Post-truth

The Nordic Wittgenstein Review has a special issue out now on the idea that we live in a post-truth world. The idea of post-truth is, I think, a bit like Nietzsche's idea that God is dead: large numbers of people have stopped really believing in something that used to make a big difference in our lives. It's a problematic idea because it's hard to imagine life without some sort of belief in, or commitment in practice to the value of, truth. Nevertheless, there does seem to be something in the suggestion that we do, in some sense, live in a post-truth world. The question is what is there in this idea, why, and what can we do about it?

Lorna Finlayson doubts that there is really anything new that ought to be called 'post-truth', rejecting claims that there has been a rise in bullshit or relativism in recent years on the basis of lack of evidence. As Rupert Read points out in his response, it would be hard, if not impossible, to prove an increase in bullshit (how do we measure sincerity, for instance?). But I do think there are more grounds for plausible speculation than Finlayson acknowledges. Read's conclusion is, in part, this:

I claim, contra Lorna Finlayson, that what has grown over the past generation or more is a trend toward a lack of interest in the claim of truth among some/many voters, and toward a rank contempt for truth among those (some in the academic world, some in thinktanks, some in business, some in politics) who have deliberately promoted a ‘consumeristic’ attitude toward truth. This lack of interest and this contempt are absurd: but I submit that we live in absurd times.

Do we therefore literally live in post-truth times? Of course not: but it is nevertheless as if we do. Much like we used to live in times in which it was as if there was a God.

Well, how did we get here? No doubt the story is complicated, but I think part of it does have to do with the bullshit and relativism that Finlayson downplays. Harry Frankfurt claims, with little supporting evidence, that:

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit [...] has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These “anti-realist” doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry.

I think he has a point. Skepticism has an ancient history, of course, so it is not new. And, as Finlayson points out, lying and propaganda are not new either. But I think there has been a renewal in recent decades of the idea that one need not be ashamed of lies, bullshit, and propaganda. One need not be ashamed, the idea is, because bias is inevitable. It is naive even to try to discover or speak the truth. The main supporters of this view seem to be on the left, but its most successful exploiters are on the right.

Since 1996 Fox News has been hitting the American public with right-wing propaganda. Opinions vary as to whether watching it actually makes you more ignorant, but it is certainly, and demonstrably, a very inefficient way to become more informed, and it does push people to the right politically. These facts are sufficiently well known that there is little excuse for watching Fox News, but I'll leave questions of whether to blame viewers or the network aside. The important point is that there is a significant new possible cause of false beliefs.

OK, you might say, but this is only in the US. True (as far as I know), but the Murdoch media empire is global. OK, then, you might continue, this explains some false beliefs, but not something new that needs its own name ('post-truth'). True again, but Fox News openly mocks the idea of objective reporting with its slogan "Fair and Balanced". Arguably it sees itself, or its viewers see it, as genuinely fair and balanced, in contrast to the allegedly leftish mainstream media, but this is prima facie implausible (why would all other news sources have a leftish bias, especially when so many are owned by large corporations?) and utterly implausible when taken together with the facts about bias and ignorance mentioned above. So Fox News not only keeps its viewers ignorant and pushes them to the right, it also undermines their faith in the value of truth and objectivity. Biased reporting is nothing new, but before cable news channels like Fox News did not exist. And its open contempt for the ideal of objectivity is, if not new, at least not as familiar a phenomenon as old-fashioned lies, bias, and propaganda.

Another thing that is new is certain trends in the teaching of English. The fight between descriptivists and prescriptivists seems to have been won by the descriptivists. (For more on this fight see David Foster Wallace and me.) That is, people who teach languages, including English, appear (overwhelmingly, from what I can tell) to prefer descriptivism. A common belief among them seems to be that it is elitist at best, and racist at worst, to regard some ways of using language as correct and others as incorrect, because the "correct" uses are so often those of the privileged while the "incorrect" ones are those of the working class, the less educated, and members of ethnic minorities. The feeling behind this belief is good, but there are some obvious problems with having no standards of correctness. Perhaps a sophisticated descriptivist would take the most common usage to be correct, or would have some other way of distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable usage. In practice, though, I think a lot of teachers are reluctant to call anything wrong.

A colleague of mine says she was taught in graduate school never to tell a student that what they have said is wrong. I don't know whether this is related to descriptivism or whether it's meant to be a kinder or more effective teaching technique, but in practice it's easy to imagine how teaching this way combined with a fuzzy version of descriptivism could lead students to think that anything goes. (And this applies not only to grammar but to ethics as well. More than one person (i.e., two) with a PhD in English has told me either that relativism is fundamental to their discipline or that it is politically preferable to the alternative, which they see as inherently conservative.)

