November 2021 - Patricia Roberts-Miller

What grade would Goebbels get in first-year composition (pt. III): rejecting Aristotelian physics

It is generally very easy for people to rationalize (in both senses of that word) marginalization, disenfranchisement, deliberate oppression, enslavement, expulsion, and extermination of out-groups by having systems and rhetoric that claims to be rational. Nazi Germany had a functioning judicial system throughout its tenure, as did the USSR, after all, as well as the US throughout segregation and slavery. People defending these systems and policies argued that they were necessary, just, and realistic, and therefore “rational.” [1]

Thus, many people think that working toward a world without genocide, slavery, deliberate oppression, expulsion, and so on requires that we abandon rationality. And, I think that’s sort of right. We need to abandon several specific ways of defining rationality, but we don’t need to abandon rational argumentation.

If you stop someone on the street, and ask them to explain various physical phenomena, they’ll give you an Aristotelian explanation. They’re wrong. Saying that we need to stop teaching rationality because modernist [2] notions of rationality are oppressive (and they are) is like saying that we need to stop teaching physics because Aristotelian physics is wrong. Physics is fine; Aristotelian physics isn’t. Rationality is fine; modernist notions of rationality aren’t.

The problem isn’t with rationality, but with how argumentation textbooks are grounded in modernist models of the mind that are slightly less defensible than Aristotelian physics.

Imagine that introductory physics courses were staffed by hiring people who were smart and skilled at writing about literature, who might never have taken a physics course since high school, and they were given a one- or two-day workshop (that also included Title IX training, a presentation from the writing center, information about digital resources, information about how to get keys, a presentation from the library, and so on) before being thrown into an autonomously taught course in physics. What would they teach? They’d teach Aristotelian physics.

And imagine that, instead of teaching those people other models of physics, the introductory physics courses and textbooks were designed so that those people could teach “successfully.” Introductory physics textbooks would be Aristotelian physics.

That’s what we do in staffing fyc argumentation courses, and that’s why the most popular textbooks are the way they are.

Just to be clear: I don’t think fyc has to teach argumentation. There are lots of other valuable things it can do. I’m open to the argument that argumentation should be a more advanced course taught (and supervised) by people who actually have some understanding of the scholarship in argumentation. A college course in argumentation would be, after all, a college course. It shouldn’t be a controversial claim for me to say that it should be grounded in recent scholarship and taught by people familiar with that scholarship.

My analogy of Aristotelian physics being like modernist notions of rationality falls apart because, while Aristotelian physics is intuitive, modernist notions of rationality are not. People are taught modernist notions of rationality–they’re counter-intuitive. If we’re going to ignore current scholarship in argumentation, why not rely on intuition? While there are reasons for thinking about all this more systematically (and there are a lot of possible systems), I think even common sense is a good basis. I think we can get to a pretty good standard of argumentation by starting with out intuitions about good disagreements.

If you ask students, “What makes for a really good disagreement?,” you end up with a list like this. Interlocutors:

are open to persuasion, or, at least, hearing other positions;
stay on topic;
accurately represent one another’s positions, claims, and so on;
give evidence for their claims;
present claims that are consistent with each other;
if we’re talking about an argument on social media, then they provide sources;
avoid the blazingly obvious fallacies.

The last is where modernist notions again trip us up, and I’ll get to that in the next few posts. But, there too we can generate a list of particularly irritating fallacies even if we don’t know the names. We don’t like when people attribute an argument to us we didn’t make, ask us to defend a position we never claimed, say our argument can be dismissed because it makes them feel bad or because we’re emotional or are bad people, insist that we say they’re right because they feel certain or can cite some youtube video by Rando McRando.

There’s a long and somewhat pedantic post about a more complicated way to think about fallacies here. I intend to do a more accessible version in this series, but, really, the fairness rule tends to work pretty well. Would we feel that’s a fair way to argue were someone to use it against us?

Do you think it’s okay if people don’t listen to you, and represent your position on the basis of what a third party who hates you has said? Do you think it’s okay if someone takes quotes out of context to condemn you, or attributes to you the views of the most extreme member of your in-group? Do you think it’s okay when people deflect?

Then don’t do it to others.

