Tag: teaching argumentation

Finding the strongest opposition arguments

various headlines accusing someone of being a demagogue

I often say that we should try to find the best opposition arguments, and so, when I’m trying to do that, there are some sites I tend to use. I wanted to post something about my sources, and then found I needed a fairly long explanation as to why I use these when I’m looking for the strongest argument for a policy, practice, or claim I think is wrong. There are two things I’m not doing–I’m not looking for “objective” or “unbiased” sources; I’m not looking for a representative sample from places along a continuum of party affiliation.

As I’ve argued, I think the left-right binary/continuum is nonsense (to the extent that it isn’t demagogically self-fulfilling), as is the notion of a binary of “objectivity” or “bias.” People who use terms like “objective” or “biased” can’t define them in a way that fits with research on cognition, and those terms are usually just what Burke called “ultimate terms.” A source might be very “biased,” in the sense of only including data that supports its argument, and yet all that data might be “objectively” true (that is, accurate representations of good studies and so on). I don’t think there’s any point in trying to find better ways to define objectivity or bias–I think we should just walk away from trying to find objective or unbiased sources, in service of a different goal.

A lot of discussion about sources is in service of the aspiration of The One Source on which we can rely. We have to abandon the comfortable fantasy of a source on which we can rely, a prophet with direct relation to The Truth. We all want clarity; we all want a source, author, ideology, perspective, in-group that guarantees us that what we believe is absolutely true. We all want to be able to believe rather than think. We are all suckers.

The fantasy of an objective source is unfortunately favorable to toxic populism in that both posit that there is some one perspective from which we might look at an issue that is the purely true one. Both rely on the false notion that, when we’re faced with deep disagreement, we should try to identify the group that has the Truth. If we find and join that group, then we will always be right, and we don’t have to think, but believe. Down that road lies demagoguery. If we believe that belief is enough, that there is an in-group that has a direct line to Truth, then we look for that group. And then we believe that only that (our) in-group has a legitimate policy agenda, and everyone else is spit from the bowels of Satan. And we start thinking that authoritarianism is a pretty good idea.
We all want to believe that our beliefs and behaviors are not just right, but the only possible way to think or behave. We pant after certainty the way my dog pants after squirrels. The difference is that he knows he hasn’t caught the squirrel, and we think we have.

If fyc, or any course, is to be a course in civics, then it means a course that teaches students how to recognize and resist that panting hope that, when we use this source, are a member of this group, (or whatever), we no longer have to worry that we might be wrong. We don’t need a course that tells us how to recognize when they are wrong, but when we are.

We shouldn’t worry that we might be wrong. That’s like worrying that water runs downhill. It does. We are. Just as, if we’re building a house, we have to take into account that water runs downhill, and plan for how we will manage rainwater, so we should acknowledge that we are always, if not actively wrong, then at least not seeing a situation from every possible point of view. We should also acknowledge that we, being human, think about the world through the lenses of cognitive biases. That water runs downhill doesn’t mean we have to lie on the ground and refuse to build a house; that we are all operating via cognitive biases doesn’t mean we have to lie on the ground and refuse to deliberate. There are ways that we can reduce the chances we’re wrong, and one of the most available and most straightforward, is to look at the best arguments that say we’re wrong.

If we believe that people disagree because we really disagree, (and not because everyone else is a benighted tool of a malevolent force) then we start looking for why people disagree. And it might be that some of the people who disagree with us are fools, stooges, psychopaths, or grifters–in fact, I think that it’s a given regardless of the issue and regardless of our position that some people on every point on the political spectrum are fools, tools, and so on (including us, from time to time)–but not everyone who disagrees with us is in one of those categories. And not everyone who agrees with us is an angel of enlightened and compassionate discernment. Because there are never just two sides to an issue.

And that’s why we need to find the best arguments that criticize our position, or argue for a policy we think is wrong-headed. Sometimes, we will find that even the best argument for some policy or candidate is incoherent, made in bad faith, profoundly dishonest, or not even good enough to be proven wrong. Not all arguments are equally good.

And this is where policy argumentation is a useful heuristic. If people are making a specific affirmative case for a policy we think is wrong-headed, and we read the best case for it, and it is wrong-headed, that doesn’t mean that our policy is right. Someone’s affirmative case (the plan for which they’re arguing) might be bad, and yet their negative case (what’s wrong with our plan) might be good. It also doesn’t mean that everyone who disagrees with us is wrong.

