument that inequality is fostered by colleges – following one floor of freshmen women at one university and announcing that those students conclusively show that “college maintains inequality” is not a well-argued thesis. But this book has become widely discussed (even here on CT) and in some cases, accepted as fact. That this cohort of freshman women was also part of the class of 2008 makes the case even weaker – following a group of students who graduated in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression is really a bummer if you want to make a case about upward/downward mobility of college students.

My students never heard of the domino theory, but I am old enough to remember when ALL of Asia would fall like dominoes to communism if we did not stop Viet Nam from becoming communist. Many Americans firmly believe Saddam Hussein was in control of those planes that flew into the World Trade Centers on that awful day in September and that we went to war in Iraq to prevent the smoking gun from being a mushroom cloud (thank you Condi!)

Arguing is an art form. Most do not have the discipline or the inclination to do it well.

universal values and shared experiences

No. Incidentally, which of those is statistics?

Shah @68 “You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.”

That may often be true, but perhaps you can stop them using sloppy reasoning to justify prejudice. When I was 16, I read Robert Thoulless’ Straight And Crooked Thinking It helped me understand the flaws in others’ reasoning, but I still had a tendency to confuse my own prejudices with informed opinion. However, that changed in 1977, strangely enough when I encountered Professor Gordon Dunstan whilst taking a theology subsidiary at King’s College London. (My degree was Chemistry with Mathematics: Dunstan’s speciality was ethics.)

Examination was via two long essays. I wrote my first one on “Justice”. I thought it was a beaut – until I had to receive it back and discuss it with Prof D. Gently, kindly, thoroughly, he demolished my pristine prose and made me ashamed of it. For example, I described Mr Justice Melford Stephenson as “a latter day Hanging Judge” Prof D’s terse annotation: “How many people has he hung?” Another annotation: “Where is your evidence?” I took my medicine and he passed me, but I never forgot the lesson and was always grateful for it.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/RPO930QU386FQ/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#RPO930QU386FQ

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1452031/The-Rev-Professor-Gordon-Dunstan.html

Aunt Flo could be a very good argument, but one must also make a case that Aunt Flo is representative.

People generally cannot stand to have more than one error at a time pointed out. But of course, college students are supposed to be tougher.

The first half of this made me laugh out loud. Cheers.

But… this:

the transcendental deduction really is an argument to the best explanation

is false.

I had an interesting conversation with a really good non-trad student today that reinforced my convictions about stressing distinctions as groundwork for further argument. She kinda understood the differences between free will incompatibilism and compatibilism, but really didn’t get the distinction between them, so arguments based on really grasping the distinction eluded her. So I brought in the good old argument by analogy to clarify the distinction. (I did this on the spot but realized I needed to work this in to my FW-based 101 ASAP.)

There are people who believe in the Christian god, and disbelieve in the Christian god. So here are two groups who agree on the concept–a triune omnipropertied god empahsized as god-man–but divide on whether such a god exists or existed. That’s like all incompatibilists who stress that determinism is inconsistent with indeterministic free will–some in fact believe in indeterministic free will (libertarians), some don’t (hard incompatibilists). But there are others who also believe in god, but not the Christian god–like Hindus, Islamists, and the like–and so are like compatibilists, who believe in a form of free will but not the incompatibilist form, and even disagree among themselves on what the true form of free will is, just as non-Christian believers disagree on what the true concept of god is. (This even helps understand semantical FW skeptics parallel to complete non-theists rejecting any belief in god.)

She visibly brightened. Evidence about determinism suddenly really mattered to all incompatibilists of any ilk just as evidence about a historical Jesus might to anyone concerned about him as deity, both positively and negatively. But not to Hindus or Islam so much, just as determinism is generally uninteresting to compatibilists.

Arguments require as clear an understanding of relevant terms as possible or they become meaningless mush. Another lesson for me on this today: sometimes it takes simple arguments like this analogical one to unlock distinctions that make understanding further more complicated arguments possible.

FWIW.

One way to fight this, which is very traditional, is to tell students that they have to counter-argue against their own argument, whatever it is. This is good advice. But it often fails. What you get, instead of solid counter-argument, which really ought to shape up the argument, is a kind of low or no-contact ‘combat’. A kind of Rashomon fu, with dueling ‘makesense stop’ narratives circling around each other, trying to sound impressive and convincing

It’s almost worse than this, though. A lot of times—and I think with the kind of students you have in mimd—it’s hard enough to get across that X, while possibly vaguely related to the topic under consideration, is not actually a consideration against Y. That is, they’ve come up with some not-entirely-unrelated consideration, but it’s not actually a counter against the argument they’re asked to consider, or against their own argument. But they can’t see this.

I do like the idea of deliberately making them come up with bad arguments (so to speak) and then having them critique these. Though I suppose it’s not obvious to me why this helps more than anything else—why this way they do suddenly get what an argument is supposed to be. (I haven’t read the whole thread, so maybe this has already been answered.)

One other thing: I am entirely unconvinced that “popular culture”, “political spin”, “marketing”, or whatever has really any explanatory power here. I’ve had tons of conversations with people who don’t at all fit the kids-these-days profile (often, they grew up without a teevee in the house!), and you see what Holbo’s identifying as “makessense stop!” reasoning all over the place. Having taught philosophy, I’m somewhat attuned to this, and you really do see that most people who haven’t been trained in specific ways fall prey to this sort of thing, that they just don’t get the canons of “proper” argument (tho of course some can glom on a whole lot faster than others).

To forestall david-style objections, all that I’m claiming is that I have what I consider to be significant, albeit anecdotal, reasons to believe that “makessense stop” isn’t simply an artefact of modern Western spin-oriented consumer culture. Countervailing evidence is welcome.

Tom Stafford has just published a very good piece on Contributoria entitled “What’s the evidence on using rational argument to change people’s minds?” It makes most of the points made in comments here and backs them up (!)

One of the points he makes, that in order to engage with the validity/non-validity of arguments students need to be engaged at more than the rational level, was born out to me while I was teaching college composition, a course I organized in accordance with the rhetorical modes and their perceived difficulty: description – narration – persuasion – argument. The final paper was generally a combination of these as appropriate to the topic, which I always left open to students themselves to select. Much, much better papers resulted when students chose to write about something they cared about.

I found this a very interesting thread, but I’m afraid I can’t help thinking about the Monty Python sketch:

“I came here for an argument!”
“No you didn’t!”

I wonder if it would help if they played Eleusis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusis_%28card_game%29

To do well at eleusis you don’t have to make arguments about why your reasoning is correct, but you do have to reason. It’s very easy to see a pattern and believe in it, not noticing that you yourself created the pattern. Then somebody plays a card which doesn’t fit your pattern and you find out you were wrong.

The actual experience of using bad logic and getting quick feedback that it’s bad, that you jumped to conclusions that were wrong, not in the context that some wise guy is trying to make you look bad but just in the course of the game, might teach better than anything else.

First there are the techniques of actually coming up with logical answers. A lot of people are weak at that. Then there are the techniques of describing why your answer makes sense. And third for things like writing classes, there’s the matter of persuading students that they are supposed to be looking at problems and coming up with logical solutions, and not just discussing bullshit opinions.

If they think it’s about presenting opinions, and you tell them they’re being illogical, they’re likely to think you just disagree with them and you’re taking out your irritation on them because they said what they really think instead of the bullshit you wanted them to agree with.

Conservatives tend to believe that the universities are stocked with liberals who discriminate against them for saying the truth. If they assume you are a liberal, and then you criticise their opinions as being illogical, it’s only natural that they’d stop right there and not come up with a second hypothesis about why you’re doing it.

..7p on the £ would obviously be a 7% increase (but Im accounting for a 3% tax increase as well, is that the way it works ? It doesnt matter !)

“Take the example of wish-fulfillment fantasy. The Trekkies invented the label of a ‘Mary Sue’ in the 70s, and every American pop-cultural phenomenon since has made the same observation of their own waves of amateur fan-written fiction. But it’s not obvious, I think, that the disapproval is actually universal, particularly amongst the writers thereof.”

I find it interesting that although purveyors of “hard SF” are among the most egregious Gary Stu abusers in the world, the SF/Fantasy world went to the conspicuously female Mary Sue (“the youngest ensign…yadda yadda”) when grasping to describe this tendency. Now, it’s true that fanfic has more successful women practitioners than there are actual female writers getting published in SF and Fantasy, and than men writing fanfic I would idly guess, all in all, but it’s still a notable thing to do so early in the history of the genre. This sort of transparent wish fulfillment is for girls. Men write about sciency stuff, and battles, and that bullshit The Force is made of. OK, I was just pretending not to know; it’s midichlorians, fine.

‘david-style objections’? Hah ;)

I actually had Gellner in mind

I meant more that it might seem as if I were going straight from anecdote to general conclusion, and I wanted to point out that I wasn’t. Anyway, I’m certainly not completely opposed to the Gellner view.

From Stafford’s piece mentioned by @98 –

Bloom cites an idea Peter Singer describes in his book “the Expanding Circle”. This is that when you decide to make a moral argument – i.e. an argument about what is right or wrong – you must to some extent step outside of your self and adopt an impartial perspective. If you want to persuade another that you should have more of the share of the food, you need to advance a rule that the other people can agree to. “I should get more because I’m me” won’t persuade anyone, but “I should get more because I did more work, and people who did more work should get more” might. But once you employ an impartial perspective to persuade you lend force to a general rule, which may take on a life of its own. Maybe tomorrow you slack off, so your own rule will work against you. In order to persuade you struck a bargain with the group’s shared understanding of what’s reasonable. Once you’ve done this, Singer argues, you breathe life into the internal logic of argument. The “impartial perspective” develops its own dynamic, driving reason forward quite apart from the external influences of emotion, prejudice and environment. Not only can the arguments you advance come back to bite you, but they might even lead you to conclusions you didn’t expect when you first formulated them.

Sure. But a student might observe “I should get more because I did more work, and people who did more work should get more” and take away the lesson of epistemically virtuous general rules. Or they might take the lesson that those who proclaim the tribal identifiers “we are all brothers and sisters in the tribe going by the label of people-who-did-more-work” and “people-who-did-more-work should get more” should get more. These would certainly seem indistinguishable in typical rhetoric – indeed, the latter is arguably more directly persuasive; it lacks any risk of ‘biting back’. It’s a cargo cult of epistemic method.

