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.
A good analogical argument, I think, with an appropriate appeal to emotion to boot.
College Humor has a video depicting men reacting to a potential bear attack in a possible world where bears statistically kill one in five people. One guy insists it’s not really his problem.
You wouldn’t want to be that guy in that possible world. Don’t be him in this one, either.
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):
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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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