A lot of people believe that, because their group is right, anything they do is right, and any claim that supports their position is true and proof that they are right (regardless of whether it’s logically connected to their conclusion, accurate, sourced in a way they would accept as valid if it made a claim they don’t like). When we ask people to think about the way they’re arguing, and ask them whether they think that’s a good way to argue when others do it to them, we’re asking that they do two things: first, engage in meta-cognition, and two, hold themselves to the same standards they hold others. I think those are good things to teach.

[1] There’s an interesting polysemy in the word “rational” that leads to some nasty and politically toxic equivocation. “Rational” is sometimes used as a synonym for “realist” which is itself used to mean ruthless pursuit of individual or factional goals. Sometimes it is used to mean a supposedly “amoral” pursuit of the best means to achieve a goal set elsewhere. Thus, as people like Albrecht Speer and Wernher von Braun argued, they were just technocrats who didn’t think about the ends and just worried about the mean. That was a lie. They were fine with the ends.

[2] I’m calling it “modernist,” although there are arguments to be made that it’s more accurately called Cartesian. I think it’s useful to call it “modernist,” though, because various groups that are anti-post-modernism are openly advocating a return to modernist understandings of rationality. They are doing so by positioning themselves against one non-modernist position (which they call post-modernist) which is actually pretty marginal, and which they completely misrepresent. If you have to lie to make your case, you have a bad case. And if you’re lying about your critics in order to go back to an ideology that was explicitly supportive of colonialism and genocide, you have serious problems.

What grade would Goebbels get in fyc? Pt. II

What grade does Goebbels get, pt. II

In an earlier post, I argued that a common way of thinking about first-year composition courses that claim to teach argument means that Goebbels could easily write an essay that would fit the criteria implicit in what remains a tremendously popular prompt. I said that the prompt forces teachers into a false dilemma of either giving Goebbels a good grade, or suddenly introducing a new criterion. The problem is the prompt.

I have a lot of crank theories, but this isn’t one of them.

In fact, what I’m saying is pretty much mainstream for scholars of argumentation, informal logic, cognitive psychology, policy argumentation, or political psychology. Just as what apparently controversial scholars in our field say about “grammar” is old news to anyone familiar with sociolinguistics, so anyone familiar with research in any of those fields would know I’m saying anything particularly insightful or new.[1]

And, because what I’m saying isn’t particularly controversial to anyone who is reading the relevant research, there are lots of ways of teaching fyc that don’t get teachers into that false dilemma. One solution is not to claim to teach argumentation, and to do any of the many valuable things that non-argumentation fyc can do.[2]

But, if we’re going to claim to teach argumentation, let’s do it. And there are lots of ways of doing it. That’s the next several posts.

Here, though, I need to argue why we should teach argumentation.

The problem is that fyc has long been dominated by a uselessly formalist presentation of argument, strongly connected to self-serving (and incoherent) definitions of rationality, teaching generations of people that having a “good” argument means having a “rational” tone, giving evidence from a “good” source, and giving reasons from “good” sources.

We do so because of staffing. FYC arose in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century when the notion was that there was a mental faculty, judgment, which could be trained through study of literature, music, or art. A person taught to have good taste would necessarily have good ethics because both were questions of good judgment. Similarly, writing “correct” English meant that they were thinking correctly, and communicating clearly (thesis first, list reasons) meant having a clear understanding of the situation. Interpretation was a universally valid skill, so teaching someone to read a poem was the same as teaching them to read a scientific study. College was seen as training someone to join a community of like-minded people with good judgment, good taste, and “good English.”[3]

Thus, teaching students to appreciate literature, and to write “well” about that literature made students better citizens. With that model of citizenship, it made sense to assume that graduate students who had been excellent literature undergraduates, highly skilled in meeting standards of “correct” grammar—even with no training in argumentation or linguistics—could teach first-year composition classes that would help students as citizens and students. That’s the staffing model we still have.

And, just to be clear, I think college students should study literature, although not for the reasons above. Reading literature cultivates empathy , can help people become more comfortable with uncertainty, fosters perspective-shifting. Literature courses can be tremendously important for an inclusive democracy.

But literature courses do not teach argumentation, and people skilled in literature are not magically capable of teaching argumentation.

