Summary Points on Shea’s Critical Thinking Course at Metro State – July
18, 2001
I have taught “Principles of
Logic" for better than 25 years, and sometimes 4 times a year. I have used the
basic analytic and critical structure of the course as a logic unit within many
other courses. I have quite frequently revised – added and deleted pieces – as
I ran into objections or difficulties. I have seldom responded directly to
evaluations; the main force for change has been student difficulties of various
kinds: when somebody didn’t get it and asked for help, and I found that the way
I was explaining the material to that person was in general better than what I
had been saying in class. Another important force for change has been work with
particularly gifted students who exceeded my expectations and showed me what I
might at least try expecting from everybody. It has also been helpful to teach
the basic material from a full class in very short sessions: half hour
lectures, workshops, etc. Sometimes, people learn things easier if one doesn’t
make them out to be particularly difficult.
The first basic insight behind
the class came from my days as a teaching assistant at the University of
Minnesota, watching other ta’s help with logic. It seemed clear to me that the
most useful and important notions were covered in about the first 10 pages of
the books they were using, and that inadequate attention to those matters was
dooming the enterprise for many students (that is, the enterprise became an
opportunity for those who had an intuitive grasp of basic notions to
demonstrate that grasp, and for those who lacked that grasp to come to feel
ever more deeply stupid. To paraphrase John Holt, “The fundamental point of the
American education system is to separate the winners from the losers.”)
I decided that I wanted to
isolate a few basic points fundamental to good thinking as I experienced it,
and to work those points in many different exercises throughout the entire
semester, so that people would get them into their habitual ways of thinking,
so that nobody could imagine passing the course without mastering these points.
(I think that anyone working on
a practical critical thinking course would be well advised to look away from
the traditional models, away from the whole development of logic since
Aristotle, and ask just: “What am I doing, in those thinking episodes I am most
proud of? What is going on, in those bits of journalism I want to hold up as
examples? What went on, in those moments when I recognized in my kids (or my
parents or my neighbors) an intellect to be reckoned with?”)
There are three ideas behind my
class:
1. The
most interesting and important arguments to talk about are pretty good arguments
that are not valid and cannot in any plausible way be paraphrased as valid.
These may be single premise arguments ((1)She doesn’t shovel her walk, so (2)
she doesn’t care about the neighborhood.) or multi-premise arguments ((1) He’s
lazy and (2) he lies a lot, so (3) he won’t make a good husband.) About these arguments, I made several
decisions:
a. These
should not be treated as truncated or misgrown instances of valid argument.
Such treatment is simply wrong every way: pedagogically, theoretically, psychologically,
even historically. (I have written about this at frightening length, would be
glad to pass that on.)
b. Although
it is tempting to lead people to see the problems with pretty good, non-valid
argument (e.g. perhaps the old lady who doesn’t shovel has a bad back), it is a
huge mistake to rest with that sort of limited accomplishment. What one needs
to make clear to people is: (1) that pretty good arguments are fine bits of
technology for investigating pieces of the world (not flies to be swatted) and
(2) that an argument to which one can raise objections in principle may be, all
things considered, a very fine argument. In other words, one can learn lots
even from putrid arguments, and not all arguments that have something wrong
with them are putrid.
c. The
notion of fallacy as generally presented is useless, and any useful notion of
fallacy would be too complex for beginning students. There are some general
ways that people go wrong in thinking, but the standard fallacy names don’t
address those, and further, the standard fallacy names tend to catch in their
net some pretty good arguments that just aren’t valid. In general, it is not
worth the trouble to ask why an argument is bad or to categorize bad arguments.
Once one has identified the particular limits or possible problems with a given
argument, one has said all that needs to be said. Ranking arguments, pouring
scorn on arguments, in general serves no purpose (except in those cases in
which one can point to a particular, better strategy that people generally
neglect – for example, trying to argue against a policy proposal without first
surveying the range of alternative possible proposals).
d. It
doesn’t matter a tremendous amount what one says about the most basic and most
important point in the whole course, the meaning and status of the single
premise argument. Here are two things I sometimes say:
A. “When
some says “Jones is a crook, so Jones should not be re-elected” that person is
claiming that there is a coherent conception of the world within which it is
impossible that one of these claims is true and the other false. The person who
gives the argument may not have such a conception in mind, may have several
such conceptions in mind: the claim is just that there is such a conception. To
put it another way: if you make use of your best rational faculties in
understanding the world, the picture that results will be one in which these
two claims are both true.”
