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Weinies

My grandmother called hot dogs "weinies."  That used to send my brother and I into fits of laughter when she served them to us for lunch.  This reaction isn't a whole lot different from the coverage of the recent "Weiner" scandal.  If only his name had been something else. 

The question has been raised as to whether Weiner should resign.  There seem to be two reasons for this. 

1.  He broke some kind of law or congressional code of ethics.

or

2.  He is now politically castrated.

Ad. 1.  He didn't break any laws–I think.  Other people have done far worse (looking at you Senator Vitter).

2 seems to be the strongest reason.  Nonetheless, it is reasonable to make a distinction between the two reasons.  And it's also reasonable to think of analogous cases (Vitter, etc.).  This seemst to be something local columnist John Kass does not grasp.  He writes:

There's not much fun left in watching that New York liberal, U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-Pervert, twist in the political winds.

But there's a great deal of amusement still to be had watching liberal commentators twist themselves into all sorts of bizarre and unseemly shapes trying to protect Congressman Priapic.

They're hysterical.

"He lied to his wife, he lied to us, he lied to his colleagues," cried Bill Press, a liberal radio talk show host and rabid Weinerista who still doesn't think Weiner should resign.

"That is totally unacceptable," Press said of Weiner's behavior on "The Ed Show" on the liberal MSNBC the other day. "I pointed it out. Others have lied. Lying in Washington, D.C., is not a cause for losing your job, or else this would be a ghost town."

Lying isn't cause for losing your job if you're a politician, though it certainly should be.

But lying about taking your clothes off and about sending rather urgently excited photographs of your special purpose to random women — including a blackjack dealer, a porn queen and two college girls — kind of disqualifies you for public office, doesn't it?

And though the liberal press just doesn't get it, many Democrats have finally realized what Republicans would have known instinctively:

You don't want Weiner as the poster boy for your party.

Weiner sent around photos of his weiner.  People apparently do that, but it's a real question as to whether someone deserves to lose their job over it; as it is not, by most accounts, actually illegal (unlike, say, prostitution).  And asking that question doesn't constitute twisting yourself "into all sorts of bizarre and unseemly shapes."  Nor does it really amount to "defending" weiner. 

 

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OSSA Day 3: On begging the question

Patrick Bondy (McMaster University) "Epistemic Circularity"

Bondy looks at track record arguments (arguments wherein one cites one's successful beliefs to support further beliefs–I have a good track record, so I'm right).  Seems right to think such arguments are circular, and hence bad.  But not everyone agrees.  Some (Alston, Bergmann) think you can have virtuous circular arguments (we've discussed this before).  But, Bondy argues, their accounts collapse under their own weight.   

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OSSA Day 3: Scheming

"Argument Schemes: An Epistemological Approach," Christoph Lumer, Universita' di Siena.

I like this topic very much, as I find the notion of Argument schemes to historically interesting (descending from the medieval variations on the Aristotelian topoi), theoretically enlightenging (as a classificatory system of argument types), and pedagogically useful (as a way of teaching argument construction and evaluation).  Lumer likes the idea of schemes as well, but finds the articulation of them wanting.  His paper articulated a different, and more limited set, of schemes (basically deductive, inductive, and practical).  Those aren't so much schemes as they are types of argument.  Nonetheless, the focus of Lumer's work is the epistemic theory of argumentation, which understands arguments as about justifief belief, rather than, say, agreement, conflict resolution, etc.  Fun thing about this paper is the Douglas Walton, the leading exponent of the scheme view under criticism, was in attendence, and challenged Lumer's approach in the Q and A.  He questioned the basis of Lumer's selection of schemes–pointing out that it was overly theoretical, and unrelated to the way people actually argue.  A good time was had by all. 

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OSSA Day 3: Your argument is valid–NOT.

Second session: Leo Groarke's "Saying 'Not' with Images."  Groarke argued via a very nice set of examples that images can indeed express negation.  Classic example: a crossed out hanger (a pro choice symbol).  Paul van den Hoven raised an interesting point in his commentary, namely whether Groarke has shown rather that images can express refutation, rather than "negation."  This raises the broader question about the verbal dependency of visual arguments; or the visual dependency of verbal arguments.