In my experience, we’ll often find that there are reasons and good enough arguments for positions, practices, ideologies, and groups other than ours. And, in my experience, we’ll often decide that, even though there are good enough arguments for a position, we still disagree. They’re good enough to be taken seriously, but not good enough to persuade us to change our mind.

What matters for the purpose of finding strong opposition arguments is: 1) if the source accurately represents the data (even if it is selective); and 2) if it is the best argument for that perspective.

I don’t think there is a two-dimensional way to represent our policy affiliations, so I talk about a spectrum. But even the metaphor of perspective is damagingly reductive. There are continua, but more than three, and some of those continua have more than one axis. I think it can be useful to talk about left v. right on some of those specific axes (e.g., social safety net), but not on all.

Here are what I think are some of the important axes in politics:
• Government regulation that promotes particular industries ( “pro-business government intervention”) v. free market [note that both of these positions would be considered “right-wing’]
• Government regulation that promotes safe, equitable, and ethical working conditions v. free market
• Government regulation that promotes safe, equitable, and ethical working conditions v. pro-business government intervention
• Interventionist foreign policy (intervention long before imminent existential threat) v. isolationism/pacifism (military action only for imminent existential threat)
• Interventionist foreign policy for purposes of promoting US businesses/economy v. interventionist foreign policy for ethical/moral goals (Wilsonian foreign policy)
• Support for a social safety net
• Epistemic libertarianism/authoritarianism: the extent to which someone believes that other points of view are legitimate points of view that should be heard; or, to put it another way, the extent to which people believe that there is an obviously good policy solution for every problem, and they know what it is
• Populism v. Pluralism: the extent to which one believes that there is one group that is real v. multiple legitimate points of view
• Populist Authoritarianism v. fairness: there is one group that is real, and all policies and practices should privilege that group v. procedural fairness
• Procedural fairness v. equity
• Regulations promoting reactionary v. progressive standards of “moral” behavior
• Naïve realist, reactionary, and demagogic hermeneutics of foundational texts (the US Constitution, Scripture, and so on) v. ….well, all others.

There are probably other important ways of thinking about various American policy preferences–this isn’t an exhaustive list. I just wanted to show that we really don’t have a binary of policy options or affiliations. I’m sure other folks could come up with lots of additional one (e.g., promoting environmental protection through nudges v. punitive regulation).

If we want, as teachers of argumentation, to get students to understand that our political world is not an existential and apocalyptic battle between Us and Them, then one way is to teach them how nuanced our policy commitments are—that they aren’t a binary or continuum. Just to be clear: there are people who want to destroy democracy and create a one-party state of people who have the pure ideological commitment. But those people are all over the political spectrum, and not everyone who disagrees with us is like that.

So, having said all that and given lots of caveats, here’s a list off the top of my head of sources I often use. I’ve given annotations on some, but not all. Again, my point is not to present this list as the definitive list that others should use, but to show what such a list might look like. Most teachers probably need to create their own, depending on their paper topics. For instance, if I had a lot of students writing about immigration, the list would be really different. A lot of sources on this list would be irrelevant, and I’d include some pro-union/anti-immigration sources, as well as some much more pro-immigration sources than anything I have on here. This list is intended to help others think about what lists they might give their students.

American Enterprise Institute. Reliably pro-GOP.
Cato Institute. Libertarian, reactionary.
Christianity Today. Conservative and moderate American Protestant Christian, conservative on social issues.
Council on Foreign Relations. Mixed.
The Economist. “Liberal” in the British sense.
Foreign Affairs. Interventionist, especially for business or military purposes, tends to be anti-Dem (but not always pro-GOP).
Foreign Policy. Interventionist for humanitarian purposes, tends to be pro-Dem (but not anti-GOP).
Guttmacher Institute. Reliable data on reproductive issues, generally pro-birth control, but not in ways that seem to bias the data.
Heritage Foundation. Almost always pro-GOP. Originalist on constitution. [Edited to add: I’m no longer recommending Heritage. They’re engaged in active dishonesty about CRT. If they’ll lie about that, they’ll lie about anything.]
Homeland Security. Government statistics on issues of immigration.
The Nation. Democratic socialist on economic issues, left on cultural/social issues, anti-interventionist on foreign policy, anti-GOP, often anti-DNC.
New York Times. Mixed economy on domestic, Wilsonian Foreign Policy, often anti-GOP and DNC (news articles strong, editorials problematic).
Pew Research Center. Reliable polling on various issues, transparent about methods.
Public Religion Research Institute. Reliable polling on issues of US religion.
Southern Poverty Law Center. Reliable information on hate groups of various political agenda, left on social/cultural issues.
Texas Observer. Specific to Texas, pro-immigration, social justice, equity, pluralist. (Texas Tribune is similar, but strives to be bi-partisan)
Wall Street Journal. Pro-government intervention for business/stock market in terms of both domestic and foreign policies; generally anti-Dem (news articles strong, editorials problematic).
Washington Post. Mixed economy on domestic, generally pro-Dem unless it bleeds, mixed on foreign policy (news articles strong, editorials problematic).

