The New York Sophist

A friend of mine clued me into a new program called Gitbook, which is sort of like a blog, but more of a private journal/documentation site. I signed up for one, but not sure if I am going to use it. It might be a great place to keep notes on the classes I’m currently teaching.

When there’s not a global pandemic, I document everything about my courses. I audio record each one, and I also keep a notebook, usually a diary where I can write down things that worked or didn’t work for each day’s course. When things start to get busy what I normally document is just the weekly feel of the course, what’s working and what’s not. Might use it for that.

Something I thought might be good in there are course descriptions, however once I had a look at one I was working on for the upcoming course flyer for the undergraduates, I thought of this blog first. I prefer public-facing sort of stuff I suppose, or maybe GitNotes is too new for me to imagine how it will work in with what I’m doing here and in other places. Maybe GitNotes is a journal for me, and this is my social media replacement site. I think that works best for the way I’m thinking about things (kind of tired of looking at social media to be honest).

Anyway, here’s my revised course description for Argumentation:

What does it mean to argue? Have you ever been in an argument? How did you know? How did you know when the argument was over? What makes an argument happen? Is argument good or bad? 

These are the sort of questions we address in Argumentation. The concept of argumentation, even after thousands of years of people arguing about it, remains open. Nobody is sure what an argument is, how it works, or what the function of it really should or can be. The conversation about argumentation is international, involving experts from philosophy, law, history, sociology, languages, and rhetoricians. The only thing missing is you.

In argumentation we will read and examine the opinions of scholars, thinkers, and practitioners of argumentation. We’ll determine if they have a good grasp on what argument is. Then, after discussing, writing, and speaking about these ideas, it will be our turn. At the end of the course you’ll be able to advance your own understanding of what a good argument is, how to know, or even if you think that there’s such a thing as a good argument at all out there. 

This class is for anyone interested in the role of argument in society, be it political, social, or personal. This is a class for people who love to read and share their thoughts on the questions of why people act they way they do and say what they say. Argumentation is a difficult concept to grasp, but easy to do when we find ourselves in one. Come add your perspective to one of the oldest questions out there: Are we having an argument?

First, it’s a bit too long. Secondly, it doesn’t really communicate exactly what we do in the class. I think perhaps I should talk more about conversation or oral assessment in the course, but I really just want people who are interested in thinking about the role and nature of argument.

Maybe next week I’ll post a revised one, or perhaps this is the kind of thing that should go into the GitNotes? I think I sort of prefer working it out with you, whoever you fine people are. Having an audience in mind is far superior than just journaling to me. I already know what I’m going to say. But you are kind of a mystery. Who knows what you are thinking.

The globalization of the scientific epistemology is a daunting problem, but no less significant is the attraction of the journalistic epistemology. They might work hand in hand. 

The journalistic epistemology is the comfortable, common-sense idea that if you want to know something you go to the place where that thing is happening and you ask the people what is happening. You record this and your impressions of the people, moral or social or otherwise, then you write about it.  This is seen by a great number of people as a very clear and easy path to the truth about things. Trouble is, this is a formula for creating good journalistic products, not a path to finding the truth. 

Photo by Thomas Charters on Unsplash

Same with science. The Scientific Method is a great way to address scientific problems and figure out how to deal with them scientifically. Less attended to is the idea that the method forms what a scientific problem is or can be. We have an illusion that the scientific method, applied to anything, will clean it up and provide an answer that has the force and clarity of a science experiment. We leave out the part where the chosen method, by virtue of its structure, limits out what counts as science, a problem, worth the time to study, etc. Science feels comfortable because it appears to be certain but it can only be certain because of its weeding process on what counts as something worth studying. Instead of bracing our uncertainty, we race to laterally apply a very limited metric to huge, complicated questions in order to get some relief. 

Same is true with the journalistic epistemology. We love it because we like the direct simplicity of it, the idea that “Someone knows” or “they know the truth, we just don’t know their story” approach. If we could just go there, get the stories, and share them with the decision makers, we would be in a much better world. This is much better than the alternative of uncertainty, which would stipulate a number of horrors: That the people there have no clue what’s happening, that they simply articulate the same corporate-supplied reasons that people far away do, that the leaders are uninterested in either compelling stories or the truth, that the leaders are very much aware of the truth and don’t care, that everyone is doing their best and the recalcitrance of the world means that someone has to simply suffer for anyone to get anything improved. 