Once one is stuck there, one way to escape the trap is to suppress the pavlovian reward for churning up more and more affiliation-demonstrating beliefs. Name another tribal identifier! NO. BAD. And another! NO. BAD. IRRELEVANT. *sprays citrus*

And that, I think, is how Holbo’s sessions are achieving real progress. At least, I hope it’s not merely training students to keep digging until the professor approves, but training students to distinguish between beliefs that all produce the same indistinguishable warm glow of belonging. Rather than the comparatively easy task of distinguishing between beliefs that do and don’t affiliate — which is where the Rashomon duelling is coming from.

Belle Waring @106

Yes, exactly! It’s hardly the case that nobody finds the gender-specific wish-fulfillment (and other violations of the norms of communicating a narrative to the reader) fulfilling. Rather, it’s that most don’t. Which may be due to a culture of integrated gender bias, etc., but it does mean that writing courses aiming to teach the norms can’t just assume that the norms of storytelling and their appeal are actually self-evident to all students.

david@113

Well, one hopes. Or maybe one doesn’t, as there’s lots of artist types who think that the triumph of the mandarins implies that a great light will have gone out of the world. Do we really prefer the world of 2001, a Space Odyssey pre-metamorphosis to that of Blade Runner? More to the point, do we believe that the metamorphosis depicted in the former is at all likely? Never mind Eldon Tyrell and the various sins of pride implied, I think I’d prefer the world of Blade Runner, mainly because it more resembles the world I live in. Better to catch and roast my rats over a flaming oil drum in the shadow of the technocrat’s tower, than to be either Michael Hayden or Edward Snowden, who, it seems to me, are the more likely future replacements for John Holbo’s young Jedi.

@115

Unfortunately, no, it’s not that simple – as Holbo describes (and my own admittedly-brief experience concurs), asking the relevant students to provide a thesis, antithesis and then draw a conclusion leads to the student writing a kabuki theater duel between strawmen. It’s not even the sin of selecting the worst possible argument for your opponent, it’s the sin of selecting completely unrelated arguments, both for your own side and for the other, and then calling a winner for no apparent reason.

Frustratingly, in conversations with the student, the student may turn out to have some kind of rationalization, but they just don’t see the relevance of writing it down. The particular rationalization may also change alarmingly in between one study session and another. So they can rationalize, but they don’t commit, which may be related.

Agreed with 116. The basic point, which the OP makes eloquently, is the backward aspect to thesis-driven writing: students are asked to leap to a premature conclusion and then backfill how someone might get there.

The same problem afflicts research papers, which many students interpret as “go find evidence that supports your thesis.”

There’s perhaps a more basic pedagogical problem. Students have been raised to see the ideal as a seamless, convincing performance. But at some point we’re asking them to switch over, and look for the seams. We ask them to be name the weak points in their reasoning, identify the holes in their evidence, consider the blind spots in the methodology they’re using. To a student this can look like some kind of trick: why should I undermine the work I just did?

I face this on a smaller scale all the time with the question of how to comment on student writing. If a student makes a strong, clear argument, that’s great, and my first instinct is to probe for the holes in it. But it’s hard to make clear that this doesn’t mean they’ve done a wrong thing: I’m deeply grateful not to have mush, but something that makes sufficiently clear claims that we can learn by approaching it critically.

UserGoogol, that explains a lot. In order to ensure that my reach always exceeds my grasp, well-meaning CT commenters have been slipping midichlorians into my tea. I’m the better for it, I suppose, but lemme tell ya, it’s a cruel destiny that they thereby impose on us poor slackers.

Well, I daresay most students are capable of making Mandarin arguments; here we are talking about the handful who fell through the gaps in an otherwise overwhelmingly successful process of acculturation.

Right, exactly. I think it’s important to keep in mind that the issue isn’t some generalized inability, but rather a (weird kind of)* difficulty faced by a subset of students. I also don’t think you really need any grand thesis about modernity (not to say that the thesis is false or even inapplicable)—I think argument in the specific sense at issue is a learnable skill. Yes, some people have more of a “natural aptitude” for it, or some such; others don’t and for them it’s harder. Still I do think it’s worth stressing that it’s much, more like other learnable skills than it is something like a talent that you either have or don’t. And I think one can see this point without committing oneself to any specific thesis about what (historical or other) conditions made this particular skill valuable or necessary.

118: “the backward aspect to thesis-driven writing: students are asked to leap to a premature conclusion and then backfill how someone might get there.”

What I was referring to is not to make a case but to actually come up with strong arguments for both sides. Isn’t that the antidote to “thesis-driven writing”? Maybe one should leave out the conclusion part if that is what distracts the students. “Thesis-driven” speech is of course what happens on TV all the time and students may get the impression that this is what is expected of them. Give them honest grades and tell them what they need to do to do better.

js @ 122

An eminently reasonable distillation of the OP, as was david’s comment preceding. My take has been largely off-topic, I admit, but not because I’m immune to John’s reasoning. Rather I’m concerned more broadly about the future utility/applicability of what he’s teaching, and of the perverted uses to which it’s already been put in a world much changed from the one in which we hitherto expected its hegemony to be less and less challenged over time.

I’m not indifferent to what John is concerned about, but I’m also a bit nervous about what we may expect as an outcome of his efforts and those of his colleagues. Whatever it turns out to be, I’m not convinced that it’s a certainty to live up to our expectations, let alone our fondest hopes, however much more refinement of form our diligent chiseling gives it.

To indulge in more grand historical hypothesizing, with apologies to js., but with possible reference to Lee Arnold wrt the role of language –

The central idea in the notion of bureaucratic conduct is the orderly treatment of cases in accordance with fixed rules—the ethic of rules, as opposed to the ethic of loyalty. The mechanistic world-picture is, in this sense, simply the bureaucratisation of nature. This deep underlying affinity is of great importance. Kant’s account of morality applies best to the ethics of cognition: tolerate no exceptions! For him, the essence of sin is the making of exceptions. Similarly, only symmetrical, ‘universalisable’ concepts, whose compartment does not vary from case to case or individual to individual, are to be allowed in a real science…

Philosophers do not generally believe the division of labour to be their special concern. Yet the most characteristic form of modern philosophy — the form in which it also makes the greatest impact on the general public — is as a set of doctrines which in fact concern the intellectual or cognitive division of labour. Typically, it consists of a classification and characterisation of broad types of knowledge (or uses of language). These types are generally defined in terms of the criteria of validity employed within each of them. Thus, in one of the best known and simplest forms of this kind of theory, assertions are classified into four groups: those which stand and fall in virtue of factual checking, those which stand and fall in virtue of formal calculation, those which stand or fall in virtue of consonance with the speaker’s feelings, and those which have no basis or anchorage at all.

What requires note is this: theories of this kind make a really powerful impact not so much through the specific detail of what they teach (i.e. through the manner in which they list and define their particular categories of knowledge or of discourse) as through the general point and approach which is shared by all of them, and which is largely taken for granted—namely, the assumption of specificity of function. By habituating people to the idea that there is indeed a single, simple criterion and function, governing the evaluation of any one given cognitive or verbal act, they profoundly modify their outlook. What these theories really inculcate is what sociologists are liable to call functional specificity. Of course, these thinkers do not deny that, in life as it is actually lived, or in language as it is actually spoken, various purposes or functions are very often conflated and confused. But this is dismissed as accident or shorthand, a compromise with the hurry and untidiness of daily life. The various functions are seen as ‘really’ distinct.

On this view, complexity and conflation are only there on the surface; underneath there is neat specificity. In fact, of course, this is a covert value-judgment of the utmost importance. What is presented as an analytic, neutral requirement or interpretation, in fact prejudges the question of the distinction, and the relative merits, of the savage and the scientific mind. It is of the essence of the savage mind, as it is of savage institutions, that there is little functional specificity. The tacit but persistent propaganda by modern philosophy, in quite a broad sense, on behalf of functional specificity (which however is introduced ‘innocently’, as a neutral analytic device), in fact insidiously favours the mechanistic, disenchanted vision of the world as against magical enchantment. The enchanted vision works through the systematic conflation of descriptive, evaluative, identificatory, status-conferring and other roles of language. A sense of the separability of the various functions, on the other hand, is the surest way to the disenchantment of the world. At this point, the present argument is in complete harmony with Horton’s. Horton puts the same point as follows:

One theory is judged better than another with explicit reference to its efficacy in explanation and prediction. And as these ends become more clearly defined, it gets increasingly evident that no other ends are compatible with them. People come to see that if ideas are to be used as efficient tools of explanation and prediction, they must not be allowed to be tools of anything else.

Demanding “a good argument” is inviting an existential reverie. There’s a sadistic undercurrent, not unlike that in the demand: “tell a good joke, make me laugh!”

All you can teach, really, and all you should try to teach, imho, are the forms of arguments. What are the necessary and sufficient elements? What drives a standard sequence of presentation? What are useful techniques (tactics)? Metaphors. Lists. Diagrams. Other literary tropes. Visual and auditory tricks. Dichotomies and analysis. Marshalling evidence. What makes the form of the argument clear and persuasive?

There are a great many forms in use. Teaching people how to write a one or two-page memo is useful in business life, and lends itself to a rapid cycle of trial and error exercises, within the bounds of a class meeting twice a week.

Writing instructions on how to accomplish some task in a popular computer application or on a popular website is another example of an exercise, which can be structured for a rapid, trial-and-error cycle of progressive improvement. (Why are instructions hard to read? Why are they hard to scan? What’s the difference between explaining the procedures, the strategy and the model?) This could be a lot like looking for lost keys.

A dramatic narrative story follows entirely different conventions, but, in its way, attempts to persuade.

Assigning students to transliterate someone else’s argument from one form of argument to another, as a whole or in parts, can be useful. What parts can be represented as a syllogism? Can part of an assigned essay be presented as a list or visual diagram? A cartoon or joke? News reporting? A narrative tale?

Certain forms of literary criticism are simple and easy, and directly address the tyranny of the blank page — which, from my memory of student days, can be a huge obstacle. Literary criticism starts from restating an argument and moves to appreciating it — these are very useful activities for someone trying to learning what goes into a “good argument”. It can start with simply finding the thesis in an essay. Some of the standard ways of bootstrapping criticism — the simplest forms of deconstruction, for example — could be a revelation for students, who are stumped for something to say, and don’t seem to have a clue about getting started in constructing an argument. And, they get to write, “wrong, wrong, wrong, . . .” someone else’s efforts, if they like.