Goebbels pt. IV: Argument v. argumentation

building blown up by weathermen

Basically, I’m saying that fyc teaches argument and not argumentation, and that fyc, as currently taught, often rewards demagoguery, unintentionally. It does so by encouraging students to assume there are two sides on every issue, and that those two sides are identities (“liberals” v. “conservatives,” or “pro-“ or “anti” whatever). If there is any discussion of fallacies (and most textbooks don’t mention), it appeals to modernist notions of fallacies,[1] and it encourages students to note the fallacies in out-group rhetoric. That’s useless. That just inflames demagoguery.

Teaching students how to identify what’s wrong with how some out-group of theirs argues doesn’t help our situation.

What’s wrong with our world is not that we have a war between people who are right and people whose arguments are stupid, villainous, fallacious, self-serving, and irrational. What’s wrong with our world is that far too many of us frame the vexed, nuanced, entangled, and uncertain world of policy choices as a choice between the obviously right option (advocated by people who are good, objective, compassionate, rational [aka, Us]) and all other options (advocated by people who are villainous, and the people who are stooges or tools of that villainous group [aka Them]).

What’s wrong with our world is that far too many people believe that our politics is a war of extermination in which “real” people are justified in abrogating all the norms of democratic discourse and constitutional restraints as pre-emptive self-defense against the group that is trying to destroy us. That is the argument of Trump supporters, and that is what makes their rhetorical and political agenda anti-democratic. Like Stalinists, they argue that they are justified in violating all norms because we are in an apocalyptic war of identity (people who are good v. people who are bad). Trump supporters are far from alone in making that argument–people all over the political spectrum do; some more than others.

People out to destroy democracy rarely see (or describe) themselves as doing that. They see themselves as instituting a real democracy, a democracy of the only group that has a legitimate understanding of political issues. They believe that, by destroying all democratic norms and legal procedures, they are purifying the nation of the people who prevent a real democracy. They destroy the village in order to save it.

The problem isn’t that they’re bad people; the problem is that they’re people who believe that no point of view other than theirs, and no policy agenda other than theirs, is worth considering. Thus, getting out of a culture of demagoguery doesn’t mean abrogating the norms and rules of demcracy in order to exterminate the group that is threatening democracy. That is exactly what people who destroy democracies argue.

Saving democracy means saving the norms and legal practices of democracy. But how do you do that when a large part of the population is drinking deep of the Flavor-Aid that our group is threatened with extermination by Them, and therefore we are justified in anything we do?

That’s where courses in argumentation can do good work.

One way to get out of that culture is to show that we are not in a zero-sum battle between two groups. This isn’t to say that all positions are equally valid; it is to say that there aren’t just two. We have many potentially reasonable disagreements about policy that are not accurately described as a binary. Of course, there are people and groups who will crush anyone who disagrees with them, who will violate all norms in order to get their way, and those people (and groups) should be condemned and constrained. But, that someone disagrees with us is not proof that they a member (or tool) of those authoritarian groups. Not everyone who disagrees with us is a tool or villain. Some are, but not everyone. There are also people who are mistaken, deluded, gullible, ignorant, constrained in our understanding, and we are that people.

Making fyc a class in civics doesn’t mean giving students tools that will enable them to argue that their or our out-group(s) is/are irrational and bad. It should be a course in which the teachers are committed to teaching students how to figure out when their in-group is mistaken, deluded, gullible, ignorant (which means modelling acknowledging when our in-group is mistaken and so on). It would mean showing that our policy options are never a binary. Achieving that goal would mean teaching students argumentation, and not argument.

