------------------------------------------------------------------------ Subject: READING, WRITING, AND EVALUATING ARGUMENTS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Several of you have requested explanations of why your Position Paper #1 was graded as it was. There are some common problems that I thought worth explaining to all of you. First, let me remind you of two quotes, one on the "What Is Philosophy?" webpage and one on the syllabus. From the webpage: ======================================================================== Thinking about the Big Questions is serious, difficult business. I tell my philosophy students: "If you like sweets and easy living and fun times and happiness, drop this course now. Philosophers are the hazmat handlers of the intellectual world. It is we who stare into the abyss, frequently going down into it to great depths. This isn't a job for people who scare easily or even have a tendency to get nervous." -- Eric Dietrich (5 October 2006) ======================================================================== Dietrich's quote is appropriate because many of you were surprised how difficult it can be to evaluate an argument and how careful you have to be about what you say! From the syllabus: ======================================================================== To read critically is to read skeptically. The reader asks himself not only, "Do I understand what this means?" but "Do I buy it?" -- p. 36 of Goodman, Kenneth S. (1970), "Behind the Eye: What Happens in Reading", in K.S. Goodman & O.S. Niles (eds.), Reading Process and Program (Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English): 3-38. ======================================================================== This one is appropriate because reading skeptically is exactly what I'm trying to teach you how to do with these argument-analysis position papers. Many of you seemed surprised that you had to actually follow my instructions to explicitly say whether you agreed with a premise and to say why, as well as my instructions to evaluate the validity of the argument. It's interesting to observe that following instructions explicitly is exactly what we want computers to do! So here's an interesting metaphor that might help you in your current position paper (and future ones): When you write, you should imagine that you're writing a program for someone to read. You need to express yourself as clearly as possible so that the reader will understand you. Because of space limitations (1 or 2 pages), don't say anything that isn't directly relevant to what you want the reader to understand, but say everything that you think the reader would need in order to understand you. Similarly, when you read, imagine that what you're reading is like a computer program and that you are the computer that has to understand it. Except, of course, you're an independently intelligent computer, and, if you don't understand something, you can challenge what you read. In other words, treat reading as an attempt to "debug" what the author wrote!