A bit of a book I've started playing around with writing
Putting this out in the world to see if other people are picking up what I'm laying down
When I left the Center in the spring, I had planned to write a book about election rumor, but for various reasons that didn’t work out (for a weird reason, actually, but I digress).
I’ve since started playing around with this idea I’ve had for a critical thinking textbook based around a mix of older theories of argument and some newer thinking in epistemology. It’s also what my workshops and talks have been about for the past couple of years as SIFT has become ubiquitous and I’ve moved on to other challenges. Had I stayed at the Center it was also what I wanted to go out and get funding for, after the election — developing this curriculum and testing it.
Anyway, I don’t know if what is new here is visible to most people or if it is too visible (why do I start talking about explanations to start, for instance? There’s a really good reason based on some argumentation theory work in the past 15 years.) But I’m not getting to run as many workshops as I used to on this stuff, so putting it here for feedback.
How to Start an Argument
An evidence-based approach to critical thinking
Chapter One: What is an argument?
You probably already have your own definition of argument. Maybe to you an argument is a fight, or a debate. Maybe it is an attempt at persuasion. Or a thread that runs through a research paper or an essay, from that first topic sentence to the conclusion.
Arguments can be all those things, but I want you to think about arguments in a broader way. An argument, for our purposes, is any use of reasons to make something seem reasonable.
I’ll warn you right now, this is a broader definition than most people adopt. After all, isn’t the point of argument to persuade? Isn’t the point of argument to win? Stay with me for a bit, because this is where it gets interesting.
Explanations are arguments (and that’s interesting)
Let’s say you are leaving early for classes. “I’m taking off a little early,” you tell your roommate or partner, “I have to take Meridian to avoid the construction on 99th.”
You’re not trying to convince your roommate to do something. Heck, they may have nowhere to go at all today. But note what you didn’t do here. You didn’t just walk out the door saying nothing. You didn’t just say you were leaving early. You said:
What you were doing (leaving early, taking Meridian), and
Why it made sense (construction on 99th)
This is actually an argument.
Of all the things humans do, producing arguments is one of the more human. We don’t do it all the time, of course, but we do it a lot. We supply people with reasons for our beliefs or actions because we have a desire to be seen as reasonable. Sometimes that is in the interest of persuasion, or accomplishing some goal. But a lot of times it’s just we don’t want to seem random, or biased, or illogical. Maybe in the case above you want to be seen as the sort of person that thinks ahead about travel plans. Or maybe you can see them wondering what’s up with your early departure.
People care very much about being seen as reasonable people holding well-grounded beliefs. Sometimes weirdly so. I know I’ve found myself getting upset that random people online – people I’ve never met – believe that I’m irrational or biased. Once in a while I’ve gotten so upset about this that I’ve found it hard to sleep! That’s weird! I don’t know these folks! But most people reading this have had similar experiences, even if we know the feelings don’t make sense. To be thought unreasonable feels like social death – even when experienced outside our normal social circle.
While being seen as unreasonable can cause a lot of social pain, the compulsion to be seen as reasonable is the key to humanity's secret strength. Let’s go back to our example.
I say “I’m taking off a little early. I have to take Meridian to avoid the construction on 99th.”
Ahh, you say – “Isn’t repaving is paused today because of rain? You can take 99th if you want.” Happy to hear this I get another cup of coffee, leave a bit later, and arrive at my destination perfectly on time.
And this is the beauty of argument. Were I just to leave, without revealing my reasons, I would never hear the information that lets me know my plan is flawed. Because I give reasons, others can analyze them, poke at them, and engage with me in sense-making around them.
Maybe they have my best interest at heart. Maybe they just want to appear reasonable or in-the-know themselves. Whatever the motivation we end up having a slightly better day than we might otherwise.
The benefits of reason-sharing
Other times we do want to convince people of something, not simply explain our reasons. But notice that the structure and benefits of reason-giving are not substantially different when explaining versus convincing.
