When people say, “The time has come to …”, what they’re implying is that until now it hadn’t. Come, that is. So apparently sexual violence was okay until this morning. The rote politician response to a tragedy is, “Our hearts goes out…” To which I wonder, Does it ever stay home? Black Lives Matter, but it’s churlish to ask to whom. A few young men, with their whole lives before them, hijack and fly a plane into a building and it’s referred to as “This cowardly act.” And so on.
Does everybody know these are just rhetorical flourishes? I don’t think they do. I think this kind of blather is designed to preclude asking the obvious question. If, in response to “The time has come …”, I asked, “What changed?”, I’d be understood as approving of sexual violence. If I question the cowardice of piloting an airplane into certain death, I’d have clearly placed myself on the side of the terrorists. And so on.
In short, language matters. And that includes my saying that language matters. But if calling out rhetoric as rhetoric is itself rhetoric, how do I speak plainly? How do I make a case, any case, without the language I use to make it presupposing the case I want to make?
There is a way. And it starts by defining our terms. By making clear which of our inferences are deductive and which are inductive. By helping ourselves to an enthymeme if and only if the unstated premise is beyond dispute, which is pretty close to never. And so on.
Are there such rhetoric-unladen cases? Few and far between. To name just a few – because there are just a few – 1) Plato’s Euthyphro argument against divine command theory, 2) David Hume’s skepticism about induction, causality, and the self, and 3) Glaucon’s reduction of morality to a set of intramental responses to patterns of otherwise-dilemmatic interactivity.
Mind you, all three of these are, in both structure and effect, theorems. And as such, each sanctions a number of corollaries. From Euthyphro we get 1) the incoherence of Christian soteriology. From Hume’s skepticism about the self we get 2) the Systems Response to the Chinese Room argument. And from Glaucon’s reduction of morality to game theory we get that 3) the nineteen martyrs of 9/11 were anything but cowards.
That we get these kind of results is precisely why philosophy is dangerous. It’s why it’s regarded – and rightly so – as the enemy of 1) faith in the salviifc power of the Cross, 2) the conviction that human consciousness is unreplicable, and 3) American moral exceptionalism.
Can a case be made that philosophers should press on notwithstanding these unpalatable results? It can, but not one in which the language making it doesn’t presuppose the case it wants to make. This is because, as Wittgenstein put it, logic takes care of itself. That is, it’s circular to use logic to defend logic. So what does defend it?
When I used to teach logic, I told my students that, “The sole justification for this course is that people who reason logically fare better than people who don’t.” But given the way good reasoning is punished and bad reasoning rewarded in universities today, I can no longer say that. Or maybe I can still say that, but that what’s meant by good and bad reasoning has been reversed.
Be that as it may, all reasoning, be it good or bad, has to be taught and then reinforced by operant conditioning. If a student concluded q from pvq and -p, I gave it a check mark. If instead he affirmed the consequent I gave it a 0. Today, however, if a student asserts that 215 children are buried in an apple orchard because 215 children could be buried in an apple orchard, that’s considered good enough, whereas to say it’s not is grounds for social ostracisation.
I’m out of the classroom now, but for whomever is replacing me, this kind of inversion of payoffs has got to make justifying a critical thinking class something of a challenge. Or maybe not. I used to teach that first you reduce an argument to its argument-form, and then you check the form for counter-examples. So, for example, if from 1) there could be 215 children buried in the apple orchard one can conclude 2) there are 215 children buried in the apple orchard, then from 3) the moon could be made of green cheese one should be able to conclude 4) the moon is made of green cheese. But since you don’t want your students to conclude (4), you introduce the idea that the validity of an argument-form is domain-specific. If the domain of discourse is the consistency of the moon then possibly p therefore p remains invalid. But if the domain of discourse is whatever’s asserted by the designated knowledge-keepers, it’s both valid and sound.
So what Orwell might have called Newlogic is teachable after all. It just takes a bit of finesse. Finesse was never my strong suit, so it’s just as well I’m no longer in the classroom. But I do stand in awe of my pedagogical betters!
Categories: argumentation theory, Critical Thinking, Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy, Why My Colleagues Are Idiots
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