This whole set of posts began because, in a comment thread about how our problem (meaning why do so many people think Trump’s open refusal to follow legal or cultural norms is okay) is that students don’t have civics classes,[4] I threw out the comment that fyc could be that class, but it would require a different staffing model, and someone asked me to explain. This set of posts is the explanation.

I meant something like, fyc could be a pretty effective civics course, but not a magic wand. And, of course, the very notion of a civics course that would make people reject toxic populist authoritarianism means a course that is grounded in a particular notion of democracy. It assumes seeing the democratic ideal as a community of people who value disagreement, who strive for a pluralistic world not about your group triumphing, but about a one in which we are all fairly represented, included, and accountable, and held to standards of fairness in terms of benefit and burden.

Depending on your model of education, there are lots of courses that could do this work–history, government, sociology, psychology, and first-year composition. Whatever class it is, it is not a course that relies on the transmission model of education; it has to be a course that persuades people to do the hard work of democratic deliberation. Telling students how to think about politics doesn’t work. I’ll come back to this.

Democracy is counter-intuitive. When we are making decisions, we are tempted to rely on what cognitive psychologists call System 1 thinking : we let our cognitive biases (especially in-group favoritism, binary thinking, associational thinking, naïve realism) drive the bus. Democracy requires that we step out of our world and engage in perspective-shifting, value fairness across groups (do unto others), are willing to lose, and can make our arguments rationally.[5] Ida Wells-Barnett’s Southern Horrors, Martin Luther King’s “Beyond Vietnam,” or Hans Morgenthau’s criticisms of Vietnam were all rational, offensive (condemned as violating norms of civility in their era), and deeply committed—perhaps even vehement—texts.[5] They are fair to their opposition not in terms of niceness, or attributing good motives to them, but in terms of accurately representing their arguments. Their arguments are internally coherent, applying standards across all groups.

In the previous post, I asked what grade Josef would get with a standard paper prompt, and I pointed out that, given that prompt, he would either get a good grade, or we would introduce a new criterion. That’s a dilemma created by how bad that assignment is. It’s also a dilemma created by how bad fyc argument textbooks are on the issue of “logic,” and how gleefully free they are from any influence by the various scholarly fields that should be influencing them: argumentation theory, cognitive psychology, political psychology. And that’s what this post is about.

We are faced with the dilemma about grading Josef because how fyc textbooks conflate “logic” with Aristotle’s term “logos.” (This recent article does a great job explaining that.) And can we start with: why in the world are fyc textbooks arranged around an anachronistic reading of Aristotle’s ethos/pathos/logos? If we’re going to rely on Aristotle, why not the enthymeme, which is what he actually cared about? Or, clutch your pearls, why not recent scholarship in argumentation, cognitive biases, reasoning, or any actually relevant field?

When we teach that “appeal to logos,” “logical appeal,” and “logical argument” are the same, we are conflating two very different meanings of the word “logic.” One is descriptive, and one is evaluative. The first is simply saying that the move is trying to look as though it’s logical (and maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t), and the second is saying that it is logical (it fits the standards of logic). I don’t think Aristotle meant either of those, but, if anything, something closer to the first.

Whatever Aristotle meant, he did not mean what argument texts say is an appeal to logic, since they emphasize what are surface features of a text (if anything, what he would have put in the ethos category): facts, statistics, and various other concepts that wouldn’t even have been in Aristotle’s world.

So, what I’m saying in this post is that, while teaching students to read literature is a tremendously important task, people who are deeply trained in reading and writing about literature are not a priori any more capable of teaching argumentation in a way that enhances inclusive democratic deliberation than graduate students in any other discipline. But, since that’s who’s teaching fyc courses, textbooks have to be ones that people with no training in argumentation can teach. And that is our problem.

If we want to teach argumentation, then we have to hire people who are trained in argumentation.

[1] At one point, I started trying to write a post that had all those references, and I got overwhelmed. These two articles are good starting points, with good citations.

[2] Notice that this solution is good as far as argumentation, but it still means that there are people who are teaching “grammar” without adequate training in sociolinguistics. I’ll come back to that.