On this score: cf. the "your argument is invalid" meme.   

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OSSA Day 3: methods of informal logic?

First session this morning: Hans Hansen's "Are there Methods of Informal Logic?" (commentary by Dan Cohen).  Great presentation, excellent commentary, and great questions.  Hansen's presentation focused on the illative (premise-conclusion) relation alone and so the idea of method is almost strictly analogous to that of deductive logic.  So, to rephrase the question, are there methods of evaluating informal illation analogous to those of formal arguments?  There seem to be several candidates, and Hansen's paper lucidly covered the alternatives.  This warranted the comment: maybe this proliferation of conceptions of informal logic is very bad PR.  

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OSSA Day 2: Fallacy Identification

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Last session of the day, Mark Battersby and Sharon Bailin's "Fallacy Identification in a Dialectical Approach to Teaching Critical Thinking," argued for the following three points:

  • Fallacies are arguments whose rhetorical value greatly exceeds their probative value;
  • Fallacy identification plays a prima facie role in eliminating bad arguments;
  • Fallacies are not the end of critical analysis, but open the door to more comprehensive evaluation.

Very helpfully, they set their view against some other common approaches to fallacies (Rescher, Hansen, Pragma-Dialectics, Walton–should do a post on these some day).  Interesting about their definition (immediately called into question by Christoph Lumer), was the idea of "rhetorical value."  He maintained that this would exclude many cases of fallacy.  For instance, absurd arguments which have little probative power; or, relatedly, an argument with lots of probative power and little persuasive power.  Battersby stood his ground that rhetorically powerless arguments can't really be fallacious, as no one would by them.

Some good commentary by van Laar (read by Krabbe).

*edited–thanks mustache man.  I was typing this during the session, trying to be quiet.

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OSSA Day 2: Mannequin

Interesting thing about broad topic conferences such as this is that you'll see people from all sorts of disciplines, places, approaches present papers on all sorts of topics.  This morning, for instance, I heard Emma Engdahl, Marie Gelang, and Alyssa O'Brien's "The Visual Rhetoric of Store-window Mannequinas," the title of which gives you a good idea what the paper was about.  Luckily, the presentation was accompanied by a slide show of mannequins from various times and places.  The authors noted the particular phenomenon of headless mannequins, a fact which inspired much discussion.  There are a couple of more papers on the topic of visual arguments (one, in fact, on visual negation–I hope to see that one tomorrow).   

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OSSA Day One: Religion in Critical Thinking Class?

The last paper of the day for me was Donald Hatcher's "Should Critical Thinking Courses Include the Critique of Religious Beliefs?" 

Hatcher argued for various reasons that religious beliefs ought to be subject to critical scrutiny.  He ran through about eight potential objections to critiquing religious beliefs (I'll try to get a copy of the handout if not the paper), answering them all and concluding that indeed religious beliefs ought to be subject to critical scrutiny in critical thinking courses.

So far so good.  One questioner wondered, however, whether there are special considerations in college courses.  Most of Hatcher's arguments concerned the general question of scrutiny of relgious beliefs, not, as advertised, the particular question of classroom critique.  The paper commenter had similar intuitions, pointing out that some religious views might best be considered in opposition to certain scientific views (such as for instance evolution).

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Ossa Day One: arguing for the sake of it

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In hte 2 O'Clock Daniel Cohen read a paper called "academic arguments."  Simply put, an academic argument is one that really matters not–a knowledge for its own sake argument in other words.  The question raised was basically whether one has any justification for engaging in such an argument.  Though Cohen is skeptical that any such purely academic arguments exist (he didn't give any examples), he argued nonetheless that it would be worthwhile, on ethical grounds, to engage in them. 

One interesting objection, the last one made at the end of the session, concerned whether we can really abstract the question from other ones: in particular, though knowledge may be intrinsically valuable, it is the least of intrinsic goods, so there will likely always be something better to do than argue for the sake of it.