The appeal of comfortable certainty that such simplistic epistemological moves provide is typically called ideology. Ideology always feels good and right, there’s little discomfort in it, and your actions and beliefs are always moving you toward the “good.” Hegemony are the practices that make ideology, and yourself, feel like you matter. It works so well that we often call others’ beliefs “ideology” and our ideology “truth” and set out to correct them. 

A great example of this is how the critique that we should leverage against the use of journalistic epistemology broadly is often leveraged against academic thinking. The Frankfurt School, with their use of dialectical social analysis to show the often contradictory results that emerge from actions are charged with being “ivory tower” impenetrable academic texts, or not in a position to be able to “know” since they are too far and too removed from the situation to comment on it. The journalist’s epistemology only provides one way to the truth, and makes it as uncomplicated as looking around or experiencing events to know what the truth of the matter is. This position is too being at a “distance” from things, albeit a distance that excludes other sorts of information, or the lack of information. 

The approach of dialectical analysis has great explanatory power, but very low satisfaction power – it doesn’t offer or provide any easy solution, no blame, no bad guy at the heart of it all to remove. It also doesn’t do much for what is in demand these days, tools for the management of uncertainty. Dialectical analysis raises a lot more questions than it answers, and provides very uncomfortable points of view rather than causal solutions. It throws most everyone’s point of view into question via ideology and hegemony. This is why such analysis, or any sort of academic analysis that tries to be holistic, gets dismissed by most people. 

It’s far more comfortable and easy to ascertain a singular cause as described by the people who are most proximate to the issue, or who are a part of that culture, then seek out those who don’t know, or don’t believe them and blame them for the issue. Then we can move on. I think Kenneth Burke’s notion of scapegoating is the best rhetorical approach to the appeal of the journalistic epistemology. 

Academic or scholarly analysis has nothing to offer for those seeking comfort or ease. It ramps up the situation via explanation, explication, and then critique and questioning of those modes, sometimes to the point of categorical dismissal of the mode itself. Analysis of how things connect, how people articulate those connections, and how belief drives reasoning are the order of the day. These feed uncertainty to be sure, but if there is any hope in understanding the world and the people who have been and are in it, uncertainty cannot be managed or diminished, it has to be embraced. We must establish an epistemology that does not prefer solving issues to understanding them.  A little bit of understanding and a lot of uncertainty keeps us asking questions instead of telling people to stop asking and start complying.

American policy debate fundamentalists have found a new phrase to martial in their panicked defense of their practices. I don’t know why they feel so threatened; policy debate can easily co-exist with many different debating styles. But fundamentalism ensures that there is an either/or, a very significant conflict where the stakes are the highest they could be. 

Recently I’ve seen a new subtle defense surfacing in the form of the phrase “Evidence-based debate.” This is meant to differentiate policy debate, with its requirement that all arguments are supported by published material that is made available to both sides, from other debate formats that don’t require this. American policy debate fundamentalists are the ones who are circulating this term as a means of distinguishing their practice, or trying to make it superior by creating types of debate that simply do not exist either in theory or practice

There is no form of debating, academic, competitive, or otherwise, that would not be evidence based. Evidence and proof are central elements, required elements, I would say, to any model of debate that is based on reason in persuasion.

The practice of distinguishing debate and evidence-based debate is not a useful one for either production or criticism. Debate without evidence is not debate. The distinguishing feature of debate is the use of arguments that must have some sort of evidence to make the argument work. This evidence must be explained to the audience. If you accept this distinction, you open up a number of non-debate forms of speech to being called debate – such as diatribe, ranting, or just statements made to others for the point of persuasion. It explodes the category of debate to a point where it is no longer heuristically valuable. 

If we look closely at policy debate, we find it to be a paradox when it comes to evidence. It is, at the same time, a form that valorizes a level of skepticism that is a destructive level of incredulity while also holding one particular form of evidence as unquestioningly superior to all others. This practice replaces the reasonable audience with a mechanism or procedure that trumps the presence of human beings as the audience. It replaces a human audience with a very clever algorithm for decision making that people just don’t do without a lot of special training.