Teaching argument means teaching students to perform the moves we associate with an argument, and it restricts the teaching of logic to the formal fallacies. From the perspective of civics, this approach is useless since an argument might be formally right and yet still fallacious. “All bunnies are fluffy. This animal is not fluffy; therefore it is not a bunny.” That argument is formally correct—the problem is not the form, but that the major premise is false.

In formal logic, truth doesn’t matter; in informal logic, it does. Goebbels’ arguments followed logically from his premises, and his major premises are untrue. They also are inconsistent with major premises of many of his other arguments, but that’s a different post (and it’s how we get out of the problem of “logical argument” simply being a synonym for “argument I think is true”).

Goebbels would get an ‘A’ in any class that only relied on the formal fallacies. Where Goebbels would fail is in regard to fallacies relevant to informal argumentation: 1) did he engage the best criticisms of his argument? 2) did he hold his interlocutors to the same standards of logic and evidence to which he held himself? 3) did he represent his opposition fairly?[2] 4) is his overall argument internally consistent? (5) could he cite non-in-group sources to support his claims about “facts”?

If we’re going to talk about fallacies, let’s do it well—in ways grounded in current scholarship in cognitive biases and argumentation. There are a lot of ways that a person could teach a class grounded in either set of scholarship, and I’ll get to them later, but, mostly, they involve students identifying their own tendency to reason fallaciously/rely on cognitive biases.

And there is one hard rule on which I’ll insist: that approach means “open” assignments are off the table if we’re claiming to teach argumentation and not argument. It isn’t ethical for a teacher to claim to teach argumentation and let each student write about whatever issue interests that student because the teacher can’t possibly assess the resulting papers in terms of argumentation. You can teach argument that way, and you can also teach lots of other wonderful things, but not argumentation.

And here we’re back to my claim that fyc doesn’t have to teach argumentation. It really doesn’t.

I think a major problem in our field, and one reason we get into unproductive and uninteresting argybargies, is that there is an underlying assumption that all fyc programs should have the same goal—that there is this thing, an eidos fyc, and we are all trying to achieve it. I think we should walk away from the notion that all fyc programs should have the same goals, and consider fyc to be strategic and local. The goals of any fyc program should be determined, not on the basis of what “the field” says should happen, but on the basis of what is most useful for the first year students of that institution. I think that decision should be informed by scholarship in rhetoric and composition, but I also think that scholarship in rhetoric and composition doesn’t support the claim that all programs should have the same goals.

But, back to assuming that the goal is teaching students to engage responsibly in civic discourse. If an instructor is going to claim to teach argumentation (and not just argument), then we have to know whether a student has accurately represented opposition arguments, is engaging the smartest opposition arguments, and is not relying on a binary. There is no way a person can know that about every issue on which any student might write. We can only think we know the best opposition on every issue if we apply modernist notions of fallacies (and react to things like tone), assume that one source always has the best argument (usually in-group), or if we ourselves think in terms of a binary (and so ask that students engage the “liberal” and “conservative” or “pro-“ and “anti-“ on every issue). As I used to say to my son when I advised him not to do something, “Guess how I know this.”[3]

I’m not saying we have to have “closed” assignments, in which students write only about a text or small set of texts picked by the instructor. Down that road lies not only boredom but actually loathing the most important part of our job: responding to students’ papers in a way that models how they should respond to arguments they read.

There are a lot of ways that teachers can constrain paper topics so that there are papers on a variety of topics, and yet a teacher can notice if the opposition has been misrepresented. I’ll explain a representative sample of them later. Here I’ll simply note that many of those teachers (like me) didn’t figure out how to do it while teaching fyc. (Or even for some time after.) I’m not, just to be clear, saying that the field of rhetoric and composition fails to teach argumentation; there are lots of people, and lots of texts, that do great jobs at it. I’m saying fyc doesn’t, but it claims to. And that is the problem.

There are lots of strategies, including not teaching argumentation. But, and this is the important point of this post, if we’re going to say that, as teachers, we can grade something as a good or bad argument without knowing the controversy well enough to know whether a student has accurately represented the smartest opposition, even though we haven’t read the sources about which the student is writing, we are modelling how disagreement works on the internet, when people believe they can assess the quality an argument without actually reading it.

We’re thereby making things worse.