I think hypnosis should be taught as a form of argument. Many common forms and techniques of argument are dictated by the susceptibility of humans to trance-induction and suggestion, and they can be observed in almost any sales pitch or television commercial. Key elements in the structure of many persuasive essays, dictated by the requirements of hypnotic processes, would be difficult to explain analytically as required by logical exposition alone.

Finally, there are the deep issues of why every argument seems to have “holes” and is never wholly persuasive. What’s it mean to agree? What motivates disagreement? What is a worldview? What’s good taste? What’s the nature of consensus? How is consensus achieved? What’s status and hierarchy got to do with it? What drives the dynamics of a committee? These are questions to which the insights of philosophy of science, social psychology, or sociology can be relevant. Just noticing that, is useful instruction.

“Demanding “a good argument” is inviting an existential reverie. There’s a sadistic undercurrent, not unlike that in the demand: “tell a good joke, make me laugh!””

I don’t think this is necessarily so but it might often be (as in the example at 115). When I foray into letting students write something for grade, I usually just ask for something empirically descriptive: here’s a graph, or a set of data (demographic, economic, environmental), describe what it tells us about reality. What does it imply about X and Y?

It’s actually hard enough for students to just describe something, many immediately think they need to make a point. And I think that is because that’s how they were conditioned: this is how you write to get good grades.

bianca steele 107, at 2:07 pm:

You should maybe read Dalva by Jim Harrison.
I won’t prejudice that with anything personal except to say I think it would make it through your winnowing filters unscathed.

;-)

I suspect that my bout of cognitive dissonance today comes from reading this post and comments thread concurrently with Glenn Greenwald’s new book. When I see something like this snipped from an NSA document: our new collection posture is collect it all, sniff it all, process it all, partner it all, exploit it all, I’m reminded of Bob Dylan’s I jes say “good luck.”

Never mind the poor student who’s tone-deaf to logical progression. Talk to the guys at NSA who come up with stuff like the above, and those who expect great things of them. Logic in the service of why seems a noble enterprise; logic in the service of how, particularly when its full gladness comes to pass, bids fair to become humankind’s worst ever nightmare.

I’m surprised nobody has referred to Nozick’s “optional stop rule”: “I do not stop the philosophical reasoning until it leads me where I want to go; then I stop.” ( Philosophical Explanations, p. 2).

Maybe everyone employs ‘makessense stop’, it’s just that some people have much higher standards for what makes sense than others.

Well, the illustration of narrative diffusion rather answers the question. But I started here:

David #133: “you’d think argumentative cognition is a basic skill”

Well you’d think that, but what if not?

If John Holbo can write, “It isn’t clear where the line is between story and argument – or even that there is one,” then perhaps we ought to look at the similarity of argument to story, for clues about basic skills.

We find that most people are not good storytellers.

I am a terrible storyteller and I admit it. I know several screenwriters (who put up with me regardless) and I would guess they think it is partly an innate gift, if they bothered to analyze it at all. Some people cannot even link a series of personal events into a coherent narrative, much less a compelling one, so this may not be an easy hurdle.

What would any of you make of the classic,
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
by Walker Evans and James Agee?

Much of it is photographs by Evans and minutely detailed descriptions by Agee.

It’s profoundly affecting, and I would venture, “persuasive”, though, in some important ways, it is little more than an artful version of an Aunt Flo story.

And, what do we make of retrospective questioning of its “truthfulness”?
http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/the-case-of-the-inappropriate-alarm-clock-part-3

Most people who are not “innately talented”, if such a thing exists, can nevertheless reach quite a high level of skill through careful training. (Innately talented means certain things are already in place that other people have to struggle to acquire.) But unless they have some sort of brain damage most people can acquire the same skills through practice. (Of course, they might rather not.)

Just off hand, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow might be of some help, since your students are mired in the “thinking fast stage.” Also, Style: Ten Lessons In Clarity And Grace by Joseph M. Williams has helped some people, according to testimonials I have heard.

bianca steele at 2:03 am:

Yes, I recommend that book to anyone who reads, but especially to someone who wants to get past pathological masking in literature.
I’m sketchy on attaching, to a book I value highly, whatever you think my writings here represent viz my literary aesthetic cred. Or sanity. Though you seem quite capable of ignoring any detrimental tarnishing effect.
So, yes.
Dalva‘s the single most moving portrait of a loved woman I’ve ever read. I’ve read a lot. If you’ve read Ondaatje, when he writes women he has a similar, in the sense of it’s a man writing about a woman… open-heartedness? Honesty? Humility and strength in the face of a mysterious and necessary thing?
For the artist the homage is in the accurate rendering of the portrait.
Maybe knowing some of Harrison’s bio would help in this instance, though it shouldn’t matter I think.
He lost his sister when he was a young man. That may inform the book, on a psychological level that’s deeper than artistic plotting, I don’t know, I don’t normally think about literature in these terms.
The book is essentially a portrait of a woman, but the love for womanhood generally in it is profound.
Harrison’s one of those not obscure, but not as honored as they should be, American artists the French are crazy about, the serious French I mean. The Parthenon ones.

1. The “Aunt Flo” type arguments are unacceptable because there’s a implicit assumption that the argument takes place in a large, anonymous, bureaucratic society:
(a) Your Aunt Flo might not be typical (implicit assumption: the population is question is sufficient large that this is plausible)
(b) You might know your Aunt Flo, and hence find the argument convincing, but the persons you are trying to convince probably don’t (implicit assumption: the population of people having the argument is sufficiently large that it is not the case that everyone knows everyone else).

In a context where these implicit assumptions don’t hold, “Aunt Flo” type arguments can be valid. That is, you can enumerate the specific individuals who will be affected by the decision you’re arguing about, and everyone knows the situation of these individuals. This is likely to be the case if the context of the argument is within a family, or some small-scale society.

Sure, it’s hard to derive universal principles this way, but you might only be concerned with the pragmatics of specific instances. Universal principles become more useful in large, “ration-bureaucratic” systems. (Or to philosophers)

2. Possibly, emotional reaction is a critical component of human decision making. Abstracting too much may lead us into poor decisions, because we become too distant from the emotional content. So, as a matter of rhetoric, telling a sufficiently specific story may be an effective way to explicate the relevant emotion to the person you’re trying to convince.

“The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic”.

e.g. The Diary of Anne Frank is at least partially persuasive the the Holocaust was a Bad Thing, notwithstanding statistical objections along the lines that Anne Frank’s experience was not necessarily typical and does not constitute a random sample.

Belle 145, am I missing the point? The point I thought I was addressing is the “Makessense stop” rule. John was reporting from his experience with giving students “short essays that are supposed to contain arguments”. I don’t know the details of his assignments but the assignment that I described – come up with the strongest arguments pro an con (at least three each) wouldn’t lend itself so easily to a “makessense stop” kind of thinking.

“Then the paper will melt. It is really pretty bad. And it’s not like the students are all stupid or anything like that! It’s just not something they know how to do yet.”

This is all very delicious. It seems there is a lot of pleasure to be gained from reporting how badly students can screw up. I don’t doubt a word of what you say. But what do we learn from it? Why are college students in a position that they just don’t “know how to do” this yet? I have attempted some partial answers. They may be wrong, maybe it’s just that students will always be students. Maybe we are just wasting our time with this discussion. Why don’t we talk about them students not getting percentages? I’m sure we could have a lot of fun with that.

150 is very good. Finally.

This is likely to be the case if the context of the argument is within a family, or some small-scale society.

This is where most effective argument and propaganda takes place. You hadlt ever, never, convince 300 people at once; usually you give one sympathetic person some tools to use in one-on-one or small group conversations.

Other good books Jacques Ellul Propaganda and Rick Falkvinge Swarmwise

In a Different Voice came out thirty years ago. Have we regressed?

Arguments are utilitarian, and the measure or their worth is in their effectiveness. The effectiveness of at least public discourse is measured in action. Obama and his supporters didn’t have to “convince” me of very much at all…all they had to do is get my vote. It is a liberal or late-capitalist delusion that we need their hearts and minds…if we have their bodies and wallets.

Bodies. Action. Both Ellul and Falkvinge agree, it is huge step going from getting someone to nod in their living room to getting activism, action, a desired activity. For that you need a lot more than an aesthetically pleasing rational formally correct bit of prose.

I’m also not assuming that the point is, here, some geeky people think argument and philosophy are all about syllogisms and nonsense like that, but John Holbo’s secret purpose in teaching philosophy is to teach eighteen year olds to ignore all of it and go straight to the heart of true Philosophy or something, and if it isn’t, to bad for John Holbo.

#150 – Aunt Flo arguments are only partially about anecdotes as a substitute for data. They are primarily about loyalty.

The story of Anne Frank is powerful not only because she was a single person, but because she was a person “like us” – a girl who could have been the daughter of any western European or American middle class family. She evokes the pull of loyalty that is the most powerful component in decision-making.

“What I get from the OP is that students aren’t able to make the step from describing their Aunt Flo to being explicit about what their argument is, which doesn’t surprise me. ”

This is exactly right. Most people only perceive or make that first step, or as little as needed for quick processing. When you hear untrained music students, they don’t hold a note to the end of the beat, they perform the first part of the piece accurately and then peter out at the end. Readers need read the first part of a word — the brain fills in the rest. I guess it is part of “fast thinking”

To inquire for clarification, of course :p. I’m not sure what the negative “I’m not iterations are supposed to underscore

p.s. I assume “should the minimum wage be raised?” was not one of his actual questions, just something he ginned up for the post. What I’m asking for is one of his actual questions.

bianca s. 155:

In the example as described by Haidt, there’s an implicit argument: everyone should be able to make ends meet on their wages, at least one woman exists who can’t make ends meet on her wages, therefore the minimum wage should be raised. What I get from the OP is that students aren’t able to make the step from describing their Aunt Flo to being explicit about what their argument is, which doesn’t surprise me.

There may indeed be students wanting to make this argument, but it’s hard to say, istm, precisely b.c it has remained implicit.

LFC, sure, but there are other arguments they could make, like the one I gave in 165. I don’t see the basis for assuming either that there’s no possible argument including a description of Aunt Flo’s case, or that what’s been said in the OP and comment thread includes an implicit theory about sympathy, loyalty, universality, economics, bureaucracy, or anything along those lines, which theory has to be accepted in order to pass Holbo’s class.

