It's the time of year in the college teaching market when job announcements start sprouting for the next academic year. Reading over their teaching requirements reminds me of being up there in the classroom, and for whatever reason this morning I recall one of the more difficult things to accomplish in the philosophy classroom. Particularly in the intro philosophy classroom.
In those places, there are a great many young minds being introduced to formulating a meritable argument for the very first time. Of course, by 'argument' here I don't mean shouting and screaming, or all-capping and multiple exclamation-pointing. Everyone knows how to do that already.
The assignments I'd give would usually have two primary elements: first, that the writer shows that (a) he or she can recognize an argument given by another author, and (b) that he or she understands it by putting it into their own words. Second, that the student shows a basic mastery of argumentative principles by defending or rejecting the point of view previously discussed.
I don't know if you'd believe how often I'd get the defense: "X's point of view is right because it agrees with what I believe," and the rejection, "X's point of view is wrong because it goes against what I believe."
Le sigh. Seeing it show up repeatedly breaks a thinking person's heart. And regrettably, although I won't take the time to explore it here, I think it's like a small mirror reflecting the level of public debate and discourse that is prevalent in our culture. I'm thinking things like Mr. Limbaugh's "ditto-heads" and folks hollering "you're wrong because you don't think like I do."
Most unsatisfactory. But how to counter it? That is the difficult thing.
An instructor can spend hours going over how to connect ideas up together in a logical fashion, how to recognize cogency, and basic but easy-to-slip-into fallacies to avoid. Encouraging the student to actually employ those tools is another matter altogether. It's the ol' leading a horse to water thing.
So I try to parse it down to motivation: what is so compelling about the "it agrees/disagrees with what I believe already," such that it shows up so often? If I can but figure out how that works, then perhaps I can short-circuit the process and try and re-route the thinking strategy.
A straightforward motivation is that it's easy, and here I'm thinking especially about the ever-recurring-paper-written-the-night-before-it's-due. We've all been there. And from a teacher's point of view, these essays are often, but not always, detectable by a variety of symptoms, this being one of them. It's 3 in the morning, you're tired, it has all the appearance of a reason, there - done! But these kinds of essays typically have other factors working against them - such as extensive copy/pastes from the internet - so the presence of the "it agrees with me/doesn't agree" is usually the least of its problems.
I'm considering more the kind of written work that evidences the occurrence of thoughts. What is going on in the student's mind, that she (or he - I'm gonna drop the disjunction now) is seemingly incapable of scouring up her own independent reasons?
The best I've come up with is the following. One one hand, maybe the writer thinks that the author she's covering has said everything brilliant that exists in defense of the argument at hand, such that her intuitive agreement (or disagreement) is all she has left? Alternatively, perhaps the writer takes her own confidence in her intuitions as the sine qua non for her intuitions' strength? These are two different vectors, and I'll talk about how I analyze them anon.
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