[1] I mean “modernist” in almost the technical sense—late nineteenth and early twentieth century Anglo-American rejections of Anglo-American Enlightenment models of the mind. What I’m calling “modernist” is often called “Enlightenment,” but that’s inaccurate. The Anglo-American Enlightenment didn’t accept the Cartesian mind/body rational/irrational split. For the Anglo-American Enlightenment philosophers, there wasn’t a binary. So, for instance, sentiment assisted deliberation, but passion didn’t. So, they didn’t believe that “emotions” were irrational. It seems to me that it wasn’t until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that Anglo-American philosophy assumed the rational/irrational split (when, by the way, a lot of classical texts were translated into English, so they show that bias).

[2] I’ve come to think this and the second are the most important. When people are engaged in demagoguery, they homogenize all non- in-group members into one, and then pick the most useful—even if completely an outlier—quote or individual to represent all non-in-group members.

[3] He once asked, “Is there anything you didn’t learn the hard way?”






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

revisionist history books

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.

Teaching with microthemes

Over time, I have evolved to having students submit “microthemes” (the wrong word) before class, and I use them for class prep. I keep getting asked about that practice, so this is my explanation.

Here’s what I tell students in my syllabus.

———

Microthemes. Microthemes are exploratory, informal, short (300-700 words) responses to the reading (they can be longer if you want). They have a profound impact on your overall grade both directly and indirectly; doing all of them (even turning in something that says you didn’t one) can help your grade substantially. Since the microthemes are on the same topics as the papers, they also serve as opportunities to brainstorm paper ideas.
The class calendar gives you prompts for the microthemes, but you should understand those are questions to pursue in addition to your posing questions. That is, you are always welcome to write simply about your reaction to the reading (if you liked or disliked it, agreed or disagreed, would like to read more things like it). Students find the microthemes most productive if you use the microtheme to pose any questions you have–whether for me, or for the other students. They’re crucial for me for class preparation. So, for instance, you might ask what a certain word, phrase, or passage from the reading means, or who some of the names are that the author drops, or what the historical references are. Or, you might pose an abstract question on which you’d like class discussion to focus. I’m using these to try to get a sense whether students understand the rhetorical concepts, so if you don’t, just say so.

A “minus” (-) is what you get if you send me an email saying you didn’t do the reading; you get some points for that and none for not turning one in at all. So failure to do a bunch of the microthemes will bring your overall grade down. If you do all the microthemes, and do a few of them well, you can bring your overall grade up. (Note that it is mathematically possible to get more than 100% on the microthemes—that’s why I don’t accept late microthemes; you can “make up” a microtheme by doing especially well on another few.)

Microthemes are very useful for letting me know where students stand on the reading–what your thinking is, what is confusing you, and what material might need more explanation in class (that’s why they’re due before class). In addition, students often discover possible paper topics in the course of writing the microthemes. Most important, good microthemes lead to good class discussions. The default “grade is √, except for ones in which you say that didn’t do the reading, or check plusses, plusses, or check minus. (So, if you don’t get email back, and it wasn’t one saying you hadn’t done the reading, assume it got a √.)

If you get a plus or check plus (or a check minus because of lack of effort), I’ll send you email back to that effect. (I won’t send email back if it’s a minus because you said you didn’t do the reading—I assume you know what the microtheme got.) If you’re uncomfortable getting your “grade” back in email, that’s perfectly fine—just let me know. You’ll have to come to office hours to get your microtheme grade. You are responsible for keeping track of your microtheme grade. There are 26 microtheme prompts in the course calendar; up to a 102 will count toward your final grade. There are five possible “grades” for the microthemes [the image at the top of this page].

Please put RHE330D and micro or microtheme in the subject line (it reduces the chances of the email getting eaten by my spam filter). Please, do not send your microthemes to me as email attachments–just cut and paste them into a message. Cutting and pasting them from Word into the email means that they’ll have weird symbols and look pretty messy, but, as long as I can figure out what you’re saying, I don’t really worry about that on the microthemes. (I do worry about it on the major projects, though.) Also, please make sure to keep a copy for yourself. Either ensure that you save outgoing mail, or that you cc yourself any microtheme you send me (but don’t bcc yourself, or your microtheme will end up in my spam folder).

=========

I find that I can’t explain microthemes without explaining how I came around to them.