I think the OP did give an example of an argument: for or against Descartes’ dream theory in favor of skepticism, though that may have been for a different course.

Also second 163. I would point out two things:
(1) Understanding what an argument is is not something students should first hear about in college. They should have been taught that in 10th grade at the latest. If they haven’t, I can see that it is very difficult for a college philosophy prof to do much about that deficiency, just as it is really hard to get college students understand percentages when they haven’t learned that in middle school.
(2) Grading essays, even short ones (but long essays should be preferable) thoroughly and giving the kind of feedback that these students would need, and doing it over and over (because students can only learn from doing), is time consuming and that time is often, or usually, lacking.

Finally, I don’t think what we are talking about is just a failure of individual students. There’s a whole culture out there that doesn’t appreciate thoughtful reasoning all that much. Would anybody disagree with that observation?

The student has a big mental box, labelled “ideas that I identify with”. When you ask them for an argument for an idea that is in that box, they pull out a similar idea and give that to you. When you ask them for their strongest argument, they select the similar idea that they like the most.

When you exasperatedly tell them, no, no, that’s not what I want, now instead try to give me a refutation of this idea – they construct a big mental box labelled “ideas that I reject identification with”, again pull out an idea most tangential to the topical idea, and give that to you. When you ask for their strongest refutation, they select the similar idea that they despise the most.

Now, tearing your hair out, you tell them that they have to actually perform gosh-dang argument upon weighing these beliefs. So the now confused student looks at one hand and sees a favourite idea, looks at the other and sees a hated idea, and triumphantly informs you that as a result of Logicâ„¢, they have decided that the former belongs in the Ideas I Identify With box and the other doesn’t.

(to be clear, I don’t have an instrument that can look into student minds. The account I give in @172 is a model for why students give incomprehensible ‘arguments’, which accounts for both the makessense stopping and the Rashomon dueling – the problem is not, as as the ‘makesense stop’ label implies, a defectively hasty stopping rule, but instead an inappropriate mental classification of ideas. Not a universally wrong understanding – in contexts of small-group persuasion, it is the appropriate and most efficient/effective communication mode – but it’s inappropriate for a term paper)

“Why not? You’re their enemy.”

Tell me again why I am arguing with my enemy? I don’t read my enemy and barely acknowledge their existence.

Is this some sort of aesthetic contest to impress sympathetic third-parties, captive students or blog-readers? “Great topic sentence there, Holbo, nifty alloisis that followed. I judge 6.5.”

Possibly better to find an emotional connection with the sympathetic third party:”You went to school with Aunt Flo, didn’t you? Do you want to say in front of these people that she’s lazy?”

This judging of the tools of rhetoric and politics on aesthetic grounds is why Republicans think liberals are effete and why they usually win.

#173

None of your “objective” objections invalidate the initial statement – unless you want people to starve or something.

J Thomas @ 11:45 pm

There are at least two kinds of Republicans, and one kind does win almost all political struggles they care about. The other kind, not so much. It is worth distinguishing between them, if only to know who is paying for the clown show and why.

John’s NUS students are young elite Singaporeans, though, who’ve generally been put through a wringer of English-language courses. Which perhaps don’t teach critical thinking, but do put a high premium on being able to generate exposition from different jigsaw pieces in a hurry – toward the opinions which can be efficiently expressed in three hours, not toward the student’s own thoughts.

TM bemoaned the diminished role of essay-type questions, but the A-level used in Singapore still has a General Paper.

As acculturation goes, you’d get humanities undergrads who are very good at looking up what answers they are supposed to give – what scholars to cite, memorized descriptions of the contesting views – but being less able to navigate questions without outside the territory of the readings. They’d be able to juggle arguments, though; they need to be able to do so on command, under time pressure, with the consideration of producing a coherent result taking priority over any personal inclinations. If anything, the flaw should be too little personal reasoning rather than too much.

I don’t dispute the communitarian values, but I note the tendency for the Singaporean state to prescribe its hyper-pragmatist rhetoric upon the syllabus, at least within 6th form and college economics – whilst I didn’t go to college there, I’ve seen some of it second-hand. Not sure how that would play in philosophy, but it’s not a good place for Aunt Flos.

> When people are given difficult questions to think about — for example, whether the minimum wage should be raised

IMO that’s a REALLY hard question to seek a well-argued answer for. Is it silly
to suggest you should start with easier questions?

For myself, I can imagine myself arguing a view on the likely consequences of raising the minimum wage (will unemployment rise? If so, significantly? What will the cost to consumers be, and for which products? And so forth). I can use economics, reason, appeal to evidence, prior research, natural experiments; there’s lots of good stuff. A relatively easy question. I probably will not invoke Aunt Flo, or if so I will explain in detail why it’s relevant.

But to argue next, whether this _should_ happen or not. Different request. Say we both agree perhaps that something like X people will benefit, although Y people will lose employment entirely, and the average consumer will pay $Z extra per year. Now I argue, contra you, that this is a good tradeoff (you think Y is way too high but would be happy if it were a tenth as much). This is really tough to do well. I might invoke Aunt Flo, and though it won’t make my argument strong it would be for a different purpose (“yes, you are rightly concerned about all the new unemployed, but perhaps you are underweighting how truly transformational a few extra dollars/hour can be to those who do keep working; here’s an example that might help you see why a calibrate this benefit more highly than you do”). But overall, this question unlike the first
is simply much, much, harder if you want not an explanation of one’s preference but an actual argument for it.

I’m concerned more broadly about the future utility/applicability of what he’s teaching, and of the perverted uses to which it’s already been put in a world much changed from the one in which we hitherto expected its hegemony to be less and less challenged over time.

Well, sure, argument can be put to perverse uses. (I’m inclined to say, what can’t be? but that’s a somewhat dumb and clichéd thing to say, so I won’t.) I suppose you could be thinking something like: in our circumstances, all argument is sophistry, and the better the argument, the cleverer the sophistry. But I don’t see why I should think that. And I don’t see why I should think that argument is especially liable to be put to nefarious uses, in ways that other modes of discourse aren’t. In fact, naïve as it may be, and demuring to put up anything like a robust argument for argument (so to speak), I do think that’s there’s genuine value in teaching that argument needn’t in fact be sophistry.

One more thing, about Aunt Flo (of course). Rereading the quoted passage—and just that—there is something a bit bizarre about the way Haidt seems to be using that example. So: suppose this is an Intro Phil class where students haven’t been exposed to philosophical arguments before. You give them the minimum wage topic. And one of them comes up with the Aunt Flo example and… stops. Ok, it’s not an argument. But the thing is: it’s a really fucking good beginning for an argument.

If they can’t get past this point, then that’s a different thing, but in the quoted passage it’s presented like the first stop. And I really don’t see how you could complain about that in the context of an intro class.

*Is* there a good argument for utilitarianism? It is not obvious to me there is, or even what such an argument might look like, other than some more sophisticated variation of, “It looks okay to me.”

“If we say that we will work for what’s good for everybody then we can attract support easier. ” Only if other people are naive. In general what you’ve written is full of hand-waving assertions and invalid implications. (How does trying one alternative provide a general argument? Surely cooperation doesn’t always leads to better outcomes. Cooperation leads to armies and war, for instance.) I could easily say also, “Snow is black. If snow is back, then utilitarianism. Therefore utilitarianism.”

“How does trying one alternative provide a general argument?”

It doesn’t, but it provides a template to test other alternatives against. The general argument is that people who cooperate with each other can compete better against others who cooperate less, and that utilitarianism is a potentially effective approach to encourage cooperation.

“Surely cooperation doesn’t always leads to better outcomes. Cooperation leads to armies and war, for instance.”

Sure, and armies that cooperate better are more likely to win. Winning is a better outcome than losing, and a better outcome than being trampled by armies that consider you part of the environment they can use to help them win.

It’s also a good approach toward ending a war. If you claim that you care about the welfare of your enemy he is more likely to enter negotiations, and if your terms tend to convince him of that he is more likely to agree to peace rather than fight until he has nothing left and must accept unconditional surrender. Many people believe that a ending a war with less death and destruction is good, although some feel that if the eenemy doesn’t feel thoroughly defeated he’s more likely to make you do it again, and others feel that it’s safer to destroy your enemies utterly.

I don’t claim that there’s nothing better than utilitarianism. I haven’t thought of everything yet. But you asked for a good argument in its favor, and this is an argument that it is better than some alternatives, for people who value their own well-being.

If you instead believe that there is a god who will reward you proportional to your suffering while you kill as many human beings as possible, then this argument is not for you.

John Holbo @ 197

:-) How about teaching them to be more bob mcmanus-like one day, and more Keith Alexander-like the next? (If, of course, you’re at all interested in fitting them for the savagery of the world outside the classroom.)

But I take your point. We’re making mountains out of your molehill. It’s just that we’re having so much fun doing it, and it’s not as though you didn’t know we would, amirite?

Did you remember to tell them that an argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition?

No you didn’t.

This, I would argue assert, is how most arguments proceed when more is at stake than clarity of the sort John’s form of argumentation produces, and facility with his form may not be a prerequisite to effective use of the rest.

Oh, I see. I just disagree with you. Or at least, I think learning argument, in the philosophers’ sense, can very well help you make more effective use of other rhetorical techniques, or techniques of persuasion, or whatever. I actually thought that was the point you were making — that learning argument teaches one to be clever without teaching one virtue (to put it as Aristotle might), that in effect it teaches you to become a sophist (at least in current circumstances).

I don’t agree with this, but I can see how it would go. It strikes me as far less plausible that learning argument wouldn’t help you with the rest. Admittedly, you said it needn’t be necessary, and maybe that’s true, but it’s surely quite helpful.

I agree with all of that, I think. Yes, the ability to reason in certain abstract ways shouldn’t be “the sine qua non requirement” of participation in public policy debates. I do think it should be a requirement (ideally). There should be other requirements, say good faith, a sense of sympathy, etc. (again, ideally).

And anecdotes, too. But not only.

godoggo 05.16.14 at 5:57 pm @ 207 —
‘Looking at the data’, when the data is Aunt Flo, means using direct observation. ‘Looking at the data’, when the data is statistics, means having faith in usually remote institutions, whose work is likely to be unverifiable and which may be directed by persons with very different class, organizational, and other interests than the looker. (The folk express this in proverbial form: ‘Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.’)

“Live” in a country, I mean. But I do love it / love in it, because I was born here, my loved ones live here, and so on. But sometimes things are just wrong, and you can’t expect people to keep making the arguments.

