Argumentation

Benefitting from argumentation

July 2, 2018 Cate Hundleby

A recent piece in The Atlantic suggests a number of guidelines for more productive argumentation. Many of these remind me of Michael Gilbert’s model of coalescent argumentation. In particular, #2 is “Prioritize Relationships and Listen Passionately,” and nobody has drawn attention the role of face values in argumentation the way Gilbert has. He suggests that most of our arguments take place between familiars, those with whom we will have further exchanges and so we have an vested interest in looking good — for instance, like a knowledgeable, truthful, caring person.

That observation takes me straight to the question I want to consider about this analysis: What does Eric Liu, a former speech writer and policy adviser in the Bill Clinton administration whose recommendations provide the content for the article, think we ought to get out of argumentation? What is the product? What fruits of the labour?

His recommendations are part of the Better Arguments Project. I’m not going to go into all that at this point, but that project provides the context for the recommendations, which is the current US political environment inflamed by hostile exchanges on the internet. Much the same environment exists in other countries too.

Liu’s rule #1 is “Take Winning Off the Table” because it interferes with gaining understanding. Many argumentation theorists (Douglas Walton and Michael Gilbert especially) recognize that gaining understanding is a benefit even of arguing that does not explicitly aim at understanding but is concerned with something like negotiating an exchange. Dale Hample (2012) suggests that whatever purposes argumentation serves, its concern with content distinguishes it from other forms of communication.

This suggests a movement toward recognizing understanding or knowledge to be the central fruit of argumentation. However, most argumentation theorists still assume that an argument must have a winner and a loser. Dan Cohen even suggests that the apparent losers whose views do not succeed may be the winners insofar as they learn the most. (See his TedX video.) But few are willing to simply reject winning as a necessary structure for arguments in order to better address its epistemological purposes.

Phyllis Rooney, however, argues that adopting explicitly epistemological values provides a substitute for the goal of persuasion, which underpins the competitive model of argumentation. There are further advantages to this in avoiding the oppressive implications that come with the aim to persuade at all costs. And these may fit with Liu’s final three rules since they concern attention to context, embracing vulnerability, and being open, all central to liberatory epistemology.

Walking the walk

August 25, 2017August 25, 2017 Cate Hundleby

This term I’ll be teaching a first-year critical thinking course for the first time in years, indeed since I started this blog and developed the guide to critical thinking textbooks in philosophy that I call “Critical Thinking Squared.” Now that I’ve been talking this talk for a while, I return to walking the walk.

This blog has not been very active lately, but I’m going to make use of it during this course to chronicle my successes and struggles. To start with, I’ve picked a main textbook based on argumentation scholarship, rather than simply the best intentions of someone with a philosophy graduate degree. I’m using Sharon Bailin and Mark Battersby‘s Reason in the Balance: An Inquiry Approach to Critical Thinking, 2nd edition (Hackett). I have not spent much time with this book yet, but I know that I share many of Bailin and Battersby’s philosophical commitments about reasoning, and I have great regard for their educational expertise. I am already pleased to find vast resources in the book. I’m also pleased to found extensive teaching resources available through Hackett, and Hackett texts are reasonably priced.

The big question is how to select material that will work for a 12-week class at the first-year level. I am skipping some of the deeper discussions of argumentation types and currently my plan is as follows:

Chapters 1-3 on: inquiry; basic argument structure (premises and conclusions; subarguments); and induction and deduction.
Michael Gilbert’s Arguing with People — more on that in another post.
I have plotted a skip to the end of the book usings Chapter 7, 10 and 11 on issues, judgment, and dialogue
We will then jump back to chapter 6 to address credibility and expertise. I’m excited to have our information literacy librarian Tamsin Bolton Bacon assisting with this.
I will end with the chapter on philosophical (ethical) inquiry as this may be the only philosophy course most of the students take — and because I hope to encourage them to take more! Also on the final exam, students are required to reflect on one of the chapters 12, 13, and 14 that address inquiry in the natural sciences, social sciences, and arts relative to what they learned about philosophical inquiry. That should allow them to connect the course to whatever type of study constitutes their larger program (few if any will be philosophy majors).