The second part of the paradox is an incredible, all-in attitude toward published information as being the only and the best qualification for conviction on a claim. 

It is the practice of policy debate evidence that gives the most weight to the persuasive defense of policy debate offered by Ed Panetta when he argued that the primary reason to teach policy debate is to train skilled bureaucrats. Policy change, he argued, does not happen at the level of the persuasive speaker anymore. It’s the technical master behind the scenes who can manipulate a field of complex requirements and lots of information who gets things done.

We could say all forms of debate are evidence-debate, but policy debate is evidence-dependent, that is, the artificial and alien concept of evidence forwarded by policy debate fundamentalists creates a culture of skeptic-addicts. The goal of the debate encounter is to valorize published text to the point where it atomizes. CERN in Switzerland is the metaphor for policy debate, the atomization of the category of persuadability into its sub-atomic particles. Instead of a democratic practice, we get a democratic absence, or an absence of any believable substance.  The absence of belief. 

DIscussion and the value of perspective is also not only diminished through this practice, but it’s also blatantly rejected. Anecdotally, anyone who has had policy debate experience knows the scene of finding the perfect piece of evidence for an argument, sharing it, and stating, “They’ll have nothing to say.” Perfect evidence in the world of American policy debate, creates silence instead of vibrant discussion.

One defense that might be martialed for this fundamentalist phrasing would be that there are anlogs from the professional world – evidence-based practice has been commonly written about in social work, medicine, and many other fields for years. So debate is just catching up to the real-world. There’s debate, and there’s evidence-based debate, which is better.

However the analogy breaks down once you read the work on evidence-based practices. These practices are not meant to be mechanistic, hard-and-fast rules for the use of evidence in these fields. They also do not valorize evidence, reminding practitioners that all evidence must be understood by the situation and the participants. There is no evidence that pierces through the situation, arranging all things in a way that conclusively moves opinion to one side, as evidence is ideologically meant to function in American policy debating. 

Such policy debate fundamentalism recalls models of pedagogy from the Zen Buddhist tradition, where students often get stuck halfway to enlightenment on the idea that reality is not what it appears to be. “the pencil laughs at you,” says the half-baked monk. The deep acceptance/high skeptic paradox has taken hold. 

This is merely a stopping point on the path to enlightenment. Outside of Buddhism, we could say that this is a sophomoric attitude. In my field of rhetoric, this is the point where the student frequently says, “Everything is rhetoric! The table is rhetoric! We are rhetoric!” Although an important recognition of the power of rhetoric as a perspective, this is by no means the conclusion that rhetorical studies draws, nor is it close. 

The phrase “evidence-based” debating is a panicked, defensive move that doesn’t accept the idea that debating is whatever audiences believe it to be, functioning however we allow it to in those moments. There is no such thing as “debate” per se, but that doesn’t mean that a solid, absolute definition based on some sort of arbitrary rules is needed. Instead, exploration of the notion of debate and how we allow it and disallow it to exist in particular discursive contexts would be a very valuable element to bring into our debate pedagogy. Evidence? How can you prove to be that this is evidence? Or in the words of Stephen Toulmin, “What have you got to go on?”

Just finished assessing the first round of student speeches for the term and the average grades were around an 88 to 90, high B to low A. This is atypical for me; most first speeches are closer to a C and slowly move up to this point over a course of four to five speeches.

Speech quality increases the less restrictions you give students on topics and the more instruction you give them in terms of how to develop a topic. Public speaking instructors suffer from the idea that in order to increase the quality of speeches they must police the nature of the topic, banning a number of topics that they associate with poor quality orations.

Photo by Jouwen Wang on Unsplash

This is the most common fallacy of the public speaking professor, the fallacy of causation between particular topics and bad speeches. It isn’t the topic choice that causes the poor speech, nor is it the nature of the topic. There are a few causes of this – namely three problems with topic approach that the instructor should address through teaching rhetoric instead of teaching orientation toward the “right position” on an issue or “a better topic” or even “good sources.” These things won’t address the core of the problem.