I suspect that this leftish concern with students' feelings, which of course goes very well with the rightish idea of students as consumers that schools should aim to please, is what produces this kind of thing. It's worth clicking on the link and reading the whole thread, but here's a summary. A woman in her twenties was apparently reduced to tears by being told that she had spelled 'hamster' incorrectly. She was not used to being told that anything she had written could be improved in any way, and did not accept that a dictionary was authoritative on spelling. This one case proves nothing, of course, and might not be the result of the preferred teaching styles or ideology of English teachers. But it is exactly what one might expect from people taught English by relativists who don't believe in telling students they are wrong.

Then there's also the problematic teaching that all beliefs are either matters of fact or mere, arbitrary, opinion. Joel Backström is good on the idea that 'everyone is entitled to their opinion' (as is Agnes Callard). This commonly repeated idea is more a result of scientism, or just crude thinking, than anything politically motivated, I suspect. But it surely encourages the belief that anything political is free from legitimate criticism. 

In other words, I do think that there is a real problem in the form of a recently increased lack of shame about lying. Or perhaps in the form of confusion about how to respond to relatively sophisticated defenses of shameless lying (and possibly sincere repetitions of lies). And 'post-truth' seems like a reasonable name for this problem, since no one will say that they think lying is OK. What they might say is that there is no such thing as objectivity or the ability to know the truth ("truth with a capital T" is likely to get mentioned at this point), or that everyone has their biases. And then the conclusion is that bias and non-true statements are fine because they are inevitable. Indeed, not only are they inevitable, they are protected by the universal right to one's own opinion. So how dare you attack what I think! No doubt this kind of thing is very often said in bad faith, but if you were brought up to believe that everyone is entitled to their opinion, that all that is not science is mere opinion, that we all have our biases, and that it is cruel to tell people they are wrong, then you are likely to struggle to respond well to this kind of argument.     

Which is why I think that the problematic term 'post-truth' gets at something real and bad, and I think that the origin, apart from basic problems like greed and dishonesty, is a combination of neo-liberalism (which gave us both the idea of students as consumers, who must be kept happy, and the 'freedom' to air propaganda as news--perhaps the First Amendment does this, but it seems that the fairness doctrine could have been applied to cable news if it hadn't been dropped) and a well-meaning but sloppy kind of relativism that has been adopted by many teachers (from elementary level up). 

What to do about all this, assuming I'm right, is an interesting question. To a large extent much of the problem is driven by money. Murdoch and Sinclair have the power, because they have the money, to push their political views. It's hard to fight that. But another source of trouble is bad philosophy, much of which might be called degenerate Wittgensteinianism. Think of a sort of bluffer's guide to Wittgenstein-influenced thought, including logical positivism, fideism, Lyotard, Rorty, and Kuhn, and then imagine people who understand this guide imperfectly, but who believe it implicitly, teaching children at all levels of education. Very roughly speaking I think that something like this has happened. (Although the possibly excessive concern with students' self-esteem is partly Ayn Rand's fault, so we're back to libertarianism there.) If so then part of the solution might be better Wittgenstein scholarship. Or rather, Wittgenstein scholarship that trickles down better. Which might be Wittgenstein scholarship that doesn't trickle down at all. Or some new fashion for graduate programs in English, journalism, etc. that is more committed to the value of truth.      

Oxford in the 80s

Simon Kuper's article on Brexit and Conservative students at Oxford University in the 1980s is worth reading. It's especially interesting to me because I was there. Apparently Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt, and David Cameron were all in my year. I remember Boris Johnson being president of the Union. (I joined because it gave you something to do in the evenings, the bar was pretty good, and the library was useful.) I don't have much to say about all this beyond recommending the article, but I will add a point or two and try to correct some mistaken impressions that I think the article could give rise to.

Kuper says that Oxford taught you how to speak without much knowledge. (He mentions Simon Stevens, who I believe was one of Rupert Read's tutorial partners, as someone allegedly very good at this.) I'm not so sure. Certainly no one explicitly tried to teach you how to do this. It would be a useful skill in a tutorial, which is like an interview in some ways, so those who already possessed this ability probably honed it, but the rest of us would just have floundered if we showed up unprepared.

Kuper also says that students only have to write one essay a week, and that this can involve very little work. But as Kalypso Nicolaïdis says in the article, it's actually two essays a week. And, as I've said, most people would find it very hard to do this without much preparation. If you're wondering how anyone ever got away with doing no work all week, the answer (apart from repeating that this is probably both an exaggeration and very rare) is that all work until your final exams is basically done pass/fail. Tutorials and tutorial essays are meant to prepare you for your final exams. It's up to you how seriously you take this preparation, although if you are too lazy you will be kicked out. So doing just enough to get by is not that hard, but is likely to hurt you in the end. Final exams are all written and anonymous, so there is no bluffing your way through them using your Old Etonian charm. 