I have three degrees in Rhetoric from Berkeley, for complicated reasons, none of which my ever involved deciding at the beginning of one degree that I would get the next. I always had other plans. And, for equally complicated reasons, I ended up not only tutoring rhetoric but acting as an informal TA (what we now call a Teaching Fellow) for rhetoric classes at some point (perhaps junior or senior year). And then I was the TA (a person who grades something like 3/5 of the papers and taught 1/5 of the course—a great practice) for two years, and then the Master Teacher (graded 2/5 of the papers and taught 4/5 of the course). Berkeley, at that point, was a very agonistic culture, and so “teaching” involved waking into class and asking what students thought of the reading, I was just a kind of ref at soccer game.

The disadvantage of all that time at one place and in one department was that I was very accustomed to a particular kind of student. Teaching rhetoric at Berkeley at that moment in time (rhetoric was not the only way to fulfill the FYC requirement and drew the most argumentative students) meant managing all the students who wanted to argue. And, given my Writing Center training, I spent a lot of time in individual conferences. My teaching load as a graduate student was one class per quarter.

That training prepared me badly in several ways. First, it was a rhetoric program, and the faculty were openly dismissive of research in composition. Second, I was only and always in classrooms in which the challenge was how to ref disagreement. Third, I adopted a teaching practice that relied heavily on individual conferences.

I went from that to teaching a 3/3 (or perhaps 3/2—I was always unclear on my teaching load) in the irenic Southeast. Students would not disagree with each other—if they had to, they would preface their disagreement with, “I don’t really disagree but…” In an irenic culture, people actually disagree just as much as they do in an agonistic one, but they aren’t allowed to say so.

Granted, we can never get students to give us some weird kind of audience-free reaction to the reading (if there is such a thing), but I had lost the ability to get a kind of almost visceral reaction to the reading, a sense of the various disagreements that people might have. I also didn’t have the time to meet with students individually as much.

I tried various strategies, such as students keeping a “sketchbook” (I can’t remember who suggested that), in which students responded to the reading, but I couldn’t read the book (since, in those days, it was a physical book) till after class, by which time it was too late for me to respond to what they’d said. But I did notice that students’ responses to the reading were more diverse than what ever happened in class. For one thing, students writing to me would say things they wouldn’t say in front of class.

Sometimes too much so. There was a problem with students telling me more about how the reading reminded them of very private issues. At some point I tried calling them “reading responses,” but that name flung students too often in the opposite direction, and they just summarized the readings.

I moved on to a place and time with more digital options—discussion boards, blogs—and found that they were great in lots of ways. Introverts who won’t talk in class will post on a blog, but there was an issue of framing. In discussions, of any kind, the first couple of speakers frame the debate, and future speakers generally respond from within that frame. So, as opposed to the “sketchbooks,” the blog posts were dialogic rather than diverse (although there weren’t as many plaints about a romantic partner). And even I recognized that a student could easily fake having done the reading, simply by piggybacking on other posts. The discussion board got me no useful information about how my students had reacted to the reading.

“Reading responses” was too private, but blogs were too much prone to in-group pressures.
I honestly don’t know where I found the term “microthemes,” and it’s still wrong (although less wrong than it used to be). Were I to do my career over, I would find a different term, but I don’t know what it would be.

The problem is that it has the term “theme” in it, and so students who have been trained to write a “theme” try to write a five-paragraph essay. Since fewer high school teachers ask for themes, this problem seems to be dissipating.

There are a lot of models of what makes for good teaching, and one is that a good teacher has students engage with each other—a good teacher is the teacher I was at Berkeley, just letting students argue with each other, and acting as a ref at a soccer game. And, to be honest, that was fine at Berkeley, because, while racists and misogynists and homophobes might have whined (and did) that people disagreed with them, people disagreed with them. Their whingeing was that someone disagreed with them.

It got more complicated in an irenic culture, when students didn’t feel comfortable disagreeing with anything. And, by the time I’d found about the disagreement, it was hard to figure out how to put into the class (I learned that you do it by your reading selections, but that’s a different post). The irenic culture meant that, if a student said something racist, other students didn’t feel comfortable saying anything about it (especially if the racist thing was within the norms of what I always think of as “acceptable racism”).

Behind all of this is that we are at a time when there is a dominant and incoherent model of what makes good teaching: it is about having a powerpoint (meaning you aren’t listening to what these students need, and you’re transmitting knowledge you already think they know) and having discussion in class in which all student views are equally valid.