[3] As a former Director of a Writing Center, and someone who argues on the internet a lot, I will also say that people who are most rigid about “grammar” are particularly likely to be wrong, even about prescriptive grammar. I have seen papers in which students were wrongly “corrected” for having said something like “The ball was thrown to Chester and me.” The number of faculty who believe in the breath rule for commas leaves me breathless.

[4] This argument is often represented as our needing to go back to some time when we had civics courses and people rejected open abuses of power oriented toward disenfranchising groups and violating democratic norms. Um, when would that be? When disenfranchising black voters was openly advocated? Granted, Trump supporters are very open that they want to go back to the early fifties, except without the taxes, because they believe (correctly) that then they could have political and cultural hegemony. In the fifties, when there were civics courses.

[5] As, I hope, will become clear in these posts, I don’t mean that out-dated, but still popular, understanding of “rationality” promoted by fyc textbooks and popular culture—the one grounded in 19th century logical positivism. All of those false models assume a binary of rational/irrational—a model of the mind falsified by research in cognition for the last thirty years, and also based in myth. Turns out the Phineas Gage story is probably wrong. Since I’ve cited that story more than a few times, my previous scholarship is part of the problem.

I think there are a lot of models of “rationality” that are more useful than the rational/irrational split, and more grounded in recent research on cognition. This research on cognition is usefully and cogently summarized in Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain, Superforecasting, and Thinking Fast and Slow.

[6] Notice that I’m picking examples that are vehement, upsetting, decorum-violating, and controversial. Also, I’m not being precise about the distinctions among reason, rationality, and logic because I think that’s sort of inside baseball.

What if Josef Goebbels took first year composition (fyc)?

In Deliberate Conflict I ridiculed a particular kind of assignment as not teaching argumentation. Since I’m retired, I can make the stronger argument: this kind of assignment teaches students to think they know what good argumentation is, when it it isn’t teaching argumentation at all. It’s like telling students you’re teaching them how to play chess, when you give good grades to students who tip over the board. It does so because it puts teachers into a false dilemma when it comes to grading terrible arguments.

Here’s the assignment prompt:

Write a well-organized five page argument for a policy about which you care, and use four credible sources to support your claims. Use [MLA, APA, Ancient Sumerian] method of citation, and [this font that I happen to like], have a summary or funnel introduction, put your thesis at the end of your introduction, and use correct English.

Having directed a Writing Center for six years, I can say that this is the fallback writing assignment for people all over the university. Sometimes the last three criteria aren’t mentioned, but are simply assumed as included in the “well-organized” criterion.

You get this paper from your student Josef. The introduction is:

Since the dawn of time there has been a problem with Jews. Now, more than ever, Germans are faced with the question of what to do with Jews. Making Germany great again requires expelling Jews because Jewish leftists agreed to the Versailles Treaty, leftist revolts made the major political figures believe they had to surrender, and Marx was a Jew.

The paper has three body paragraphs showing that each of those minor premises (his data) are true. They are, so he has no problem citing credible sources to support those claims. There are no grammar errors, and his citation is faultless.

What grade does this paper get?

On a rubric model, assuming the prompt implies the rubric, he could easily get a good grade. He cares about this issue, he has four credible sources, he uses the correct method of citation, the right font, his thesis is right there, he could easily have the kind of “organization” that student writing is supposed to have (which is specific to student writing, but that’s a different post), and he meets whatever idiosyncratic grammar rules the teacher has.

Josef might have worked a long time on this paper—should he get a good grade on the labor contract model?

If a teacher abides by the criteria implied by that assignment, they seem to be faced with giving him a bad grade because of his argument being awful (and it is)—which is a criterion not mentioned in the prompt–, or giving him a good grade because he met the criteria.

If we give him a bad grade because his argument is awful, we’ve introduced a new criterion, and one that only applies to him. Since Josef’s (false) narrative about him and his group is that they are persecuted by “leftists,” we seem to have given him evidence to support that claim of persecution. He would definitely get invited to go on Tucker Carlson’s show.

If we give him a good grade, we’re saying this is a good argument, and it isn’t.

So, what do we do with Josef’s paper?

This will take me several posts, but the short answer is: the problem is the prompt. It doesn’t ask that students engage in argumentation. We don’t do anything about Josef’s paper because we don’t give that prompt.