B. “When
someone says, “Jones is a crook, so Jones should not be re-elected,” that
person is playing a kind of conversation game, making an opening gambit that
amounts to this: “There is a bridge of necessity between these two claims, a
way in which the first makes the second necessary (the force of the argument).
You (the listener): build that bridge!”
Both of these statements contain
some mystical entities. The second contains mystical entities that look like
those in Newtonian physics, forces and necessities and such. It doesn’t matter.
This whole subject is somewhat mystical, and not to be belabored. If one tries
to chase out the mysticism by opting for some conception of a system of rules
of inference within which these transitions (after much processing) can be said
to be provable, one will make the whole process of learning logic needlessly
cumbersome and distant from ordinary discourse, and one will really gain
nothing much, ultimately, since the same sorts of problems will come up again
with respect to inference in the formal systems.
e. Points about meaning and
unclarity and ambiguity are treated pretty lightly and not allowed to intrude
into argument criticism. When someone says, “That premise is ambiguous,” I
respond, “Since you don’t have the opportunity to ask the author what he/she
means here, make your two best guesses about what is meant and state those as
your interpretations of the premise, and then evaluate the argument on each
interpretation.” I don’t go looking for problems of ambiguity and unclarity,
and I don’t develop a critical vocabulary for naming such problems. When they
come up, I try to find a way to continue thinking about the argument, despite
the uncertainty about meaning.
2. The
fundamental realization that people need to make in order to cope with what is
thrown at them is that argumentative prose has structure, that is, one thing
depends upon something else, or multiple somethings else, and those in turn
depend…. This realization is opposed to confronting persuasive prose as a sort
of undifferentiated blob, to which one responds gestaltishly, the way one
responds to a hamburger hotdish. This realization that one needs to read or
listen for structure is both elusive enough and important enough to require
most of our time, for most of the semester. I begin the class by defining a set
of simple ways that claims can be argumentatively related to other claims, and
then I spend the whole semester getting people to say, for some carefully
crafted reconstructions of arguments from the popular press, how exactly those
structures are used to glue together complex, multi-stage arguments. Most of
the work of the course is figuring out how to draw a picture (according to some
carefully defined rules) of the relationships among claims in arguments.
This diagramming exercise is
important for some other reasons as well. Students need some repeated exercise
at which they gradually get better. It doesn’t matter tremendously what they
do, but the sense of steady progress is important pedagogically. Proofs have had that role in geometry and
formal logic. My diagrams fill that need in a way that seems to me particularly
sensible. The main point of the right sort of exercises is not to directly
impart skills (as if people were going to meet these exercises on the street)
but rather to call forth a broad range of skills and attitudes of the right
general sort. A second goal is to enlist students in the project of the class
as their own project, by showing them ways of making measurable progress,
criticizing their own errors, explaining things to other students using the vocabulary of the class, assuming
its conceptual structures. A third
goal of the diagramming exercises is to counter in some meaningful way the
widely popular idea that judgments on all sorts of ethical and political
matters are simply subjective. One needs
something one can not just criticize but count as wrong, take off points for.
The whole apparatus of objectivity gets generated around argument diagrams:
some people get it more quickly than others, they make progress, work helps
them to make progress, laziness results in lack of progress. And that makes a
performative point about the enterprise: there is something to be learned here
that is not just a matter of pleasing or second-guessing the instructor.
3. The
standard moves of formal logic are treated as specialized technology within the
much broader field of ordinary argument, and they are treated selectively.
