Category Archives: General discussion

Anything else.

General discussion

OSSA Day 2: Fallacy Identification

5 Comments

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.

General discussion

OSSA Day 2: Reasonable Hostility

Karen Tracy, University of Colorado-Boulder

"Reasonable Hostility"

Some background questions: Is there such a thing as reasonable hostility?  Is that an oxymoron?  If there is such a thing as reasonable hostility in argument, then are the constraints of civility improper in some cases?

A rough version of reasonable hostility. First, there's a difference between speaker-hostility and listener-perception of hostility (you can get a non-hostile question, but perceive it as hostile).  Second, reasonable hostility must be to a perceived wrong, but not to initiate a wrong. Third, whatever hostility manifested must be from care for the issue, not hating a speaker.  There must be the required face-work in the midst of that hostility.

Some examples of hostility (and reasonable hostility) from the Hawaii Same-Sex Civil Union debates.  Some features: Passionate speech, some attention to face but still causing insult (e.g., calling opponents to Same-Sex Marriage bigots, face-saving by opponents to Same-Sex opposition… "it's not about hatred…",  Opponents to same-sex marriage point out that the proponents don't apologize for their tone, Proponents responding that they can't apologize because they've been the ones who are being wronged)

One thing to remember: to distinguish between what's persuasable and what's not. Reasonable hostility must take account of what can and cannot be argued in a culture at a time. 

Q1: What's the role of critical thinking?  What, other than argument, changed the culture so that gay-rights issues are arguable now?

Q2: What's the tipping point between arguable and non-arguable? Or is it a matter of degree?

Q3: Why so much face-work?  Is it because of the fact that an issue is becoming non-arguable?

Q4: Is reasonable hostility a norm, or is it a description of how folks are actually manifest hostility?

General discussion

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).   

General discussion

OSSA Day 2: Epistemic community

Michel Dufor, Univ. Sorbonne Nouvelle

"Epistemic Communities and Arguments for New Knowledge"

Dufor's background presumptions: Communities are epistemic when sharing specific beliefs, interests and arguments. E.g., religious and scientific communities.  The question is how knowledge is produced in these communities.

Dufour's suggestion: Poincare on the difference between justification and intuition in mathematics is a model for mathematical creativity.

Q1: What about Socrates and Meno's slave boy?  Is the slave boy creative, or is the means of demonstration with Socrates only about justification?

Q2: What is the difference between intuition and mathematical induction?  Is there only a difference in modes of presentation?

General discussion

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).

General discussion

OSSA Day One: Emotion and Reason

Robert Pinto, University of Windsor

"Emotions and Reasons"

Pinto argues:  (1) emotions can provide reasons for action because the evaluative attitudes at their core can, together with cognitive attitudes, provide reasons for the conative attitudes (desires and intentions) – which are reasons to act

(2) evaluative attitudes can be rooted in reasons insofar as they arise from a combination of cognitive attitudes together with other evaluative or conative attitudes which (potentially) render them rational.

Q1: Can one fear something without believing it is impeding (e.g., is it right to say that some S can live in fear of cancer without having the belief that it is impending?)

Q2: What is it to value wrongly?  How does one determine that one has done so?

Q3: What about irrational fears/emotions?  E.g., one certainly can fear spiders without having any beliefs about their badness.  One can even fear them despite actively believing them to be good thing!

General discussion

OSSA Day One: Presumptions

David Godden, Old Dominion

"Presumptions in Argument: Epistemic versus Social Approaches"

Godden's paper is a response to Kauffield's 'commitment-based' approaches to presumption.  The commitment model is one where there are socially grounded defeasible presumptions about the right sort of ways for people to behave.  The question is whether these 'ought' claims are a basis for making presumptions about how people will behave.

The main issue of contention was whether the moral expectations about people (e.g., that people ought not drive drunk, or that people ought to do their jobs), when defeated (e.g., when you see that S is visibly drunk and behind the wheel of the car, when you see serious dereliction of duty) disappear.  Godden says yes:  he calls them 'busted bubbles'.

Some questions:

Q1: Are presumptions about duties really predictions?

Q2: Surely the duties don't go away when our predictions are defeated.  Is this a matter of what you expect morally vs expect epistemically?

Q3: Should it be Dr. Livingston, I assume?

General discussion

Ossa Day One: arguing for the sake of it

1 Comment

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. 

General discussion

OSSA Day One: Gordon and Walton

"Modeling Critical Questions as Additional Premises"

Gordon and Walton's paper had two objectives.  First, to show how the scheme model for argument forms provide a means to explain how critical questions function in argumentative dialogue.  Second, to show how the Carneades system of argument representation can make these critical exchanges explicit.  Arguments from authority were the test case. The critical questions for authority arguments are along the lines of whether the authority is motivated to lie, whether the authority's pronouncements are consistent with other authorities, whether the authority is reliable in this case, and so on.  The questions and answers add premises to the arguments.

A few questions about the paper were:

Q1: Is the dialogical model overplayed here, instead of adding premises, don't questions elicit the expression of suppressed premises?

Q2: How widely used is the Carneades system, and is it a representation of audience-acceptance or is it a representation of argument-assessment?

Q3: What are the consequences for legal reasoning for Carneades' use?

General discussion

OSSA Day One: Thagard’s “Critical Thinking versus Informal Logic”

So begins our "live blogging" exercise from the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation conference.  I won't comment on the beer store, the Vietnamese restaurant, or Detroit Coney Island style hot dogs, or the 2.50  3.00 dollar Rye.

Scott will comment on Doug Walton's paper on argument schemes are dialogue; here a quick note about this morning's keynote by Paul Thagard's, "Critical Thinking versus Informal Logic." 

Always interesting about papers like these are the examples of motivated reasoning, which Thagard might call "inference."  Argument, by constrast, is the stuff you do in logic class.  The problem Thagard points to is that argument has little cognitive value; we arrive at most of our beliefs by a process of inference, which, is unfortunately susceptible to various motivational distortions (fear, hope, etc.).  So what of argument?  Argument can at best be a corrective, used in the best of circumstances to influence inference, perhaps overnight, asleep, or while dreaming.