Science

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.

Getting there from here: Critical thinking and debiasing

March 5, 2015March 5, 2015 Cate Hundleby

A primary lesson from the first day was that biases pose different problems in different contexts and need specific techniques to be negotiated. Ways to engage the social and emotional variables occupied a central role on the second day. In that afternoon, and today, the third and final day, we get more specific, considering how reasoning operates in particular contexts and the difficulties faced by critical thinking pedagogy in addressing those contexts and improving people’s practice.

Scientific reasoning concerns Ulrike Hahn, who directs us toward the advantages of Bayesian approaches to fallacies and argumentation. Hahn’s point of departure comes from Douglas Walton‘s analysis of argumentation schemes, including taking the appeal to ignorance as a central case. Accounting for how we gain and incorporate information into belief is the key benefit of Bayesian probablistic analysis, and Hahn makes quite a convincing case, at least if we take arguments to be monological. She takes the dialogical approaches of Walton and pragma-dialectics to become unnecessary in the wake of the Bayesian appraoch. Burden of proof and its dialogical shifts are a messy business, to be sure, but I don’t think we can dispense with analyzing them so easily. We need tools to reason with others, and judging by the social approaches to debiasing that prevailed on the second day, the social dimensions may be key to debiasing argumentation.

Mariusz Urbanski presented research completed with Katarzyna Paluszkiewicz and Joanna Urbanska showing that while untutored skill has a lasting effect on performance in deductive reasoning, training can improve performance on difficult deductive problems.

Debiasing was studied in legal contexts by Frank Zenker, Christian Dahlmann and Farhan Sarwar, because it’s an environment that demands judgements be made; judges can’t suspend their evaluation of a case. People, and so perhaps judges, who score high on agreeableness seem especially influenced by anchoring.

This day gave us little room for optimism about debiasing, or the future of critical thinking as an ideal and an educational practice. An account of frustration with facilitating critical thinking at an institutional level provided the final talk, from Chip Sheffield, recounting his experience as the inaugural Eugene H. Fram Chair in Applied Critical Thinking at Rochester Institute of Technology. Sheffield described how institutional pressure to develop or adopt a new assessment instrument flew in the face of a lack of other institutional and faculty support, student resistance to the integration of critical thinking in courses, and only superficial resources in the larger critical thinking movement. Yet he found some progress in student panels and discussions, and community outreach.

The result of Sheffield’s experience is his recommendation of more critical thinking courses, and more at advanced levels. So it might seem that the problem is not how to teach critical thinking but how much to teach it. That could seem to be the only room for improvement given the disjunct between the experimental research on cognition and biases and the philosophical pedagogy of critical thinking. I was struck to hear the experimental psychologists express concern over the philosophers use of “bias” losely, just as the philosophers were discouraged by the inattention to the pressures to find practical strategie for students.

However, as much as this conference demonstrated an absence of the practical evidence we want to guide critical thinking education, it also paves the way for more engagements between the psychological evidence and the pedagogical and philosophical ideals. I take particular inspiration from the work of Kenyon & Beaulac, and Howes, as philosophers attempting to explore the implications of the psychological research, but also Weinstock, Schendel, Cooke, plus Urbanski, Paluszkiewicz & Urbanska, and Zenker, Dahlmann & Sarwar in assessing the impact of specific techniques on the development of critical thinking. We have barely begun to chart the possibilities and potentials for critical thinking education, and we need more research of the sort gathered at this conference to develop and explore options. Ideally, this should be like the work from Paglieri, Mercier & Boudry, directly engaging both the philosophical and the psychological. To start with, we should explore whether they or Goodwin are correct about the effects of classroom debate.

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.”

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