Here’s the list: disjunctive syllogism, modus tollens, hypothetical syllogism,
universal generalization, modus ponens, combinations of modus tollens and modus
ponens with hypothetical syllogism and combinations of disjunctive syllogism
with modus tollens. To all of these I give my own names, since Metro students
are not by and large going to be taking advanced symbolic courses. I also sneak
in a modal version of modus tollens without making huge fusses about it: (1) If
Jones moves now, he will destroy his son’s mental health. But (2) heaven forbid
he should destroy his son’s mental health, so (3) heaven forbid he should move
now. What I say about the forms of valid argument is just that these are
particular cases of premises working together to support a conclusion, peculiar
in that (a) at least one of the premises needs to be there for there to be any
argument at all to the conclusion (Compare: “(1) Jones is sick and (2) Jones
smells bad, so (3) Jones should not go to the party” with “(1) Either Frank
will go or Joe will go. (2) Joe won’t go. So, (3) Frank will go.”) and (b) if
the premises are true, one is simply forced (as a matter of grammar) to believe
the conclusion. That’s all way too simple, but it is I think a simplification
at the right level; it helps people get on, and it won’t trip them up too badly
if they have the talent to ask later: “But what is this about “matters of
grammar”?”
The moves of formal logic are
treated as useful strategies for putting one’s thoughts in order, for
generating insight, and for presenting thoughts in public (things to think with
and also things to present with) . They aren’t given any special general
precedence over single premise or multi-premise ordinary arguments except as
appropriate tools for some purposes. I use these things in two ways: (a) I ask
people to construct many arguments in these forms. Sometimes, I give them a
conclusion and ask for an argument (e. g. “Construct a chain plus working
backwards (hypothetical syllogism plus modus tollens) to the conclusion: Joe
should eat his vegetables.”) We sometimes do this sort of exercise going around the class. I may
also ask them to construct argument on either side of some controversy (e.g.
“Should my son’s curfew be 11 or midnight?), placing these forms into the
mouths of the debaters. (b) In the diagramming exercises, arguments of these
forms are prominent, and the diagramming exercise goes very much better if
people recognize these forms and strategies. Thus, in the course of reading for
structure, they see plausible uses of these forms over and over and over
again, hundreds of times. Throughout the
treatment of all this, I try to keep saying that the same basic argument idea
can be put in many different ways, can be fitted into one of these funny forms,
or presented as an ordinary argument. The forms may suggest some interesting
manipulations of ideas, may allow for some constructions that help make
progress. They may also obscure the thought, over articulate the thought.
These three points account for
the theoretical spine of the course. One way I summarize it all: “The motto of
this course is: divide and conquer. First, we have to divide understanding an
argument from critically evaluating it; we must understand a structure before
we can say what might be wrong with structure. Then, within criticism, we must
divide again: the criticism of premises has to be separated from the criticism
of connections. Finally, once we know what we think, we must separate the order
of presentation that seems natural to us, as people who have thought this all
through, from the order that will be helpful to some audience relatively new to
the topic, or coming to the topic with perspectives and biases (the separation
of logic and rhetoric).”
Toward the end of the course, I
ask people to do a fair argument presentation paper in a particular format. The
idea of this is to give people a practical, helpful resource in their civic and
professional lives: a simple structure for writing a followable argument paper.
This is not really in some ways part of the course: it is more a advanced
composition add-on intended to make the course more valuable to people. I
frequently consider ditching this feature in favor of more intense analytic and
critical work.
Ad Astra, Excelsior, “So What Else is New?”: I have
been teaching this course long enough that it has started and is
continuing to bore me silly, and I feel ever more what is being left out. One
problem: we take arguments in little discrete chunks: we do not go after the
full range of considerations in a long controversy – say, for example, the
dispute about whether Ashcroft should be confirmed. Further, I don’t make much
effort to educate people about how things are in the world (beyond a commitment
to derive my examples almost always from real print sources). It would be
possible to give people a basic map of the facts that human beings have to
contend with these days, in the course of teaching argument structure and
criticism. Also, I don’t do as much as I would like with getting people to care
about something before they argue about it: we need to see what sanctions are
doing to Iraq, before we get all tied up in how to manage Saddam and still not
kill millions of children. Another problem: I don’t make sophisticated use of
web resources, particularly the amazing access to broad ranges of fairly
authoritative editorial and commentary pieces.
Finally, there are some very
powerful things to say about what goes wrong in argument (the topic generally
treated under the heading of fallacies) and gradually those notions should be
kneaded into the course.
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