Feminist methodology and traditional standards for evaluating philosophical argumentation

May 17, 2017August 30, 2017 Cate Hundleby

I have finally read the controversial article from Hyptia — which I don’t think all those interested in the editorial dispute need do, but which I decided I must do — since I teach gender identity and will be in the future teaching racial identity. It is also somewhat related to my own research, especially on standpoint epistemology, but I wouldn’t normally consider myself qualified to referee a paper like this for Hypatia. (I do referee for them periodically, have published there, and have a long standing paper-and-print subscription.)

My impression from the protest has always been that the article’s serious error is its neglect of work done on the topic by trans people and people of colour. (I list of such sources has been compiled here.) Methodologically this is problematic, and I could see it from the bibliography; but it might not be visible in the steps of argumentation. However, I think I can indicate where it comes out, and I know some people are interested in such an account. I confine myself to two serious objections, and think that shows deep problems with the article.

On page 265, early in the article, it says, “it is not clear how one can affirm that it is possible to feel like a member of another sex but deny it is possible to feel like a member of another race.” My jaw dropped at that point because the discussion continued speculatively, as a thought experiment rather than attending to the actual evidence of lived experience. This sets the tone for remainder.
The long literature on passing is never mentioned – which is something I’ve actually done a little research on. Gender passing has been punished in either direction — as male or as female (though often for different reasons). But racially there’s a stark asymmetry. People of colour are punished for passing as white; white people are assumed to have no desire to pass except as a joke. (Clearly the Dolezal case mucks up this picture, but it is the background.) This all connects with “the one drop rule.”
This omission becomes visible (to my quasi-expert eye) when the author fails to recognize the weight of this power structure in page 270’s quotation from Tamara Winfrey Harris. The article focuses only the temporariness of identity and fails to appreciate the weight of Harris’ final words: “I will accept Dolezal as black like me only when society can accept me as white like her.” It’s not that whiteness is harder to shake as a mask than blackness – the interpretation the author gives, but that being accorded white identity allows one to willfully adopt a race or ethnicity when others can’t, which makes it an expression of privilege. The article employs analogies on 271 to challenge this point by Harris, but they regard much smaller scales, less categorical forms of privilege, and have other contrasts that I find altogether make them false analogies.

I am not using the author’s name because I continue to believe that whatever problem underlies this scandal rests in the journal and its editorial process and standards, not with the author. Also, the editorial dispute has received too much attention already from academic gawkers. For what it’s worth, I think the arguments in the article could be rehabilitated into an account of how this sort of transracialism could become acceptable, and it already argues why in the abstract that would be desirable. However, in failing to attend to the obstacles to such progress, it perpetuates certain silences that are among those very obstacles. It so happens that in feminist philosophy that omission counts as a serious error in reasoning. I believe I’ve shown how that emerges as a problem too in more traditional philosophical and argumentative terms.

Free & open workshops May 18 in Windsor: Argmentation, Bias and Objectivity

April 24, 2016 Cate Hundleby

These workshops launch the conference Argumentation, Bias and Objectivity organized by the Ontario Society for Studies in Argumentation and hosted by the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation & Rhetoric at the University of Windsor. The workshops do not require conference registration; they are free and open to the public.

Exercising the textbook masters: Artificial examples

April 24, 2016 Cate Hundleby

This term I taught from Douglas Walton’s Fundamentals of Critical Argumentation (Cambridge UP, 2005) and I was excited to do so. I’m a big fan of Walton’s pragmatic approach to argumentation for it’s ability to make sense of fallacies and it’s pluralism — the convergence of which I will be exploring more in my own research and which I think are both valuable for education. Teaching from this comprehensive text promised to immerse me and the students in Walton’s vision.

I knew of some limitations of Walton’s text from my own perspective, including the almost complete reliance on manufactured examples. I appreciate, and rely on, manufactured examples to provide maximally clear and uncontroversial exemplars of aspects of argumentation, but they also may mislead students into thinking that argument analysis can and should be cut and dried when it is not. That false belief also can encourage students to think that the application of the analysis they know trumps other forms of interpretation which can make logic a type of bullying tool, even a tool of domination (without anyone having such domineering intentions).

