Epistemology

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.

Getting started with Bailin & Battersby

September 13, 2017September 13, 2017 Cate Hundleby

I knew that Bailin and Battersby would provide good exercises and I anticipate (still only one class in) that their book will really engage students. The instructor manual turns out to pay a lot of attention to how to involve students, and the other resources are even better than I’d hoped: the slides provide opportunities for discussion and don’t simply repeat what’s in the textbook; plus Bailin and Battersby provide quizzes, which solves the huge problem of coming up with examples that mirror the style and difficulty of the textbook.

I really like the focus on inquiry in the first chapter too. It connects students’ own decision making with institutional research and epistemological norms.

I’m focussing on two skills today — the second class. The first is featured in a slide in the instructor materials but doesn’t get so much attention in the textbook, unfortunately. This is the question of identifying an issue (or controversy or question) and distinguishing it from a topic and a thesis. At the first-year level I think this is extremely valuable for students. It will be obvious for some, but I have known students in later years who didn’t understand the difference between a topic and a thesis, so this discussion should assist with that obstacle to later learning.

Second, I’m focussing on identifying opportunities for inquiry. This is the subject of one of the exercises in the text, and it’s fairly straightforward to test.

I did notice that this book, as most good ones, demands students provide explanations for their identifications. This is a basic academic skill, and it too deserves to be taught at the first-year level. There is further discussion of explanation later in the book, but students need an account of what they are supposed to do. In https://books.google.ca/books?id=XhjRBrDAESkC&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1&output=embed“>Biggs’s language, they need “alignment,” to be taught how to do what will be the basis for their evaluation. So I’ve added a slide about the nature of explanation — using familiar language to make a case identifiable or applying a concept in detail to show how it characterizes an example. Of course, there is a large philosophical literature on explanation, but controversy hasn’t stopped critical thinking educators before. Nor do I think it should. I tend to think that bringing such debates into pedagogical context helps put such philosophy of science or philosophy of language controversies into a context that clarifies the scope and significance of those technical discussions.

I have another, more pointed criticism of this chapter. The philosophical discussions of the nature and value of inquiry make a number of distinctions: nature, value, and features in particular. These are all used to characterize inquiry without an explanation of what distinguishes and connects these different perspectives on the task. Partly as a result, I found the associated exercises useless. While I will do a little lecturing on the epistemological discussion that they parse in this vague way I do so only because I expect it to prime students for some of the lessons later in the book and because it connects their discussion with Gilbert’s book. I wish they had been clearer about these fundamental ideas and how they want students (and instructors) to apply them.

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.

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!”

Reasoning together

July 29, 2013July 29, 2013 Cate Hundleby2 Comments

Hugo Mercier visited the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric at the University of Windsor last Fall to discuss his recent work with Dan Sperber in which they argue that reason is meant to function socially, in contexts of argumentation and hence as part of communication. This welcome message for argumentation theorists and social epistemologists draws together an immense amount of research in cognitive psychology about the conditions in which reasoning is successful. I found it very exciting.

Not only does this view suggest a fundamental epistemological significance for argumentation, it suggests that argumentation is basically cooperative, not adversarial. Sure, opposition can be part of valuable argumentative practice, but the more general or at least original benefit is learning from each other — not winning, as the view has been misrepresented in The New York Times.

What was disappointing is the appearance that Sperber and Mercier’s appeal to evolution, and their employment of “evolutionary psychology” is weak. Does evolution provide explanatory power, connecting theory with one of the most important scientific innovations of the past several centuries? Yeah sure. But explanatory power is not enough, especially when more rigorous empirical standards are available from and demanded by evolutionary biology. At least, so the consensus seems to be — I need to learn more about this area; but Mercier appealed only to the explanatory power of natural selection, not to anything concrete.

Evolutionary psychology is notoriously problematic, and seems especially prey to the assumption that what has evolved must have been selected for, having an advantage itself. Some evolutionary features, like chins and male nipples are by-product of other features, like jaws and female nipples. The automatic assumption that all evolved features are adaptations has been described by Elisabeth Lloyd as “adaptationism.”

What’s wrong?

January 29, 2013April 4, 2014 Cate Hundleby

The main motivation for the Critical Thinking Squared website and this blog is to raise consciousness about critical thinking pedagogy in the discipline of philosophy. There are a few ways in which scholarship has advanced in recent decades that textbooks continue to ignore. Many of these advances come from argumentation theory, and here are the basic advancements in that field that I find textbooks tend to neglect:

Arguments take place in dialogues. Some theorists view the dialogue as a secondary aspect; but the consensus is that among the range of forms that argumentation can take, arguments take place between people. They are not free-standing but audience-relative, an insight going back to Chaim Perelman and Stephen Toulmin.
Fallacies are forms of argumentation. Without this assumption there is little hope of providing any coherent account of fallacies. While fallacy labels provide a longstanding method for teaching reasoning, the errors we count as fallacies take many different forms and until the development of the informal logic movement there was little method behind the lists of error names. The depth of this problem has been set forth by Charles Hamblin in his book Fallacies (1970). Since then, fallacies have been systematized in three different ways:
1. The three aspects of an argument that may go wrong (acceptable premises, relevance of premises to conclusion, and sufficiency of premises in supporting the conclusion). This analysis structures the classic books by Johnson & Blair and Govier.
2. Presumptive argumentation schemes that may work well or go awry. Identification of the proper working of a presumptive scheme of argumentation, such as an appeal to authority or a generalization, one considers critical questions characteristic of the particular scheme.
3. The pragma-dialectic approach treats fallacies as rule violations but that provides no systematic account of how they arise.

Many textbooks employ the first analysis, but many still lean on ad hoc lists of names and view most types as categorical problems despite the flourishing of epistemologies showing the relevance to reasoning of emotion, testimony, generalization, etc., all of which challenge such categorical dismissals.

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.

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