WT @ 195

There’s a very rich adversarial context in those two short snippets, which most of us can follow even though almost none of it is explicit. Nearly all of John’s rules are being violated, it seems to me, but I don’t think any third party from the same cultural background would miss any of the implications.

Except an “argument” is supposed to be impersonal. It shouldn’t matter who is making it. But the tete-a-tete you reference is all about the personalities (or at least mcmanus’s) and the baggage associate with such. That is what made that exchange interesting. Broken windows and guillotines are just icing on the cake.

js. @ 204

I actually thought that was the point you were making — that learning argument teaches one to be clever without teaching one virtue (to put it as Aristotle might), that in effect it teaches you to become a sophist (at least in current circumstances).

That was, in fact, Socrates’ gig.

Are we damned twixt the poles of excessively coarse & excessively fine distinctions?!

William,

I think you are mixing things up that don’t belong together. At 216 I was merely trying to show where I thought you were talking about something different than the art of constructing a rational, fact-based argument which is what I take John Holbo to be talking about.

You can mark me down as believing in rational discourse. And, I think you’re completely mistaken to make claims like,

What you can’t or won’t see is that the purity of argument you say we’re supposed to treasure is every bit as likely to give us War Is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, and Freedom Is Slavery. Objective journalism, its bastard child, can, when shorn of its pretension, give us Judith Miller at the Times, and all Dick Cheney all the time on the talk shows.

Yes, I like to remind folks that people like bob mcmanus are advocates of class-based violence.

No, rational discourse is not what gets us Judith Miller, etc. That’s more than a little absurd.

mattski @ 220

This is what you’re missing, and bob mcmanus gets in spades: If you control the premise, you control the argument. If you have the power to mandate a list of acceptable premises, then at very least you give argument a bad name. Also, selecting premises is of necessity a mysterious process, which tends to make argument in the philosophical sense deceptively linear. Scientists don’t speak of the importance of intuition only when they loosen their ties, and poets don’t employ metaphor for merely frivolous reasons. Both are aiming at a certain density in the process of ratiocination-in-general which pure logic avoids whenever possible — arguably for very good reasons, but certainly not all-embracing ones.

It would be nice to have arguments about the legacy of Stuart Hall or the implications of Modi’s victory or….why doesn’t CT consider diversifying its blog roll?

221

Bruce, if the meaning or the power of an argument can change as a result of the identity of the person presenting it wouldn’t that say something rather less than complimentary about the argument??

Or is reason a matter of popularity?

William,

If you control the premise, you control the argument. If you have the power to mandate a list of acceptable premises, then at very least you give argument a bad name.

I find this puzzling. Who mentioned “controlling premises?” And if some people have the de facto power to control premises–which undoubtedly some do–does that mean that in doing so they are engaging in ‘rational argument?’

This post is about what distinguishes a rational argument from a prejudice, or a ‘prior belief.’ I didn’t notice anyone on this thread advancing the idea that the way to practice reason is to refer to facts, but only certain kinds of facts. So, ISTM you have this discussion confused with a different discussion, one about propaganda.

mattski @ 228

Yes, the intent of the post is clear enough. What’s in contention is that rational argument is the sole key to understanding what’s eternally puzzling about reality. Being structurally indistinguishable from certain forms of propaganda is one of its defects, to be sure, but not in my view its most significant one. I don’t worry as much about sophistry, in other words, as I do about self-deception.

All of which is neither here nor there to you, nor — as you point out, and I have already conceded above — to the intent of the original post. John doesn’t really deserve to be raked over the coals for something outside the scope of that intent, but neither should bob mcmanus be accused by interested parties — you again — of crimes he hasn’t committed.

“This post is about what distinguishes a rational argument from a prejudice, or a ‘prior belief.’”

But rational arguments are always based on prior beliefs. “Nothing comes from nothing.” If you have no beliefs to base an argument on, then you have no argument.

Rational argument involves sorting out the prior beliefs so they fit together.

So you can point out that somebody else’s argument has a flaw and is therefore false. “Over here, you assume A to get your conclusion. But in this other place, you assume ~A to get the conclusion you want. But they can’t both be true, so at least one of your conclusions does not follow.”

But of course, they can explain that you missed the point. “Yes, over here I assume A. But the second place, I really assume A and M with the result ~A’. Both are true, I know it in my heart, and they do not contradict.”

So for example, a person can assert that private business is always good and government is always bad, but also assert that we need a strong government-run military.

Isn’t this a contradiction? Wouldn’t we be better off to hire many efficient mercenary outfits to do all our fighting for us, and allow free competition when they bid for the job, instead of having a wasteful, inefficient, inherently-bad US Army and US Navy?

But it doesn’t have to be a contradiction. When you buy from a private corporation, you don’t usually expect to be their only customer. And you don’t expect them to ever sell to you at a loss. A mercenary regiment that changed sides whenever the opponent offered more money, and that stopped selling their services whenever the war got hard, would not fit our needs. But that is the efficient approach for them. For an army, we need men who will be loyal to the nation, who will sacrifice themselves if necessary, who will follow their orders even if it leads to certain death. You simply can’t expect that from private businesses. We must have inefficient wasteful armies to protect us from foreign inefficient wasteful armies. No contradictions.

But we can have good, efficient private businesses that create weapons and sell them to our government and also to allies and neutrals and potential enemies. That’s good, where government armories that try to make their own weapons are inherently bad.

Whenever you find a contradiction in somebody else’s argument, they can always find finer distinctions to eliminate the contradiction.

Rational thinking is a tool to help us sort out our prior beliefs. That’s all. [cue video of Jack Sparrow standing on the rocky shore and his ship has sailed without him. “They done what’s right by them. Can’t expect more than that.”]

Rakesh Bhandari @224
I think you mean diversifying or expanding its roster of contributors. (The blog roll is the thing on the sidebar headed, in this case, ‘Lumber Room’.)

William @ 230

What’s in contention is that rational argument is the sole key to understanding what’s eternally puzzling about reality.

No. I don’t know where you got this, but you didn’t get it from me. Really.

but neither should bob mcmanus be accused by interested parties — you again — of crimes he hasn’t committed.

I accused him of advocating class based violence. Something he does openly and repeatedly.

You know, Harold has a good point about the role of trust when it comes to persuasion. Over time we get to know people. Over time we build up trust in certain people we find persuasive. So we do tend to see arguments differently depending on who they are coming from. But it is important to bear in mind that this is not a purely rational thing to do. Neither is it completely irrational, since some people clearly are more trustworthy than others. But a) not everyone has the same capacity for weighing facts in a disinterested manner and b) when a reasonable person ‘trusts’ an argument from a familiar and sympathetic source, the act of trusting is provisional, not final.

Example: I trust Krugman. I give his arguments the benefit of the doubt. But that doesn’t mean I suspend critical judgement on anything he writes. What it means is most of what I get from him goes into the “probably sound” folder in my mind. It tends to stay there until someone else provides a superior argument for why Krugman was wrong in such and such a case. So, trust plays a role, but mostly just a facilitating role.

“There is something a little ironic about the liberal use of sweeping generalizations in a thread about constructing rational arguments.”

Mattski, I gave examples of sweeping generalizations to make a point.

But then I also made sweeping generalizations of my own. Do you have examples where my own sweeping generalizations fail to fit your experience?

“But rational arguments are always based on prior beliefs.”

You can also make rational arguments based on hypothetical assumptions that you do not believe at all. But I doubt you will claim much truth for the results.

“Rational argument involves sorting out the prior beliefs so they fit together.”

“Whenever you find a contradiction in somebody else’s argument, they can always find finer distinctions to eliminate the contradiction.”

I guess some people are not skilled at that and might admit a contradiction rather than patch their argument.

Would you argue that my generalizations are in general wrong?

Mmm…that last was a right mess, wonnit? Fyslexic dingers being the universal sign to scuttle away while you still can, let me just apologize for bollixing your thread and go do something useful for a change.

mattski @ 226:

if the meaning or the power of an argument can change as a result of the identity of the person presenting it wouldn’t that say something rather less than complimentary about the argument??

The Gettysburg Address was a powerful argument for the meaning and purpose of the American Civil War in part because the man making the argument was President.

Arguments are made by people in society: advocates and opponents, speakers and listeners, writers and readers. We shouldn’t imagine arguments are disembodied or de-socialized, if we are trying to make arguments of our own.

There’s something to the proposition that most of the arguments we witness are disembodied in the sense that they are recorded and replayed, scripted performances by professionals. That isn’t complimentary to the argument; it’s a short form way of noting that we are all exposed to massive amounts of propaganda. Another commenter mentioned Bernays, the father of public relations.

That we are passive consumers of so much performative propaganda may be a factor in the difficulty a minority of students have, in “getting” what it means to make an argument. If so, it may be a more direct analogy to the sonata problem than the OP indicated. If you are always eating in restaurants, you don’t learn to cook by eating, and you may have very odd and shallow notions about how food is prepared and certain effects of kitchen chemistry are achieved.

But, I don’t think you were making a point about propaganda. In subsequent comments, you defended the value of “rational” argument, but it’s not clear to me what work you want “rational” to do for you; rather more work than “rational” is capable of doing, is what I’m thinking. I hope you are not identifying “argument” with proving theorems in geometry or algebra, by invoking “rational” as a standard. Beyond that, it is not clear to me what your argument is. (ironic, no?)

J Thomas,

But rational arguments are always based on prior beliefs.

As a rule, sweeping statements like this raise red flags. Did the person who wrote this think hard about it? Did they look for exceptions, either actual or possible? ISTM this generalization is shaky, to say the least. … I guess I want to ask you why you think it is necessary to make a claim like this?

To my way of thinking the process of rationality is the discipline of looking for and acknowledging facts. An important aspect of this discipline is learning to distinguish facts from desires. Another important aspect of reason is keeping one’s perspective on language. Because it is easy and seductive to move from language which is relatively objective and specific to language which is increasingly abstract and general. And as you get more general and more abstract with your terms you–quickly–enter a twilight zone where the claims you’re making are neither falsifiable nor useful.

Rational thinking is a tool to help us sort out our prior beliefs. That’s all.

This is murky at best. You make it sound as though we have only our “prior beliefs” to choose from! Rational thinking, to me, is how I deliver myself from ignorance. It is how I attempt to have accurate beliefs about the world. In the words of Thomas Huxley, “to sit down as a child before the fact.”