Let’s say that instead of taking off alone for classes we are car-pooling. “We have to leave early,” I say, “there’s construction on 99th and we have to take Meridian.” You’re not sure of that. You say, as before, the rain has paused the work on 99th and we should be fine leaving at the appointed time. After checking that you are right about the construction pause, I agree and we leave later.
You’ve used reasons to persuade me to take the course of action you prefer, but there’s not much difference, structurally, between this persuasion scenario and the explanation scenario. I gave my reasons, you challenged them. I altered my viewpoint and ultimately my action.
We can also imagine this scenario in a case where neither one of us felt compelled to give reasons or be seen as reasonable. I say “We need to leave early”. You say “No, we don’t”. Then – well, what? We flip a coin, maybe? Giving reasons allows us to bring information to the table informing our views; and often others find that information persuasive, or at the very least, useful.
Seeing little exchanges like this as the small arguments they are is important because when we think of argument too often we think of disagreements on big issues where both participants bring radically different values and evidence to the table. Gun control, abortion, presidential power. People look at two people continuing to disagree on beliefs they have held for decades after examining one new piece of evidence and exclaim “Look, argument doesn’t work at all!” Nothing could be further from the truth. We notice when argument fails precisely because argument so often succeeds. And we continue to engage in argument on big issues, despite a history of failure, because argument is so uniquely useful in most domains of our life.
It’s so common that it’s a habit. Every time you try to figure out where to go out to eat (and note that Sarah has a gluten allergy, or Red Robin closes at 10), every time you tell your partner you’re finally going to take the plunge and get a gym membership, because you’ve really gotten out of shape, every time you say you’re going to take the trash out later because it’s pouring right now – you’ve made an argument.
Far from being a useless tool, you make arguments every day, and making them comes naturally to you. Simple ones do at least. Ones where less bias comes into play, or where domain knowledge is stronger. Like a lot of education, the process of getting better at producing and evaluating argument is not a matter of learning something completely new to you, but better understanding what you already do on a more analytical level so you can improve it, like a natural baseball player videotaping their swing in order to analyze it and up their game.
The structure and functions of argument
Let’s return to our original definition of argument:
An argument is any use of reasons to make a belief or course of action seem more reasonable.
Sometimes of course we might be arguing against a course of action or a belief, and so we can add some minor complexity in here to cover that:
An argument is any use of reasons to make a belief or course of action seem more or less reasonable.
In the analogy above we talked about a batter improving her swing by watching a video of her swing. She’s not going to be watching a video while she plays baseball of course. But by looking at what she is doing and becoming more conscious of it she can improve and play at a higher level.
That’s our model for teaching argument. We’re going to start with a bunch of small arguments that you might construct or critique during the course of the day. We’re going to get you to diagram them, which may seem unbearably academic. But what we want to start by doing is showing you – as corny as this may sound – the beauty of what you do on a daily basis and then talk about how we can level that up.
Along the way we will also show the various functions that argument performs
Reasonableness is not necessarily support
The other night a family member took the last slice of pizza. On pizza night. This can be a contentious matter.
Coming out to the living room where we were watching Survivor, they endured the looks of others as they strolled in with the last slice.
“I can’t have the dessert,” she offered, “It’s got soy in it.”
Humans are so good at building and analyzing arguments that everyone understood what this meant immediately. The assumption of the room was that everybody should have their fair share of the meal. The looks she was getting implied that the taking of the pizza was a violation of that social norm – that she had taken too much, that she was acting unfairly. She argued back that it actually was fair for her to have a bit more pizza than others, as her allergy was going to lock her out of having the dessert, which others had access to.
And you know what? Despite the tension around that pizza’s last slice, everyone in the room was more or less “Yep, that makes sense.”
Now that doesn’t mean that people were glad the last slice was gone. It doesn’t even mean that they thought the way things played out was the fairest outcome. But it meant that people could see her point and see it enough that they thought her action was reasonable, and not inconsiderate.
This sounds like a big drama. It wasn’t, of course. It happened in the blink of an eye, like many arguments we exchange. But together we all did something amazing.