My way of addressing this problem (and some of the course’s content requirements) was to supplement Walton with Mark Battersby’s Is that a Fact? A Fieldguide to Statistical and Scientific Information (most recent edition Broadview, 2016). Battersby’s book provides rich detail in its treatment of real examples and many of the themes overlap, allowing for what promised to be a healthy yin and yang approach. Battersby’s book had also been recommended to me by a friend who teaches CEGEP in Quebec.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t realized Battersby provides no exercises (maybe the new edition does?), and that made it hard to integrate Battersby’s deep theoretical treatment of concrete cases with the logic of argumentation. The course began to seem disjointed and Battersby ended up getting less use that I’d hoped.

Walton too was disappointing. Some difficult subjects were covered too briefly and not only with only abstract examples but with very few examples for practice. This is the flipside to the comprehensive nature of Walton’s theory: he covers not only argumentation schemes — his stock in trade, but the larger context of dialogue types and the more traditional analysis of argument diagramming and even a dash of formal logic.

I do think the students learned much of what I intended, though I am more conscious of these intentions now. The dialogical context of argumentation orients both Walton’s and Battersby’s approaches, but it also complicates the teaching of reasoning. I believe now that it cannot be taught at the introductory level with real examples. The closest way to do so may be with Tindale’s Fallacies and Argument Appraisal (Cambridge U P, 2007), an extension of Walton’s approach but restricted by a set of inference schemes that receive deep treatment.

In the future, for a general course on reasoning, I will look to Battersby and Sharon Bailin’s book Reason in the Balance: An Inquiry Approach to Critical Thinking (now in an affordable Hackett edition too! 2016). I have heard nothing but good things about this book, and I know it contains substantial examples and exercises. I many have to give up on the desire for real examples (I’m not sure yet). I did this too when I used Brian L. Epstein’s Critical Thinking (Advanced Reasoning Forum), which makes develops a cartoon world to provide artificial restrictions on the interpretation of argument examples. Originally I laughed at this, but I found it extremely valuable.

Many demands must be balanced in developing a critical thinking course, but good examples have to be a priority. That often requires artificial examples and the challenge is to transition from the artificial to the real, in the hope that will encourage “knowledge transfer” — a concept I hope to learn more about so that I’m doing less guess-work in my pedagogy. I think I’ll start here.

Diversity and academics

March 23, 2015March 29, 2015 Cate Hundleby3 Comments

The situation of women in philosophy has received a lot of attention lately, including the Gendered Conference Campaign for philosophy developed back in 2009. Including women in academic venues (conference invitations or departmental hiring, notably) is not simply an attempt to make manifest a social ideal. There are many epistemological reasons to demand the representation of women be significant (I tend to find a minimum of 1/3 works well for most the arguments):

Regarding the need to counteract the operation of implicit social bias in selecting people: Reasoners tend to (often unconsciously) prefer men over women. This general tendency tends to remain unaffected by one’s conscious political commitments such that women and feminists are vulnerable to bias against women just like everyone else (we may have ‘aversive bias’). The implicit association test (IAT) now provides massive evidence to this effect that builds on decades of social psychological studies of how people judge each other. (If you haven’t taken the IAT, then you should.) Such studies show that gender bias (e.g.) is not better for those trained to be objective, and in fact they (we?) tend to have a false sense of confidence that makes us actually moreprejudiced. This recent article by Moss-Racusin et al. on this psychological phenomenon shows that faculty members in science are just as biased as anyone else and more so if they consider themselves to be personally objective.
Regarding the ability of women (and other marginalized social identities) to participate: Psychology reveals a robust phenomenon of (mostly unconscious) stereotype threat. It’s complicated, but one aspect of it, one trigger for it, is when few participants (only one or less than 1/3) belong to the same social group as oneself. Minority status is sufficient to trigger stereotype threat. The effects are that people in that group will not perform as well and will be deterred from participating (and they may never realize it).
Regarding the quality of the discussion and emerging understanding or knowledge: (1) and (2) affect this, and there is further reason for concern:
1. from feminist epistemology and philosophy of science:
  1. Helen Longino’s empiricist view of objectivity arising from critical discourse suggests that social diversity provides for a great range of background assumptions and therefore more meaningful criticism and response.
  2. Standpoint theorists argue that women’s experiences (i) provide a more complete perspective, or (ii) a critical outsider perspective, are (iii) less invested in current systems of power, and (iv) simply provide an underrepresented perspective.
  3. Standpoint theorists also argue that feminist and other liberatory perspectives provide valuable input because their understandings are (i) different from the more widely accepted perspective; (ii) are committed to developing understandings of a different future. More women tends to mean more feminist perspectives.
2. from psychology (in Scientific American: I confess I haven’t read the original research) comes evidence that social diversity makes people work harder in groups.