Finally, you might get the impression that Oxford is full of sad women who will do anything to help get some boy elected to office in the Union. This is not how machine politics works, as far as I know. The Union has many elected offices, mostly (as I remember it) positions on various committees. The voters--Union members like me--know nothing at all about most of the candidates. So groups of candidates form alliances, all voting for each other and encouraging their friends to do the same. Being part of one of these groups doesn't guarantee that you'll be elected, but it certainly helps. If you arrive at Oxford already knowing about this system and already knowing other people from your old school, you have a big advantage. I was clueless, and by the time I might have worked out that this was the way to become a future prime minister, it would have been too late. Not that I have any ambitions like that, or the skills to get anywhere in politics, but it's obviously an unfair system. Which is why Kuper's article is worth reading.

Does writing exist?

It seems paradoxical to write the question, "Does writing exist?" but what I mean is: is there some thing called writing that someone can be good or bad at, teach, or simply do? According to John Warner, we know how to teach writing. But what is the evidence? And what is it that we, supposedly, know how to teach?

Warner's concern is with student writing, and in particular with the common complaint that students write badly. One part of his response, to which I am very sympathetic, is to say that people have been complaining about bad student writing forever. Saying that students can't write is like complaining about kids these days. I get that.

A second part of his response relies on agreement among people who teach writing about what works and what doesn't when trying to get students to write better. I have some sympathy with him on this too. When you teach something you do find out what works, and this isn't necessarily something you can easily prove to people who have not taught that subject. On the other hand, there are some questions one could ask about his main claims, which he says most writing instructors would agree with. Here are the claims:

1. The more reading and writing we do, the better.
2. Writing is best taught as a recursive process which includes (but isn’t necessarily limited to) pre-writing, drafting, revision and editing.
3. Writing should engage with the rhetorical situation: message, audience, purpose and genre.
4. Reflection and metacognition are key ingredients to developing as a writer.
5. Isolated exercises in grammar and mechanics that don’t engage with the students’ own writing are not helpful.
6. Sentence diagramming is not an important skill for good writing.
7. Peer response and collaboration are useful tools in helping developing writers
8. Writers write best when engaging with subjects they are both interested in and knowledgeable about.
9. Developing as a writer requires a mind-set where we seek to increase our expertise without ever declaring ourselves expert. (There is always more to learn.)
10. Writing itself is an act of thinking that allows for discovery while writing. In other words, the ultimate message is constructed through the act of writing, as opposed to being fully formed prior to starting to write.
11. Developing writers benefit from close one-on-one instruction from an experienced mentor

Here are my responses to these claims:

1. Agreed (within reason)
2. This sounds right, too, as long as we keep in mind that this probably does not apply to all writing (e.g texting my kids) and that not everyone works best like this 
3. Probably also true, although I sometimes fear that in teaching this point too much attention is paid to teaching and learning the meaning of 'rhetorical situation'
4. This seems doubtful. "Reflection and metacognition" sounds as though it means self-consciousness, and I can imagine this doing as much harm as good. But perhaps this is because (or why) I haven't developed much as a writer
5. Could be true. But when people complain about student writing I think that grammar and mechanics are primarily, if not exclusively, what they have in mind. So if these things cannot be taught (which I know #5 isn't saying) then perhaps we should stop trying to teach students how to write in dedicated writing courses 
6. Depends how it is done, I think. (I have never done it, by the way.) Argument mapping has been found to improve critical thinking. (I don't mean that it has been conclusively proved to help in all cases.) But perhaps argument mapping is too different from sentence diagramming for this to count. Or perhaps critical thinking is not relevant to good writing. Or perhaps what almost all writing instructors would agree on is not the same as what empirical evidence shows.
7. Maybe. My students very often think it is a waste of time (I still do it sometimes, because it seems as though it ought to help.) I believe that people with MFAs disagree about whether this kind of thing actually improves one's writing or, instead, turns it into writing by committee. Peer response will only be as good as the peers in question anyway.
8. Plausible. But students must learn to write about things they are not already interested in. 
9. OK
10. Certainly writing should involve thinking
11. Surely this is true

In other words, many of Warner's claims are at least highly plausible. But I also get the distinct impression that he wants to focus on teaching writing in a sense that is quite different from what the "kids these days can't write" crowd want. They want spelling and grammar. He, and others who teach writing, want something else. That's fine. But I think the reason so many students are required to take so many writing courses is because of "kids these days" concerns. If these courses don't address those concerns they should probably be optional.

Here's another questionable claim from Warner, one that I've heard before from other people (emphasis added):

Supposed tensions such as “Do we hold students accountable to sound mechanics?” or “Do we let students engage in self-expression?” are not actually tensions when students are required to work in a full rhetorical situation because they are forced to do what all writers must do -- make choices and wrestle with ideas that will be presented to interested audiences.