That model is fine for lots of classes, but it’s guaranteeing a train wreck if you’re teaching about racism, or any issue about which a teacher is willing to admit that racism might have an impact. Since we’re in a racist world, asking that students argue with one another as though their positions are equally valid, when racism ensures they aren’t equally valid, is endorsing racism.

Yet, in a class about racism, it’s important to engage the various forms of racism that are plausibly deniable racism. Most racists don’t burn crosses or use the n word, but they make claims that they sincerely think aren’t racist. As I’ve said, this is rough work, and it really shouldn’t be on the shoulders of POC—white faculty should take on the work of explaining to white racists who think they aren’t racist that they are.

If we think of the discursive space of a class as the moment of the class, then this is almost impossible to do, and it’s racist to think that non-racist students should have to explain to racist students that they’re racist. It’s racist because the notion that a classroom is some kind of utopic space in which the hierarchies of our culture are somehow escaped enables the hierarches to skid past consideration, and thereby, those hierarchies are enabled by “free” discussion.

But, if you’re teaching a class in which you want to persuade people to think about racism, you have to have a class in which people can express attitudes that might be racist. Open discussion won’t work, and blogs still have a lot of discursive normativity, and so you need a way in which students can be open with you and say things they don’t want to say in front of other students.

And so you have microthemes.

Students feel more free to express views that they wouldn’t say in front of other students, and they’ll tell you if they haven’t done the reading, so I walk into class knowing how many students didn’t do the reading.

There are some disadvantages. You can’t reuse old lecture notes; you can’t prepare a powerpoint. And, since I’m the one presenting views that students have, there is a reduction in student to student conversation (it gets me hits on teaching observations but, since student to student interaction is deeply problematic in terms of power, I’m okay with that).

And, since undergraduate lives are, well, undergraduate lives, students don’t always remember what they’ve said in microthemes. And there is a tendency for students (especially graduate students) to feel that, since they’ve already told me what they think, they don’t need to say it in class.

But, still and all, I wish I’d adopted microthemes years before I did, but with a different name.

“They always say that”: Radicalizing the opposition

As someone who has been teaching argumentation for a long time, I’ve found puzzling a lot of the ways that people approach and think about argument. One of them is the tendency to radicalize the opposition argument, taking an opposition argument that has hedging and modifiers (often, sometimes, rarely, frequently, occasionally, infrequently, tends) and recharacterize that argument as an extreme claim (“sometimes” becomes “always” and “infrequently” becomes “never”). So, if Chester claims, “The squirrels tend to try to get the red ball when it’s easy,” Hubert says, “Chester believes that the squirrels never do anything but try to get to the red ball.”

Notice two things about that recharacterization: Hubert has framed the issue as a question of Chester’s beliefs, not his argument, and he’s radicalized Chester’s argument.

At first, I thought it was because I was a grad student teaching in the Rhetoric Department at Berkeley. That department attracted a lot of aspiring lawyers, and many (most?) of them had had debate experience. I thought students to often radicalized opposition arguments was because radicalizing your opponent’s argument was debate weeny move 101 (and one any good judge or opposition team would catch).

But then I moved to colleges where debate training was rare, and I noticed how common that shift from a modified claim to an extreme one was still common. I caught myself doing it (especially when angry or frightened), as well as colleagues (in rhetoric, who should know better), pundits, editorials, people complaining about spouses, partners, room-mates.

Perhaps because of my training, I had always thought of it as a deliberate misrepresentation of the opposition, a conscious use of the straw man fallacy.

But then I ran across relationship advice that said, essentially, if you hear yourself saying (or thinking), “You never…” or “You always….” you aren’t in the realm of talking to the person in front of you. It’s pretty unlikely that the person in front of you—spouse, partner, room-mate—has literally never done the dishes, or helped around the house, or taken out the trash. They probably washed a glass here and there, or wiped off a spill, or took out one piece of trash. It’s unlikely that they always interrupt you, leave dirty dishes in the sink, or talk on the phone. There are hours in the day when they aren’t, at that moment, interrupting you.

Because those accusations aren’t true, a person who treats relationship arguments in bad faith (they’re just trying to get their way and not solve the problem) can dismiss your claim by pointing out that they once did dishes, or are not, at this moment, interrupting you. A person who treats relationship arguments in good faith has a really hard time figuring out how to respond to such hyperbolic claims. That’s really good relationship advice—listen to yourself when you’ve radicalized their behavior.