It’s fine if we choose to have an fyc program that doesn’t have the goal of teaching argumentation. FYC is overloaded with things it’s supposed to do, and it’s great if programs choose to do one or two things well rather than a lot of things badly. And those one or two things aren’t necessarily argumentation. What’s not fine is claiming that we’re teaching argumentation when we aren’t.

It’s also not fine to set teachers up for the false dilemma of how to deal with Josef’s argument, but that’s what we’re doing. There are many ways that we can write prompts that don’t put us (or teachers of fyc) in that false dilemma, and even many ways that do so while actually teaching argumentation.

“Conservatives” need to stop whining about Facebook “censorship”

Once I hit 61, I started getting a huge number of ads and posts from pro-Trump groups of various kinds (stop calling them conservative—they aren’t ). And, dang, they whine. I see so many posts in which pro-Trump groups ask that I sign a petition about how they’re being silenced by Facebook.

Think about that for a moment.

Clearly, their supporters don’t take that moment.

But, people often ask me about social media censoring, so the strategic talking point that social media censoring is a major issue for democracy and demagoguery is getting adherents—adherents who don’t realize how strategic and irrational that talking point is.

A lot of people repeat the very muddled talking point that democracy relies on all claims being put forward as equally valid. Since Big Tech censors some claims, they say, it is a danger to democracy.

For the sake of argument, let’s set aside the issue of whether that is what democracy requires (it doesn’t), and just worry about the minor premise. If Big Tech threatens democracy because it doesn’t give all points of view complete freedom, why aren’t we worried about Fox News? If democracy requires that all points of view be put forward as equally valid on Facebook, why shouldn’t that be the case with Fox News? Fox censors relentlessly. It doesn’t give equal time to all points of view. Prager U whines relentlessly about getting censored—does it give equal time to all points of view? No. If Big Tech is a threat to democracy because it censors, then so is Big Media. And Fox is as big as it gets.

If democracy requires that the sources of information on which people rely be open to all points of view, then Fox, Prager U, the Leadership Institute, and every single medium whining about being censored on Facebook are threats to democracy.

The whole “Facebook censors” is not about Facebook censoring being wrong—where were these people when Facebook was censoring photos of breastfeeding?—it’s that propagandistic media and institutions (who don’t treat all points of view as equally valid) aren’t allowed to promote misinformation, incite riots, libel, or engage in other actions that put Facebook in danger of getting sued.

The whiners don’t want to be held to those standards. (And, really, if you can’t make your argument without lying, maybe you have a bad argument.)

How Facebook censors is bad, and automated, and I’ve been Facebook jailed many times for stupid reasons. But I am on Facebook a lot, and Facebook has allowed me to post a lot. On the other hand, I’ve never been invited to be on Fox News. Fox has censored me far more, and far more effectively, than Facebook has.

Fox News is not a platform that allows everyone on who wants a chance to speak. Nor does Prager U, the Liberty Institute, or any of the other places whining about Facebook rules. Biden is not on Fox News as often as Trump was (or is). When Fox has someone who is not towing the party line, it’s usually not the best proponent of that point of view, and that person gets cut off.

So, were the people fomenting outrage about Facebook censoring operating from a place of principle, they would be starting with Fox News. They aren’t. They don’t. When it comes to Fox News, Prager U, or bakeries, then the very same people argue that, as a private enterprise, they have the right to promote or silence whoever they want only discover the principle of free speech when they want to be irresponsible; otherwise, they’re in favor of private enterprises censoring.

In other words, they don’t have a principled position; they have a set of talking points that are intended to deflect attention from their behavior and foment outrage about groups that thwart them.

This is strategic fear-mongering. Strategic fear-mongering is when people pretend to be outraged that an important principle is being violated, when, in fact, they don’t care about that principle at all—they violate it all the time.

Were those people—Fox News, Prager U—actually committed to democracy requiring the unfettered expression of all points of view in all media, then they would demonstrate that commitment by themselves being media that engage in no censorship.

In short, various groups are engaged in strategic moral panic about censorship on Facebook–groups that themselves censor far more than Facebook. And GOP-supporters are falling for that demagoguery without noticing how incoherent the whole argument is. Really, that Trump supporters feel sorry for themselves that people make fun of them for being being stupid, and then they fall for this kind of demagoguery, and never make the connection….