Many of these arguments hold for any marginalized group, but the epistemic values sometimes run up against a lack of people having adequate training. That is no longer the case for women in philosophy, as we can be found in decent numbers (again 1/3) in almost all fields and subfields. At this point, the exceptions where women are not well-represented may well indicate that the field has been constructed in some way to include only the work done by men and thus that the field needs to change. (Despite great progress over the last 200 years, work remains quite gendered, and that includes academic work.)

Including women and other marginalized people may well require broadening a field or its methods, and that is good enough reason for change, but it’s justified on epistemological grounds as much as socio-political. It’s not easy to do, at all, and token efforts may be quite ineffective, as Carla Fehr (2011) argues. The above are all “diversity as excellence” approaches and they demand a lot of work to be effective. I’ve written this post in the hopes of saving people a step when you are called on to make arguments for the epistemological value of diversity, such as solid representation by women. You have here almost a dozen reasons, just to start with.

Talk data to me!

February 25, 2015March 4, 2015 Cate Hundleby

Today’s papers were quite exciting for argumentation theorists, such as myself, hungry for empirical knowledge — ’empiricism envy’ is how Jean Goodwin described it. “Talk data to me!” she exclaimed. It can be a relief and a refreshing change to move from the “might”s and “should”s and “possibly”s of normative theory to facts and findings.

Plus, as teachers, we want good reason to believe our efforts are effective. There has been reason to consider recently that teaching critical thinking is not very effective and that the skills students learn in class do not translate to other environments. For philosophy departments whose budgets often depend critically on the expected utility of these courses, more information about what works and what doesn’t may be increasingly urgent.

Today, from Michael Weinstock we learned about how argumentation skills connect to folk epistemologies: absolutist, multiplist, and evaluativist –drawn from Deanna Kuhn. His review of the research indicated a need for work specifically exploring the effect of education in one on development of the other. Kuhn’s view of folk epistemologies also formed the basis of Rebecca Schendel‘s discussion, and both of them complicated the picture with questions about the cultural specificity of epistemologies. Weinstock looked at contrasts between Bedouin and Jewish lay evaluations of argumentative reasoning.

Schendel, drawing on her experience as an educator in Rwanda, asked us to consider how the educational ideal of critical thinking connects with other social values, such as the creation of job skills or an empowered electorate. Moreover the values encouraged by critical thinking may vary from one cultural context to another in a way that demands further study… more data!

A deeper look into the culture that generated the educational ideal of critical thinking came from Patty Cooke, who discussed her research on how a “fun with philosophy” class for middle school children helped them develop skills in argument analysis and construction. The grade 6 students were encouraged to scrutinize their beliefs and have open-ended discussion in the pursuit of good reasoning. In addition to gaining skills in argumentation, they showed some improvement in meta-cognition.

Discussion became more theoretical with Fabio Paglieri, who presented his joint research with Hugo Mercier and Maarten Boudry.

While Paglieri does not adhere to the evolutionary psychology behind the Sperber and Mercier approach, together Paglieri, Mercier, and Boudry employ the related Argumentative Theory of Reasoning, the view that reasoning functions to serve argumentation, and provide for better communication. The implication of ATR — and the empirical studies behind it — for critical thinking instruction is that we need interventions based on social environment.

In the abstract the authors take that the fallacies approach to argument evaluation is unlikely to yield good results. Paglieri did not explain that, and I’ll have to ask him about it tomorrow — I disagree at that point, as I think fallacies are good tools for identifying different contexts of reasoning. Instead, Paglieri stressed the problem with adversarial debate as a means for teaching critical thinking, especially when it involves the role-playing of taking up a perspective one does not believe. That encourages, he suggested, a disconnect between the tools of argumentation and its operation in specific contexts .

ATR also provided background for Goodwin’s paper, and she elaborated problems with the critical thinking pedagogy that exposes individuals to artefacts for analysis. She too stressed the influence of social settings, but she introduced the consideration that personal accountability is crucial to the value of communication, which argument and reasoning serve. So CT pedagogy should attend to the motivation for reasoning provided by personal accountability, which suggests the value of debate as a learning exercise, contra Paglieri, Mercier and Boudy.

