Authority & expertise

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.

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.

Critical Thinking and the Adversary Paradigm

October 21, 2013October 21, 2013 Cate Hundleby2 Comments

Critical Thinking and the Adversary Paradigm

The new APA newsletter includes an article by me entitled “Critical thinking and the adversary paradigm” — link in title above. My purpose is to review new evidence from argumentation studies about the continued dominance in the discipline of philosophy of what Janice Moulton called “the Adversary Method” in an early article (1983). I argue:

One of the primary ways in which the Adversary Method is reproduced is through critical thinking courses. These courses are typically taught by people with little expertise in argumentation scholarship, although argumentation has become the main tool for teaching critical thinking in the discipline of philosophy. Improving the standards for critical thinking pedagogy would help to unseat the Adversary Method from its status as a paradigm. Alternatives can be readily found in the textbooks authored by argumentation scholars.

I hope that this piece will help feminist scholars to see the epistemological, pedagogical, and political significance that argumentation theory could have. Maybe it will encourage textbook authors and academic departments to take more seriously their claims that critical thinking serves democracy.

Admittedly, argumentation theorists tend to have an idealized social ontology and to ignore oppression, as for instance when they assume politeness as a panacea for aggression and adversarial culture. They pay no attention to how the burden of proof may, in practice, shift according to the speaker’s social status and expertise in argumentation. Yet the ideals it establishes can work in concert with feminist epistemology to realize the ideals…

As my dad says, “hope springs eternal!”

Methodology

October 7, 2013October 7, 2013 Cate Hundleby

I’m a philosopher and so untrained in methodology although my work in feminist epistemology intersects extensively with feminist methodology. A method of only a very rough sort thus can be found in how I choose textbooks for analysis in my the database.

Textbooks are suitable for the database if intended for introductory philosophy courses. I exclude other disciplines to keep things manageable. What counts as critical thinking varies greatly from discipline to discipline, and often connects with the disciplinary methodology.
I include introductory argumentation textbooks because that has become the standard way to teach critical thinking in philosophy, and only a few textbooks (Pinto, Blair and Parr and Kenyon, that I know of) do not focus on argumentation.
However, books with 50% or more on formal logic do not make the table since that material tends to be covered in separate courses. Likewise, textbook publishers tend to include argumentation skills under critical thinking and distinguish that from formal logic.
I try to prioritize books by scholars in the field and academic publishers over commercial publishers. My larger goal is to encourage adoption of the more scholarly textbooks, and I try to provide the resources to allow instructors to find their own way to those books.

Suggestions and advice are welcome!

Addressing gender bias in philosophy

November 4, 2012November 10, 2012 Cate Hundleby

Gender bias has become a hot subject in philosophy, not merely as a topic for epistemology — in the work of Lorraine Code, Nancy Tuana , and Miranda Fricker, for instance. Thirty years of feminist epistemology bears currently on the discipline in ways that it hasn’t since the emergence of the field in the 1980s. Whereas at that point a central contention was that women might bring different ways of thinking or different concerns to the discipline, now the issue is that all people — including philosophers — tend to be biased against women. Over fifteen years of research on implicit bias shows that across cultures (classes, and professions) people tend to underestimate women’s ability and qualification. Take the demonstration test and see! (Though the test is not meant to offer a personal diagnosis, taking it can be profoundly humbling.)

The effects of bias in philosophy have become apparent because women are now around 20% of philosophy departments, and often more. This is a rather meagre advance over the last thirty years, and the continued under-representation and leaky pipeline has earned the name “the philosophy exception” because it is so poor relative to women’s advances in other fields. Nonetheless, enough women work in the discipline that when philosophical forums neglect women there is quantifiable reason to complain. (This contrasts with the case for people of colour and other marginalized philosophers who don’t yet constitute a significant number of people in the discipline.)

Further, the evidence about implicit bias suggests that the reason for the problem is not personal or curable (though perhaps treatable) at the individual level and provides reason to demand systematic and institutional attention to the problem. Witness the Gendered Conference Campaign that “aims to raise awareness of the prevalence of all-male conferences (and volumes, and summer schools), [and] of the harm that they do.” This campaign recently received an apology from a co-editor of a Canadian philosophy journal, Dialogue, Mathieu Marion.

Ordinary critical thinking does not serve us well in addressing implicit bias. At least, reflection does not affect how implicit bias enters into our pre-discursive evaluations, poisoning our reasoning from the outset. To address and root out the default switches, the fast thinking in Daniel Kahneman’s terms, demands we develop a new set of tools. I think some of those tools may come from argumentation, as a discursive practice, and I think the success of the Gendered Conference Campaign bears that out: they write letters to organizers of events that under-represent women pointing out the problem. Philosophy will not be the same in ten years, we have reason to hope, for women; and that should set a precedent that allows the discipline to better address intersecting forms of marginalization.

We are all vulnerable to implicit bias — me too! And ordinary philosophical methods are no help. Introspection is a weak defence against socialization. So we must rethink our methodology, but philosophers don’t like to think about methodology. There can be good reason to stick with a general argumentative rigour, and follow intuition as well as evidence. However, the utter lack of any methodological sensibility renders philosophy prone to the vague pronouncements most susceptible to implicit bias. For instance, terms such as “smart” seem to apply most frequently to young white men, argues Jennifer Saul in The Philosophers Magazine.

Instead of introspection and personal resolve, assuming that good will can be adequate to the problem, addressing social biases head-on requires making equity into a principle of organization. Most of us reach for the names of old white men when looking for someone important or interesting to feature if we receive no further guidance. Organizational resistance to that proclivity can help us head it off, giving ourselves new patterns of practice by asking ourselves to look first for women, people of colour, disabled philosophers, and other marginalized people to feature in our forums.

Sometimes too, women and other marginalized philosophers may be harder to engage as speakers and authors. After all, women do more work than men hour-by-hour, in all cultures and classes; and other forms of social marginalization bring with them other obstacles to ready participation. Those obstacles provide another reason to prioritize the inclusion of people who are not men, not white, not able-bodied, not straight, and so on, and to do so systematically from the start of our editorial and organizational work. Without that priority we succumb not only to implicit bias but to systemic discrimination that lowers the quality of the philosophy we promote.

Who am I to say?

November 2, 2012November 2, 2012 Cate Hundleby

Having styled myself as an expert in critical thinking is somewhat problematic because I am a novice in the field, however enthusiastic and dedicated I may be. There are many greater experts whom you can find by looking at the ““Teaching the dog’s breakfast”” or consulting the AILACT website. There you can find people who know the ins and outs of three decades of research on the topic.

What I offer may help those also new to the field in large part because I have the benefit of living among the informal logicians at Windsor for long enough that I’ve “gone native.” So I can offer some advice about the general shape of the field, and comment on what I’m learning.

Developing a critical thinking course is a highly personal project dependent on one’s own skills and objectives as well as program and course objectives. Vast options are available, and as I continue to develop my guide I expect it will become more comprehensive. However, choosing a textbook (and deciding whether one should be used at all) is a highly individual matter, and I’m not match-maker though I do know a good yenta if you need one!

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