It doesn’t work for people who see relationships as zero-sum battles between the two people, and who like it that way; it takes the fun out for them. They like the big blow-up arguments that are all about throwing hyperbolic accusations at one another (and sometimes physical objects) and the makeup sex afterwards. YKINMKBYKIOK

But I found it to be good advice for me—to pay attention to when I was radicalizing someone else’s argument. And then I realized it’s really good advice for policy deliberation. And I don’t mean just national politics, but I noticed that intra-departmental policy arguments (what should we do about the photocopier) often triggered all-or-nothing thinking in some people. In faculty meetings, a person would say, “I’m concerned because I think this policy might lead to [this outcome] under these circumstances,” and someone would respond with, “So you’re saying [this outcome] would always happen,” and then they would engage in a long speech about how silly it was that their opposition would think it would always happen. Smart people, people trained in close reading, radicalized the claims of people with whom they disagreed. And they hadn’t been trained in debate.

And, working individually with students, I found that they could read a nuanced argument, and, if it was in-group or confirmed their beliefs, they could read it with nuance, but if it disagreed with them, they radicalized it.

The tendency to radicalize what they believe, in my experience, is pretty rarely a strategic and conscious rhetorical choice. I’ve come to think it’s entirely sincere. I’m not going to say that “both sides” do it, because I think the whole notion that our nuanced, vexed, and rich array of political options can be reduced to two sides (or a continuum) is not only empirically false, but proto-demagogic.

I will say that many people all over the political spectrum, and in the realm of non-partisan policy issues (such as what policy should we have in our house about doing dishes), radicalize the beliefs of anyone who disagrees with them, and all of us often radicalize the beliefs of people who disagree with us, especially under certain circumstances.

My crank theory is that there are various conditions that make people prone to radicalize the opposition:
1) That’s how some people think. Honestly, this is, I think, the most common explanation. There are people who can’t think in nuanced terms, or understand probability. They think in extreme terms. They’re the kind of people who, if the weather predictors say, “There is a 90% chance of rain,” and if it doesn’t rain, they say the weather predictors were wrong.

Lots of people in our muckled public/private realm engage in hyperbole, and so do these people. If something is bad, it’s the worst thing ever; if something is good, it’s the best thing ever. But these people talk that way because that’s really how they think—their in-group is entirely good, and made up of good people who all agree as to what is good, and anyone who doesn’t agree with them is entirely bad. You are either in-group (double plus good) or out-group (double plus ungood).

They have a lot of trouble admitting that in-group people are deeply flawed or out-group people have any virtues at all. Because they think everyone thinks in such all-or-nothing terms, they project that way of thinking onto everyone else. They read “often” as “always” because that’s what it really means to them.

2) That’s how all of us think in situations when we have been effectively inoculated against the opposition. Inoculation https://www.patriciarobertsmiller.com//2019/07/28/democracy-and-inoculation/ works by giving us a weak version of “the” opposition argument. It’s generally paired with training us to associate certain terms or positions with one opposition (so, all feminists are lesbians who want to convert all women to lesbianism, if this woman says she thinks women are unfairly treated, she must be a feminist lesbian missionary).
3) It’s also common if we’re naïve realists—if we believe that our position is the only possible reasonable position, then we are prone to reframe all opposition arguments as arguments. That is, we radicalize them.
4) If we believe that there are only two positions on every political issue, then we’re going to throw all unreasonable positions into the “other” side. We all tend to think of our in-group as nuanced, heterogeneous, and diverse, but the out-group as essentially all the same. So, if I believe that vaccines are great, and someone says they’re not wild about the HPV vaccine, I’m likely to assume that they’re opposed to all vaccinations.

I think the unconscious (and sometimes deliberate, when it’s part of inoculation) of “the” opposition is one of the major contributors to our culture of demagoguery.

It’s common now to say that we’re in a bad situation because civics is no longer taught, and there certainly seem to be an awful lot of people who don’t seem to understand some of the basic features of our governmental system (all over the political spectrum), but I think more important is that we don’t teach logic.

I don’t mean formal logic, but the very straightforward, and yet very challenging, skill of teaching students to recognize various fallacies, like straw man, not when those people engage in it, but when we do.