First, most of the topics that are associated with bad speeches – abortion, drug legalization, gun restrictions – are huge topics that cannot be taken on just as they are. They require a walk through the stasis in order to discover what the best point of contention is. They require examination through the general and specific topics of Aristotle and Cicero. They require acknowledgement that a young person is speaking on the topic, someone with little to no credibility. All these things are usually ignored by the instructor in favor of “get good sources.” But speech should be a lot more than a way to measure someone’s ability to evaluate research sources.

Another issue with these topics is that instructors might consider them “too real” and inappropriate for the classroom. this defense makes little sense to me. It’s one thing to criticise the university for not teaching “real world” skills or having applicability outside the gates. It’s another for instructors to deliberately restrict the content of a course to be removed from the things that people are speaking about and attempting to persuade one another about most often. Even moreso, consider that the course is meant to help people become better at such speech, and the instructor saying “There is no point in discussing these issues since persuasion is impossible.” This seems like a reason to reconsider the necessity of a speech course in totality, not an adaptation to make the course better.

Audiences are audiences. A university student audience brings with them into the classroom the assumptions, ideology, and values they have. A speech on a controversy is a wonderful way to gain class attention and connect the principles of good oratory into something they are experiencing directly and can connect to their life experiences. Of course, nobody should feel compelled to change their mind on an issue, but that’s an important consideration for oratory as well. These principles of democratic engagement are really not taught anymore. We teach young people that they are fools if they do not dissolve their opinions in the light of the facts. Instead, why not discuss how difficult it is to understand the fact, understand ideology, and negotiate the feelings and thoughts that surround any controversy they might face. Giving students a plan for future encounters with oratory might be more important than practice in making the same old designs on safe topics.

Speaking of safe, this word is probably the centerpiece of the most serious objection to particular topics, and that is the concept of the “safe space.” The trouble with safe spaces has been argued to death all over the internet, and I won’t rehearse those arguments here. The only thing I can add to this conversation is the danger of assuming there is a place that is free of persuasion and argument. Although safe-space considerations are well meaning and aimed at helping students feel comfortable and get in the mental space to engage learning, the idea that they would be immune or free from convincing speech is extremely dangerous. We are always vulnerable to it. And people who are not well-meaning at all will take advantage of those who feel that there’s a space that is persuasion or argument free.

When people want a safe space, what they want is a space that is free of aggressive, hostile, and bad argumentation or speech. This has been conflated with all persuasion and all oratory because in contemporary America, we are horrible at this. We have been taught, and continue to teach that facts are facts, they are easy to obtain, easy to understand, and that in their presence we should just change our mind without hesitation. This anti-human, monstrous position is responsible for people’s negative feelings about political conversation, their aversion to argument, and their desire to be away from oratory. The solution is to provide oratory as the fine art that it is. If speech teachers and public speaking courses are not going to do this, we have little hope to find it in other places.

Public speaking is oratory, and oratory is an art that connects humans and allows human beings to see themselves connected to one another in new ways. “Consubstantiality” is what Kenneth Burke called the art of rhetoric. This has been forgotten, or is just unknown to contemporary teachers. We tend to automatically think that speech and oratory are a violent interruption of our lives, separating us from what we know and believe, challenging us to accept new and different beliefs. This can be the case. But this other relation is where oratory is at its most artistic, creating moments where we see new connection and take on shared identity, seeing a place for future possibility.

I have a lot more to think about in terms of creating digital speech. The internet has become an art gallery of oratory, with preserved speech hanging there, waiting for us to stop for a bit as we walk or surf by. More on that later as I think about these wonderful orations that the students are producing this term.

There really isn’t such a thing as “graduate student pedagogy,” but I thought I would write about it anyway. I’m always hopeful about it, but I know why it doesn’t exist: People who want to teach graduate students don’t understand how teaching works, they aren’t interested in thinking or talking about teaching, and they also have a very high self-image of their own importance to the field and to their studies.