So for example, a person can assert that private business is always good and government is always bad, but also assert that we need a strong government-run military.

If a person wants to argue that private enterprise is always good and government is always bad, then let that person present an argument to that effect, and let us judge the merits of his/her presentation. Let’s see the “facts” assembled to support the claim. Let’s see the response when we present counter-arguments. This is called ‘rational debate’. Do you know a better way to get closer to the truth?

Belle Waring @ 241

I volunteer to return to my TA position exclusively for the “make students more like mcmanus-sensei” semester. This is going to be great.

Totally different orders of creative perversity. More or less gives the lie to my all magisteria are overlapping. Still, it’s a class I wouldn’t mind sitting in on, if only way at the back of the room, with dark sunglasses on, and a Groucho mustache.

“To my way of thinking the process of rationality is the discipline of looking for and acknowledging facts.”

To my way of thinking, once you believe you have found a fact, then you have a belief that you can combine with other beliefs to argue for conclusions. You organize combinations of things you believe are facts to make rational arguments.

“Rational thinking, to me, is how I deliver myself from ignorance. It is how I attempt to have accurate beliefs about the world.”

If you notice that a collection of facts you believe in are not compatible with some of your other beliefs, you can use rational thinking to discard some beliefs so that you wind up with beliefs that are more compatible.

Or you might find ways to re-interpret some of your facts, or to isolate them. So for example, a person who is a fundamentalist christian and who also believes in evolution, can decide that God made the world and the way that God made the plants and animals was by evolution. The seven days of creation then do not mean days like rotations of the earth. Or he can decide that the story of the Creation is literally true, but the Devil provided all our fossil evidence to trick us. Evolution that happens in the lab and in the wild in real-time, things like bacteria evolving resistance to antibiotics, is something that happens but that does not reflect the history. Or he can decide that science and religion belong in different compartments and he can believe both in their own context without having to worry about conflicts. If physicists can do that within science, believing in waves sometimes and particles other times whichever is more convenient, why can’t he do that too? There are lots of rational ways to deal with conflicting beliefs, and rationality does not usually constrain us to just one answer.

“If a person wants to argue that private enterprise is always good and government is always bad, then let that person present an argument to that effect, and let us judge the merits of his/her presentation.”

Sure, if he wants to argue about that. But if he has accepted it as a universal fact, something he believes is always true, then he would not think to argue that it’s true.

If you challenge him on that, he might remember various arguments he has heard. There is the argument from complexity. To make and distribute a pencil requires many millions of decisions, which cannot possibly be made by central planning. But private enterprises manage it without anyone knowing how it’s done, somehow they automaticly produce the right amount of pencils at the cheapest possible cost, better than any possible alternative system.

Then there’s the argument from unintended consequences. When people do things we always get results we didn’t intend. People who think they have good intentions always create misery, while people who greedily try to succeed in business result in the best possible outcomes for everybody. That’s just how it comes out. There are lots of examples, and no examples where good intentions get only good results.

Etc. You will not be impressed by such arguments because you start from different beliefs. That’s how it goes with rational argument, when the arguments are in fact rational then people agree only if they agree with the assumptions the rational arguments are built on.

“This is called ‘rational debate’. Do you know a better way to get closer to the truth?”

My preferred approach is to look for reproducible events, and then make up at least two ideas about what’s happening (but better more than two, as many as I can handle). Then come up with tests that ought to show one or more of the ideas is wrong, and see what happens. Throw out the ideas that cannot be right, and make more new ideas that fit the known facts, making sure to always have at least two. Continue this process until I die with at least two alternatives still available.

People who have settled on one single idea that’s supposed to fit the facts, suffer from a lack of imagination. They are likely to think they know the truth. And so they become a menace.

Mattski @245
Have you ever actually heard of pragmatics or speech-act theory?

Harold, I believe I’m talking about the same sort of rational arguments everybody else is.

What people call rational arguments is not usually much involved in how people choose the beliefs they base other beliefs on.

Here is an example. A young man finds a technique that reliably gets him two to four new women to have sex with each week. (Depending on how many women he is actually up to having sex with each week. He may say he has a new one every night, but more likely it’s two to four a week.) He will probably have ideas about why it works. And he will probably believe that all women are like the ones he seduces. He will believe that his “success” is evidence that his theories are correct.

But it’s easy for me to believe that other theories could explain his results just as well. If you would, for example, choose women randomly out of a 3-years-old high-school yearbook and challenge him to seduce them, there’s a strong chance that he would not do as well. He almost certainly has ways — conscious and unconscious — that predispose him to choose women who are compatible with his methods. My own experience tells me that women vary in most ways and are not all alike at all.

Similarly, he has ideas why his methods work. For example, he might believe that women unconsciously want to be dominated, and that they fall for that. But maybe some of the women who sleep with him are looking for sex but definitely do not want a relationship at the moment, and by choosing an obvious asshole they prevent the temptation that they might agree to a second date. There are lots of ways it could go. He knows what to do (with the women he has screened) but he probably doesn’t know why.

Our experience is highly biased, and that’s a good thing. We have learned how to deal with our own specific environments. They are not representative of the whole. We know how to get predictable results in some specific circumstances and our theories about how it happens at least don’t keep us from doing the things that get those results, and maybe help us to do the right things to get our results. But they likely don’t have a lot of truth.

And the things people call “rational argument”, where do those fit in? Do they teach us to carefully observe the biases in our observations? Do they teach us how to assign good controls for our experiments? How to do careful statistics? No, they’re mostly about a particular formal way to argue with other people about what it all means. Kind of like Queensbury rules for boxing.

My preferred approach is to look for reproducible events, and then make up at least two ideas about what’s happening (but better more than two, as many as I can handle). Then come up with tests that ought to show one or more of the ideas is wrong, and see what happens. Throw out the ideas that cannot be right, and make more new ideas that fit the known facts, making sure to always have at least two. Continue this process until I die with at least two alternatives still available.

This process is still dependent on “rational thinking” as you’ve defined it, because of that key phrase “Throw out the ideas that cannot be right”. That step is not sufficient for good decision making, but it is necessary.

But the rest of the process you describe isn’t sufficient either. That process doesn’t prevent you from having an internal Alan Colmes in your mental dialogue, subconsciously making weak arguments to bolster the alternative view, the one that you really want to believe. Or it could turn you in to David Broder, having two preset views, each of which must be as true as the other.

I don’t actually consider it likely that you’ll succumb to either of these fates–you seem like a reasonable person. There is still a missing step–that of what we are to do when we come across two different beliefs or observations that conflict with each other. None of us has a completely worked out and successful theory for accomplishing that–if someone did, they could implement it on a machine and replace human reasoning, which no one seems to have done yet. But most of us have the intuition that some ways of doing this are better–more reliable, more honest–than others.

@255:

You might want to look up Robert Brandom on “deontic score-keeping”.

Congrats. You have made a reasoned argument. (I think.)

J Thomas @ 257

“Mostly observations are just observations, they are the raw material you work with and they don’t usually conflict — our ideas about them conflict but the observations are just themselves. If you measure a liquid’s temperature and it’s 39 degrees, and a minute later it’s 41 and then another minute later it’s 39 again, those are just your observations. You can make conflicting explanations how that’s possible, but the observations aren’t in conflict.”

I could observe the water, and say it was “warm” and you could observe the same water, and term it, “tepid”. Those would be subjective evaluations, probably incorporating our individual expectations and needs. Maybe I’m preparing a bath, and you’re preparing tea. Maybe, I’ve been burned by hot water. Our individual histories and needs color how we see things, name them, feel about them.

There’s a whole social construction involved in sticking a thermometer in the water and reading off a conventional measurement, instead of just communicating our subjective evaluations and impressions. We “objectify” things that way, to facilitate social cooperation and communication. For some purposes, constructing an “objective” measurement or set of terms is a strategy for getting to agreement. People can let go of subjective feelings and “agree” on a shared reality, denominated in objective measurements. For other purposes, the subjective experience matters, and should matter. It doesn’t become “irrational” to eschew irrelevant metrics, when they are, in fact, irrelevant.

As to what observations we retain, and which we reject or discard — well, that isn’t “objective” measurement operating, that’s likely to be a very strong confirmation bias or social conformity. Other people agree on certain conventions — but they’re not measurement conventions, they’re priors and terms of reference, and assumptions about what’s good or pure or right — and they are pretty much immune to the stream of facts and experience, because of the randomness of the stream of facts and experience. No single flip of the coin or turn of the roulette wheel indicates whether the coin or the roulette wheel is fair or biased.

#259

“…either you’re in a world in which reason works, therefore your wrong beliefs will eventually be corrected, or you’re in a world where reason doesn’t work, in which case you can’t be blamed for wrong beliefs.”

If I come up with a hypothesis which fits the data I have, and new data shows it’s wrong, I refuse to accept blame for doing that. I would prefer to come up with two hypotheses which both fit the data I have, and if one or both of them later get falsified I refuse to accept blame for that, also.

However, people might blame me for using reason whether or not it later turns out that reason will work on average or will fail. People are quite capable of blaming other people for being right, if they think someone is right.

It isn’t supposed to make sense.

“But don’t we have to play by some approximation of what we’ve called “Queensbury” rules for this process to work?”

Sure. It only works for the people who go to the effort of making it work. Other people do things other ways.

I once dated a woman who sincerely believed in astrology. She asked my birth data so she could compute a horoscope to decide whether she wanted to be with me. I didn’t know what hour I was born and I called my parents. They laughed and said they couldn’t remember. But it might have been during the night shift, and they weren’t sure which day wound up getting put on the birth certificate. She was upset by that. She started computing horoscopes for each hour of the day, and then she’d ask me leading questions. “When you were in high school were you like a badass from Compton?” “Did your mother have a crisis and die or almost die the summer when you were 10?” Her intention was to see which horoscope had already come true to find my hour of birth. She really believed in it. She wound up picking a horoscope that said I had bad intentions and evil magic and she ran. I can’t say I was entirely disappointed. Life with her was more than a little surreal.

A couple of years later my parents laughed about births. The doctor induced labor at 10 AM for my youngest sibling, because he said he was up at 3 AM for every other delivery and he wasn’t going to do that again. They were quite reasonably lying when they said they didn’t know. They still insisted they didn’t know whether it was 3 AM the day the birth certificate claimed I was born, or 3 AM the next day. So if I met another woman like that I still wouldn’t be able to tell her.