RACT watch this space

February 24, 2015March 4, 2015 Cate Hundleby

Tomorrow begins the conference on Reasoning, Argumentation and Critical Thinking Instruction at Lund University in Sweden. Dr. Frank Zenker, a researcher at Lund, has hosted several conferences in recent years on social epistemology that I would have loved to attend, but I’m especially happy to attend this one as it deals with an intersection of academic topics of special importance. It’s an open question whether argumentation fosters critical thinking and how it affects reasoning, and the recent decades of psychological research on reasoning suggest that people’s thought is much less critical than we might tend to otherwise recognize. All sorts of bias — from perceptual to social — colour our interaction with and reasoning about the world.

The picture at the top is of a lovely brass band playing in the pub this evening, and here are a few speakers who’ve convened so far.

I will post summaries and commentary on the talks as we proceed over the next few days.

What Is Argument Repair?

January 16, 2015January 16, 2015 Cate Hundleby

Somewhere along the way, I picked up the language of “argument repair.” I don’t think this is my term, but borrowed from others. Many people have found it the most interesting concept in my analysis of textbook treatments of fallacies. Some textbook authors have asked for sources, and some instructors have developed their own exercises.

I have only found one scholarly discussion of it, and no articles aside from mine, but in critical thinking and argumentation studies it’s quite common for innovative scholarship to be presented in textbook form. (A great recent example of this is Maureen Linker’s Intellectual Empathy: Critical Thinking for Social Justice — I plan to post on that soon.) Richard Epstein’s Critical Thinking (Thomson Wadsworth) devotes a chapter to the argument repair, and perhaps that’s where I picked up the term. It’s no longer in print, unfortunately, but you can find a discussion of it here.

What attracts me to the notion of argument repair is that it suggests a dialectical context. We may repair arguments in response to criticism, though we cannot in change our central reasoning (how to identify that central reasoning is the big question). That dialectical engagement distinguishes argument repair as a practice from simply charitable interpretation, which does not involve the arguer revising what is said but only an audience interpretation. (It may also include repairing one’s own argument, in an internal dialectic.) That dialectical element is present when “argument repair” appears in the one other place I’ve found the phrase, a poem “On the Immortality of the Soul” by Charles William Jones (of Islington):

In matters of such import, pith, and weight,
As the soul’s welfare and a future state,
Each should endeavour for himself to judge,
Invoke the contest, and refuse to budge:
Then to the field of argument repair,
Wisely engage in manly conflict there;
But should conviction’s force your breast assail,
Retire at once, nor your defeat bewail

This rich depiction of argument as war is far from what I want, and yet conflict is certainly part of the dialectical picture. What interests me is that the audience allows the speaker the opportunity for argument repair. The speaker can take “to the field” and “retire” in turns.

Although dialectical context distinguishes argument repair from simply charitable interpretation, each may follow the same guidelines. We don’t want to shoehorn all arguments into deductive form, and yet we want to allow for implied premises, and also “blunders” in Douglas Walton’s terms (see Tindale’s article here). Epstein in a later edition along with Carolyn Kernberger provide the following Guide to Repairing Arguments (206, 68):

Given an (implicit) argument that is apparently defective, we are justified in adding a premise or conclusion if it satisfies all three of the following:

The argument becomes stronger or valid

The premise is plausible and would seem plausible to the other person

The premise is more plausible than the conclusion.

If the argument is valid or strong, we may delete a premise if doing so doesn’t make the argument worse.

The three criteria involve additions to the argument: the audience “putting words in the speaker’s mouth” in a non-pejorative sense, or the speaker making additions; but it’s also noted that an argument might be improved but trimming off extraneous information. Epstein and Kernberger also suggest the following limits to argument repair (206, 68):

There’s no argument here
The argument is so lacking in coherence that there’s nothing obvious to add
A premise it uses is false or dubious and cannot be deleted
Two of its premises are contradictory, and neither can be deleted
The obvious premise to add would make the argument weak
The obvious premise to add to make the argument strong or valid is is false
The conclusion is clearly false.

None of this indicates a dialectical context, so it’s interesting that they choose terminology different from the traditional “charity.” So, it seems that I need to look closer at my own past practice to see if I’m doing anything different, and have made explicit my interest in the dialectical context. I’ve also sent out some inquiries to people who might know better than I, and I’ll report back.

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