Graduate student pedagogy is essential, particularly in pedagogy. It is clear that nearly all future jobs for advanced degree holders are going to be in teaching, and will likely consist of a lot more teaching than we are used to in academic appointments. When departments don’t have serious conversations about course and assignment design, and don’t have regular conversations about how to teach, pretty terrible things happen as they recently did on my campus.

A graduate student was removed of his teaching duties after he tried to get a class to come up with arguments in favor of slavery. As someone who teaches argumentation for a living, and someone who thinks a lot about the power and nature of classroom speech, this assignment cannot adequately be described as terrible. It’s the epitome of bad graduate student mentoring and what happens when you don’t have open conversations about teaching and what it’s about. Professor Taylor’s terrible assignment is a symptom, not an independent problem. And it’s a symptom that exists at some level in higher education in general.

Graduate student supervisors, as a rule, are really nervous about talking about teaching quality with graduate students. I wonder why this is? Are they afraid? Are they unwilling to let the graduate students know that teaching is an art that requires a lot of work and thought just to realize you could have done it so much better? Is it that they don’t know what to say, they believe in a simple transmission and response model? Taylor is, to his credit, trying to have an interactive classroom. But his assumptions about things like critical thinking, student engagement, and what his role is as a professor are detrimental to his ability to teach. He is one of these people who seems to believe the professor’s role is to offer the opposite, to teach from the point of opposition, to take up the impossible position and push it toward the students to see if they can push back correctly. This is not teaching. This is like mixing chemicals as a Chemistry teacher to see how the students will react to the explosions. It’s irresponsible, and it’s simply not teaching.

This professor was trying to be edgy, he was trying to really get the students to “think outside the box” to have that moment of “Wow! I’ve never thought of that before,” or whatever trendy nonsense was going through his head. It is not teaching to rupture the students’ relationships with the things they bring into the classroom. It is also not appropriate to think that you are offering radical expose about ideas to them. This assignment screams the attitude that Taylor believed he knew more about this issue than his students. This is an inappropriate attitude for teaching anything. Good teaching is realizing that you know different ways to encounter knowledge, not that you have amassed more than they have.

Secondly, Taylor did not do any adequate research to try to teach this assignment. People have written books where they have contextualized the arguments in favor of slavery from American history as well as the history of other countries that practiced it. But this was done carefully, with research, with context, and with the understanding that bad and good are contextually understood. Taylor did not offer any of that to his students, by all reports, and just tried to get them to speculate what good could come from slavery as they were sitting there, in a classroom, in 2020, with no other resources than their own feelings and thoughts. Of course that is inappropriate. More than that, it’s irresponsible to think that this would help teach these students anything about how slavery was permitted to survive so long, or how people justified it in the time and place where it was practiced. How is this the teaching of history if you are not providing deep context? Again, there are entire books written on this topic.

Finally there is this idea floating around that the pedagogy of critical thinking consists of examining the extant “two sides” of every issue. These two sides exist already and can always be accessed. One is preferred now, the other is not although it could be preferred given the right argument.

This is an unhealthy and improper model of argument, controversy, and critical thinking. If you can access arguments in favor of something it does not mean this side of the issue has legitimacy. That legitimacy is always conferred by audiences. In order to think critically about any controversy, all positions must be situated within the discourse, the context, and the ideology of the time. This requires a lot more than just sitting and staring into space in a classroom and writing down whatever reasons come to mind.

Taylor seems to believe that a starting point for critical thinking and teaching is to tell students to imagine a horrible atrocity from a positive point of view. This stereotype of thought often appears in popular culture as what rhetoric or debate offer. Nothing is further from the truth. If Taylor had actually prepared to teach his class, he would have provided them ample readings from scholars of the time who discuss why it was that people who were decent citizens in every other respect would consider it normal and healthy to own other human beings. That’s a conversation worth having, and that’s something where the critical thinker could make connections between our discourse about global economics and the terrible conditions of Chinese labor could be recognized as a more modern version of this atrocity.

Thinking that coming up with a logical argument to justify atrocity without any consideration of context is evidence of only one argument: A lazy, unprepared teacher who should not be teaching in the first place. But isn’t the blame really with the supervisors and mentors who clearly didn’t inquire, or investigate, or suggest how to teach to their graduate student?