@262,

Okay, sure, you can be blamed, but not honestly or reasonably blamed. In order to honestly blame me for thinking that reason would work, you have to claim that I should have known better–that whatever my starting prior beliefs where, the internal contradictions should have led me to realize that there was a better alternative to reason (otherwise, it wasn’t my fault, it was just my bad luck to be born with the wrong prior beliefs.) But if that were the case, then we would say that reason works. In other words, to honestly criticize me for believing in reason, you have to assume that I’m right about reason.

Sure, you can blame me just for having the wrong prior beliefs, but when pushed people aren’t usually willing to assent to this as a general rule. We only convict someone of involuntary manslaughter if we can show that they should have known better.

Sure. It only works for the people who go to the effort of making it work. Other people do things other ways.

Sure, we don’t always go to the effort of being honest. When failing to make that effort hurts other people (something that almost all of us are guilty of at some time or another), that’s a moral failing on our part.

Vaccine opponents can be immune to education.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/09/upshot/vaccine-opponents-can-be-immune-to-education.html?ref=health

Excerpt: Surprising as this may seem, our finding is consistent with a great deal of research on how people react to their beliefs being challenged. People frequently resist information that contradicts their views, such as corrective information— for example, by bringing to mind reasons to maintain their belief — and in some cases actually end up believing it more strongly as a result.

our results show that other types of messages used by public health agencies — information about disease risks, a dramatic narrative and images of sick children — were also ineffective.

****
These findings, which were recently published in the journal Pediatrics, suggest some caution is necessary among those proposing parental educational mandates, which were recently enacted in Oregon.

The sorts of beliefs that contribute to high vaccine exemption rates in some states aren’t necessarily about facts at all and can’t be easily legislated away.

A more promising approach would require parents to consult with their health care provider, as the Oregon law also allows them to do. Parents name their children’s doctor as their most trusted source of vaccine information. That trust might allow doctors to do what evidence alone cannot: persuade parents to protect their children as well as yours and mine.

[I think that knowing someone who had actually had had small pox (like my step-father) or had died of diphtheria or been crippled by polio, might make one more inclined to accept vaccination against these diseases. There is no education like first-hand experience. When things are far away in time or distance (or size) we are less likely to care about them or even to think they are real. — Harold]

Harold @ 266

Why do you suppose no one studies the elites, who squander their credibility?

“To my way of thinking, once you believe you have found a fact, then you have a belief that you can combine with other beliefs to argue for conclusions. You organize combinations of things you believe are facts to make rational arguments.”

Aren’t you making a sort of semantic play on fact v belief?

Yes. Belief is primary.

Sure, I ‘believe’ in my ‘facts.’ But belief isn’t sufficient. I have to be able to show evidence for my facts.

No, you don’t have to. Many people can’t. And standards of evidence vary every which way.

You show your evidence, I show mine. Then we, and any other interested parties, judge the evidence.

You make it sound so — clinical. Like we’re both supposed to display our naked evidence to any interested parties and they will judge.

Over time, groups who ignore good evidence and cling to prior beliefs no matter how unsupported will be seen as unreasonable by free-thinking people, who also, no coincidence, will tend to be higher functioning.

It doesn’t take very long. Most people immediately decide that anybody who disagrees with them is being unreasonable. Some of us are willing to listen to others and perhaps see that by their own lights they are not so unreasonable after all.

I think you should make a specific example here. And I don’t think your fundamentalist Christian who believes in evolution is a satisfactory example. Why? Because there isn’t any evidence for the god of the Bible. Or none that I know of.

See, you have pre-judged the issue. In your opinion, people should not believe anything until they have “facts” which justify their beliefs in your opinion. But Christians have different values. They think it’s valuable to believe in the word of God. Jesus said if you have faith like a mustard seed you can move mountains. Jesus worked miracles — for those who had faith, who believed.

You value skepticism — to disbelieve everything until it is proven to your satisfaction. They value faith. Which is better? I don’t know. Herodotus said not to judge a man’s life until he is dead. I kind of approve of that.

So we haven’t risen to the level of facts, or reasonably close questions of facts.

No, and in blog comments we are unlikely to rise to that level. Nor will we in political debates where candidates talk for two minutes at a time.

I don’t think we got to that level in my qualifying exams. I remember it like it was yesterday. One of the committee members was this guy from india who had an upper-class british accent. A couple of weeks before the exam he told a racist joke and expected me to laugh, and I stood there embarrassed, wondering what to do. Then during the meeting I had just answered a question about plasmid transfer, and he asked me, what about transfer mediated by KF1! And he sat back like he had totally refuted me. I thought fast because KF1 did not mediate transfer at all, and how could I say that without making him look like a total idiot? He could cause me a whole lot of trouble. He would hold a grudge. I couldn’t see any way to say it. And was there some chance he was right, something recent I’d never heard of? But it would be big news, I’d have heard of it. How could I say it? After a significant number of seconds he smirked and asked something else. At 90 minutes they called an intermission. The Indian guy cornered me in the hall and repeated the same racist joke word for word and waited for me to laugh. I giggled nervously. He nodded and moved on. My advisor came to me. “Why didn’t you tell Singh that KF1 doesn’t mediate transfer at all? He would have looked like a complete idiot.”

Also when conservative parties get elected by lying and talking nonsense, it makes it harder for other parties not to do the same I think. So the whole political context begins to deteriorate.

I said, Sure, I ‘believe’ in my ‘facts.’ But belief isn’t sufficient. I have to be able to show evidence for my facts.

J Thomas replied, No, you don’t have to. Many people can’t. And standards of evidence vary every which way.

I think we are talking about different things. In my world you don’t believe things without evidence. That is what is meant by ‘rational.’ The moment you make a claim based on stories people tell and completely lacking evidence you have passed into a realm where rationality doesn’t operate.

Anarcissie says I’m not skeptical of rationality. Skepticism IS rationality!! Show me evidence and I’ll grant you a hearing. If all you have is a lovely story… you don’t have much at all.

You know what really strikes me as ironic? I’ve been an advocate here for skepticism about excessive conceptualizing. I’ve been a proponent of the idea that we tend to think too much. And I firmly believe this is the case, and that many people have no clue as to how repetitive and obsessive their thoughts are. That’s why I’ve linked to videos by people like Eckhart Tolle. I believe in the scientific method, but that also extends to our subjective experience. Which is why going on a silent meditation retreat, for example, can be a transformative experience. When you come face to face with your repetitive thoughts you begin to take them a little less seriously.

I strongly recommend this to many of my ideologically inclined friends here.

Harold @ 269

[The article] was also about people resistant to rational argument. . . . As to why elites squander their credibility — I don’t know quite what you are getting at. I am not sure one can use elites interchangeably with expert opinion. An expert might be a very obscure person.

The article was premised on the idea that rational argument could be reliably equated to the prescriptions of authority. People resist authority, with regard to giving their children vaccines as mandated by law, and this is transmuted to people resist “rational argument”, and the article is about how best to get people to comply with authority. They find that the authority of the family physician is more trusted. (The author’s test instrument for resistance to “rational argument” was an article “debunking” the alleged association between vaccination and autism. You’d think he might conclude that there was something wrong with the rhetoric of the “debunking” article — that maybe it missed the target somehow, but, instead, he shows contempt for the audience.)

I think your anecdote about the woman, who was persuaded by her homeopathic physician, gets closer to the truth about resistance.

I’m troubled about the way “rational argument” is carelessly thrown around in this comment thread and generally. As in this argument, I think it’s often a deceptive stand-in for legitimate authority, particularly in arguments where the legitimacy of the authority ought to be in question.

Brendan Nyhan doesn’t present a value-neutral, analytic argument, with scientifically valid parameters, for vaccination in the N.Y. Times article you linked to. He talks, instead, about the achievements of Science in using vaccination to reduce or eliminate disease. His argument is that Science has earned authority by its achievements, and that authority should be believed, and he’s distressed when it isn’t.

I’m not saying that people would be open to, or able to process the science behind the decision to vaccinate. Frankly, I’m not sure that, if people were presented the science and they were able to understand it in scientific terms, that that would produce the necessary levels of social compliance for an effective vaccination program. The truth is that for the “rational” individual, opting out of vaccination is a superior strategy; social compliance is not. (I don’t know that this game-theoretic insight plays any part in popular resistance to vaccination — I’m just pointing out that openness to “rational argument” defined in an honest way would not necessarily result in social compliance. This is a clear indication that Brendan Nyhan isn’t defining “rational argument” in that particular honest way.) It’s just a general instance of the principle that a free-ride is a good choice for the individual and a bad choice for the society.

At best, a democratic society can openly explain and rationalize the decisions made by authority. They can show why these particular vaccines have been developed and chosen for distribution, and the precautions taken, and the monitoring programs in place, and the plans for revision of policy in light of experience, etc. But, they still have to use force to achieve social compliance. Bad news for libertarians, I guess.

Openness to “rational argument” per se helps in the case of vaccination only to the extent it enhances the legitimacy and credibility of authority. “Rational argument” doesn’t, by itself, enhance social compliance, and shouldn’t be expected to. (Remember the free rider problem.) “Rational argument” is not going to end, even ideally, in all cases with unanimous agreement about what is true. That’s a bad model of what a rational argument is or can do. A “rational argument” is not truth, nor is it authority; it may be in service to either. That’s why I was pressing against mattski’s sweeping determination to detach “rational argument” from people and society, as if a rational argument could float among the clouds of Kantian categories.

People can argue that vaccines are a good thing, because of the good experience with using smallpox vaccination to eradicate the disease. But, that’s an argument for the value of using authority to coordinate a program requiring social compliance, not an argument for a particular vaccine. It would be insane, for example, to vaccinate against smallpox today. There hasn’t been an endemic case of smallpox since 1977, and administering the vaccination to millions of people would cause minor problems for everyone vaccinated, and serious problems for a small number of people. The vast majority of polio cases in the U.S. since 1979 have been caused by the vaccine. Even though the safety of the vaccine has been greatly improved, general administration of the polio vaccine doesn’t make sense any more. As vaccination programs are successful, the benefits of a free-ride increase. And, as the diseases being vaccinated against become less common, or less acute or life-threatening, the social benefits of the program, itself, diminish.

Given that the American medical system is, generally, a giant rip-off, and a threat to public health in many of its practices — hospitals kill more people than automobile accidents — I cannot imagine why rational people would simply accept that the vaccines being pressed upon their children are uniformly safe (enough) or worthwhile. Saying that in resisting, people are resisting “rational argument” seems, at best, patronizing, and, at worst, actively dishonest.