First there was an implied claim. We can state this either positively or negatively
Taking the last piece is justified
Taking the last piece was not justified
Now, note the person taking the last piece could have just said, more or less, go suck on an egg, I don’t have to explain this. But they wanted to seem like a reasonable person playing by the rules. So they offered their argument by providing a reason.
Once the reason was offered (soy allergy), we all intuited the argument. Which is usually how it works. Unlike in a courtroom or in a research paper, we usually intuit the argument from the evidence offered. We know the evidence must mean something relative to an existing issue, so we intuit what it could be.
So we start with this evidence:
Soy in dessert (E)
and we intuit it’s about the pizza claim (that this is a justifiable action):
Soy in dessert (E) ===> Last piece justifiable (C)
And then we make a guess about what’s in the middle here – what connects the evidence to the claim? Some people call this the warrant, and we’ll call it that sometimes too. But when we map it out we’ll label it as the “and since” of the argument.
I know it seems like we’re going all CSI on this slice of pizza. We realize it’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous because like most of the arguments we make in a day the argument is accepted easily. People say, “Sure, fair enough.”
This is part of our point. Contrary to what you hear in the media, most arguments help people to see the other side of things, most arguments are accepted, and most disagreements are productive. When we look at people discussing the last slice of pizza vs. opinions on Israel and Palestine, this is far easier to see.
So stay with us for just a bit more. Suppose you were grouchy. You really, really wanted that slice of pizza. It was not your best day, and you were being a bit of a dick. In what ways could you challenge this?
Three options stand out.
First, you could challenge the evidence. You could say there actually is no soy in the dessert. Perhaps this was a lie, or perhaps they got it wrong.
Second, you could challenge the idea that they could not consume the dessert. Maybe the type of soy in it is not the type that causes a reaction, or maybe the person quite often eats soy products, so you’re a little bit suspicious. Maybe you say, hold on, didn’t you have the same cake yesterday?
Third, you could challenge the “value warrant” – the “and since” that has to do with what we supposedly agree on. Maybe your view is that it doesn’t matter what people can and cannot consume, they should get equal portions of everything. You might say, ok, that’s about the dessert, what does that have to do with pizza?
You probably don’t do any of these things, for good reasons in this case. In this case, if a person has an allergy they are probably a much better expert on what they can and can’t eat. You’ll look like an idiot challenging that unless there is a long history of this person lying. They are also much more motivated to determine correctly whether something has soy or not. Finally, your value warrant challenge – that a person who is allergic to the cake but not the pizza should get a portion of cake and a portion of pizza, just like everyone else? If you say that in front of people they are going to tell you to get a grip, because that is simply not a shared position.
So you keep your mouth shut, not because you don’t want the pizza, but because you too would like to appear reasonable, and the reasons that you might raise are going to look rather foolish when uttered in front of people. You might have a bit of a point here, but that’s it. A bit.
There would be exceptions – if you really truly knew there was no soy in the dessert, you might reply – “Oh, hold on, there’s no soy in there, I checked twice. I think it’s a different brand than you’re thinking.” If you both went over and looked at the label and this turned out to be true the person that took the pizza might even be happy you said something – they can have cake now. That’s good. But you’d definitely want to make sure you know what you were talking about before you spoke up.
A Social Web of Reasonableness
Ok, enough with the pizza, at least for a bit. But keep in mind this pattern because it’s the way argument makes us all a bit smarter and a bit fairer.
A person expressing a belief or pursuing a course of action wants to seem reasonable and gives reasons for what they do.
An audience – whether one person or thousands – evaluates those reasons.
If a person in the audience disagrees, they think about whether their reasons for disagreeing are solid enough before offering them – because they want to appear reasonable too.
If a critique is expressed, an audience evaluates the reasons in the critique as well.
Individually we’re not very rational people. We often lead with our emotions. We’re upset about things, we believe we deserve things. But in public we have to try to make those things seem reasonable, and that forms a constraint on what we can do or what we can publicly claim to believe.
And that’s where I am at the moment… maybe I’ll post more as I go forward.