#274

“In my world you don’t believe things without evidence. That is what is meant by ‘rational.’”

You’re talking about what you think people ought to do. But in my world, the majority of people conspicuously do not do that, a lot of the time.

I have a theory that what people actually do gets better results for society in the long run. I can’t prove it’s true, but I can describe a scenario that demonstrates that it *might* be true.

Imagine your society has a situation where there are 12 plausible choices for individuals to make. Five of them are obviously terrible. Three of them look very good. The other four look kind of mediocre.

If everybody was rational, we would try the three choices that look good. Then say it turned out that one of them is bad for reasons we could not have foreseen. When we find out we quit that one. Then we study the two remaining choices until we see which is better. Perhaps we find that one of them has bad long-term effects (like chlorofluorocarbons and the ozone layer). We discard the worse choice, and we say the remaining one is the right way to do this particular thing. Then we’re done.

But when most people ar4e not rational, they try say eleven of the twelve choices. And they don’t just quit when their choices look bad. They dig in their heels and they *believe* despite the evidence. Over an extended period the bad choices gradually lose membership, and the choices that in fact have good results gain. Maybe one of the choices that looked mediocre and one that looked bad both come out better than the best rational choice, because in a complicated situation our rationality can’t predict well. So on average we come out better. We still have the overhead of the people who stay with their bad choices through thick and thin. But if circumstances change, they provide us with ready-made alternatives and they maintain the methods they have found to make those choices not as bad as they would be if we were first starting out trying them.

I contend that maybe — just maybe — society is better off when some people sometimes irrationally sacrifice themselves trying out approaches that from a rational standpoint look bad. We don’t really know what to expect from them until we try. Rationality probably helps us as individuals — surely our rational choices are better on average than sheer random choices. But society — as opposed to our rational individual selves — does better when we explore lots of choices, not just rational ones.

I can imagine scenarios where that fails, too. But society has created lots of irrational individuals who sometimes suffer for their mistakes and who sometimes bad together in large groups to make you suffer in their place. Perhaps — perhaps — this is on average good for society, since it is what society has in fact created.

John: “The post is really ONLY about those students who work hard and … just don’t get it. Presumably lots of them sort of lack the aptitude. Not sure how that works, but people are different, so it seems.”

Well yes we kind of knew that. But you also seemed to be making or at least implying generalizations. Especially the Haidt quote, which you described as “helpful”, isn’t referring to a small fraction of (Singaporean) students. He says “generally” and “most people”. So which is it?

Rational argument, as presented here, is about persuasion, or a non-coercive way of soliciting agreement (and defending the innocent), which was considered by many since the time of the Greeks to be essential to freedom and democracy. It is interesting to me that so many people on this thread appear to believe that persuasion is in and of itself a bad thing. It is as though we have to re-invent the wheel.

I missed the part about persuasion being a bad thing. Where was that?

Anarcissie,

You believe that rationality produces truth. I am skeptical of this proposition.

Well, not exactly. We need to pay close attention to how we are using words. A word like ‘rational’ has different levels of usage. At the most basic level, to be rational is to look at what is, observe reality, be aware of what is real. But the moment we open our mouths and enter the realm of thought and language we have taken a step away from reality. Now we’re dealing in symbolic representation of what is.

Nevertheless, it is possible to make statements about the world that are supported by evidence. So even though ‘the truth’ is never perfectly conveyed by words it is still possible and necessary to distinguish between beliefs which have strong evidence to support them and beliefs which are weakly supported.

I mean, this is a lefty blog, is it not? Are there climate change deniers taking part in this discussion? Because I certainly don’t want to hurt anyones feelings by calling their beliefs STUPID. [heh!]

Say, do you have an hour and 45 minutes to spare? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KNefVPDbsQ

:^)

J Thomas

You’re talking about what you think people ought to do. But in my world, the majority of people conspicuously do not do that, a lot of the time.

It’s not so much that I’m talking about what I think people ought to do, although to some extent you’re right. It’s more that I’m trying to make a distinction between certain types of thinking and belief. If a person wants to believe things without evidence that’s up to them. I’m only saying their behavior is irrational.

Here’s a Chinese proverb your post reminded me of: http://www.drmarlo.com/?page_id=181

> You can do it even more simply. The point of argument is, ultimately, to induce belief.

Really? I argue when I think there’s a good chance I can learn something and change my mind. What I do when I’m convinced I’m right, well, that’s very context dependent but if argumentation works so be it but if manipulation or authority or intimidation or whatever is faster then I’ll go to that. If I really, really, “know” I’m right and the purpose is to induce agreement then anything that works, goes. Sham argument if it fits, but anything else if it fits better or saves me time.

I’d like to think I’ve arranged a life and work for myself where that essentially never happens. Where “argument” carries a good-faith assumption – which “it’s all about
inducing belief” does not.

It just IS.

TM @ 281

I gave the Gettysburg Address as an example of an effective and important argument precisely because I thought it would clash with some of the presuppositions being cast about. There is an argument in it, to the effect that the country’s founding principle was at stake in the war, and that defined the war’s meaning. It’s an argument about meaning. Like a lot of arguments, it is about inducing social cooperation. (Whether arguments are, in general, about inducing belief, seems a dubious proposition to me.) Since it’s about inducing social cooperation, that it is made by an official leader is important to its power and effects.

mattski @ 241 You know what really strikes me as ironic? I’ve been an advocate here for skepticism about excessive conceptualizing.

It strikes me as ironic that you have been alternating in this thread between sweeping generalizations and complaints about people making sweeping generalizations.

I am one of those people you sometimes accuse of excessive conceptualizing, but I wouldn’t make the sweeping generalizations you have about what’s “rational” or “beliefs” precisely because I wouldn’t know how to conceptualize “rational” or “belief”. I see people use the words, but I’m not always sure what idea they are referring to, so I approach with caution.

mattski: If all you have is a lovely story… you don’t have much at all.

I’m not so sure. Stories — narrative dramas — are what most people seem to want most of the time. They want to know what something “means”, whose good and what’s bad or mad. If you have a lovely story, you may have all you really need to persuade. Explanatory stories are retailed in journalism and social science with abandon. Policy turns on whether people believe Aunt Flo is genuinely needy, innocent and virtuous, or greedy and lazy and in need of sharper motivation.

Harold @ 277: I am not sure what your quarrel is with me

I didn’t think we had any great disagreement, and didn’t intend to give any sort of personal offense. I just wanted to hold out against the idea that people are “resisting” rationality, per se, or that others, in supporting authority are championing rationality.

Prescribing a set of beliefs, or a set of conventions for expressing beliefs, and calling these, “rational” and opposing beliefs and conventions, “irrational” seems prejudicial and contemptuous in ways that are uncalled for. It’s not my idea of “a good argument”. I thought the Brendan Nyhan article you linked to, and the paper he linked to, were good examples of abusing the notion of rational argument, by privileging certain assertions and advocates as “rational” and opposing advocates and arguments — which, admittedly, might not be conventionally well-expressed or entirely sensible — as “irrational” (and by implication, illegitimate).

Something that changed my thinking about rational argument is seeing repeated iterations of argument over the Ticking Time Bomb scenario/justification for torture on utilitarian grounds. The first time I saw it I think I still believed that rational argument was the way to go no matter how controversial or important the issue at stake. In fact I believed that strictly rational argument was more important the greater the issues at stake.

After more than a decade and many iterations of this argument I have come to the opposite conclusion. Engaging with torture advocates on the level of argument only works in their favor. Give an inch and they’ll take a mile — pretty soon the “ticking time bomb” is “any possible future threat” and it’s not a couple hours of field expedient torture but years of cruelty. Repeated debate desensitizes people to actual abuses even if the torturers don’t have the better arguments. Torture advocates need to be shamed, flamed, baited, mocked, and harassed if they show up seeking a “rational” debate on the merits of torture. Anything that hinders them is good, anything that gives them the advantage is bad, no matter how rational/irrational the methods reaching those ends. If you ever get the chance to debate John Yoo, don’t bring your best arguments. Bring a pair of running shoes so you can pull his pants down and then get away before anyone can react.

A real-world example was given where (going on shaky memory here) three suspects were taken into custody and the officer, given his level of information, elected to shoot one of the suspects dead in front of the other two. And he got the information he was seeking.

I read about that. It was claimed that both the German army and the Russian army used this method a lot during WWII, and it was effective.

The Americans claimed that what they did instead, was first they asked questions of the first POW, and when he did not answer they took him off behind a truck, and then they fired a weapon. The two remaining POWs did not actually know whether the third one was dead or not, but the Americans said it worked just as well. The idea was that smart good guys could get results without being evil. This approach was also thrifty. If it didn’t work you had three POWs to try out something else on, and if nothing else worked you can always bring the third guy back and kill him in front of the others, later.

However, the information tended to not be all that valuable. Usually, soldiers who got captured did not know all that much.

“The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile.”
– Napoleon Bonaparte

People can also be persuaded by total nonsense – especially if the argument makes them laugh!

“If a man who turnips cries,
Cry not when his father dies,
‘Tis a proof that he had rather
Have a turnip than his father.”
(Samuel Johnson)

My late mother, who was an expert at illogic if she wanted to wind someone up, once said
“Organic vegetables? Huh!!
We ALL know what they put on those: give me nice clean chemicals any day!”

Matt,

I think you did a good job of articulating your position here. You made me want to stage some ‘mock debates’ where, maybe with professional actors, we stage exactly the “rape” debate you describe and let two writers, or two groups of writers, control the dialogue and re-work the dialogue until both sides feel like they made their optimal arguments. :^)

My feeling is that the “pro-rape” side is going to inevitably emerge from such an encounter as a completely odious point of view. They will make of themselves a pariah. I think this is not an exaggeration. Because any argument for rape can be immediately turned round upon its proponent.

“OK, then, so it’s basically not a problem if me and my mates here tie YOU to an oak tree and fuck you in the ass without your consent. As much as we want. Right?”

Then there is the bigger consideration of sanctioning censorship, which is the road I see your point of view pointing towards. By ruling certain discussions out of bounds we are sending the message that people cannot be trusted to figure things out for themselves. We need a big brother to make sure we don’t venture into areas we’re incompetent to handle. I don’t think that’s a great precedent to set.