Do that enough times in enough different contexts and not only will you learn how to write, but when you’re confronted with a type of writing you haven’t done before, you’ll be able to figure out how to write in that form or genre as well.

Seriously? If you write a novel, a political speech, and a lab report then when you have to write a sonnet you'll be able to do it? That's absurd. So maybe that's not what he means. You might be more confident of your ability to rise to the challenge, and confidence surely helps. You might also know something about how to learn how to write a sonnet. But you won't actually be able to do it just because you have written other kinds of things. If you really want to learn how to write sonnets you should take a sonnet-writing or poetry-writing course. Just as if you want to know how to write a lab report you should probably get to a lab and ask someone there.

Which is to say that I have real doubts about the point of trying to teach generic writing, unless it really is focused on precisely the grammar and mechanics that people like Warner, understandably, seem not to want to teach.

Beyond bullshit?

My friend Chris Gavaler has co-written a piece with Nathaniel Goldberg on Trump and bullshit for Philosophy Now. If you're interested in this subject then, obviously, you might want to read it. Their conclusion is that a sample of Trump's speech is "beyond bullshit."

Here's the sample:

“He said something to the effect, ‘No we’re not leaving, because Donald Trump promised us that we’re not leaving.” Trump added, “I actually said I didn’t make [the promise]. When they played [my statement back], I said, ‘I did make it [to Carrier], but I didn’t mean it quite that way’.” As he explained: “I never thought I made that promise – not with Carrier. I made it for everybody else. I didn’t make it really for Carrier.” The promise was, he said: “A euphemism. I was talking about Carrier like all other companies from here on in, because they made the decision a year and a half ago”

After quoting this they talk a bit about what Trump might have meant and about Grice on implicature, before drawing their conclusion. But they've already quoted Frankfurt saying that the bullshitter "is not trying to deceive anyone concerning [the particular subject he happens to be talking about]. What he cares about is what people think of him." And that seems very much like what Trump is up to, and not something that Trump somehow goes beyond.

In this case. actually, Trump seems to be trying to tell the truth, more or less. At least, he seems to be acknowledging that Carrier made their decision before he did anything about keeping them in the US, although he's also adding a claim that other companies will keep jobs in the US now because of him (which is doubtful). He just isn't very good at speaking precisely. It does seem true, though, that what he cares about above all else is what people think of him. Trump is thus not beyond bullshit but the ultimate example of the kind of person Frankfurt was talking about. (As, I believe, Frankfurt himself has said.)

Stop making sense

Matthew Yglesias has an interesting essay on Trump and bullshit at Vox, but I think he goes too far in his attempt to explain what's going on. Here's an example:

When Trump says something like he’s just learned that Barack Obama ordered his phones wiretapped, he’s not really trying to persuade people that this is true. It’s a test to see who around him will debase themselves to repeat it blindly. There’s no greater demonstration of devotion.

This makes Trump sound like a kind of genius. He doesn't just get people to demonstrate the loyalty he craves. He has the greatest way to get them to do this.

Admittedly, this genius might be accidental. Yglesias says of Trump that, "His flagrant lies serve as a loyalty test," which is different from saying that they are intended as a loyalty test. But there is still an implication here that there is something to be explained, namely the function of Trump's bullshit, and that Yglesias has the explanation that enables us to make sense of it all. But why suppose that it makes sense in the first place? It's not as if Trump is a great success. If he had built his wall, imprisoned his electoral opponent, and banned Muslims from the United States then we might wonder how he had managed it all (as well as why, of course). But he has done so little that there is little to explain. (He has emboldened white supremacists and hurt people of color, but not as much as he tried to, and it's not clear that is exactly a conscious goal of his anyway. Nor is there any mystery about how someone could get this done.)

In other words, Trump might be an evil genius bullshitter, but he might just be confused and floundering. He could also be both. Perhaps he has found bullshit to be useful in his career. That doesn't mean that he wields it skillfully or knows what he's doing at any given moment. He might sometimes know just what bullshit to spout, or lie to tell, to achieve his particular goal. Or he might just spout and spout and hope it works out. My impression is that he is so used to getting what he demands (even if he doesn't always get what he demands) that he has very little sense of himself as answering to an objective reality. Frankfurt says:

Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite.

Trump's bullshit seems to stem from, or at least reflect, his lack of thoughtful attention to detail, his lack of discipline, lack of objectivity, non-acceptance of standards and limitations, his selfishness, and his insistence on indulging impulses and whims. His is not the "carefully wrought bullshit" that Frankfurt describes (along with the other kind). The opposition between truth and (not falsehood but) ego here is worth noting.

So Yglesias seems to see sense, something intelligible, even intelligent, where there may well not be any such thing. There is still something to explain, though, namely why so many people accept this bullshit. Partly, no doubt, 'twas ever thus. Partly, also, people accept it because it is in their interest to do so: they work for Trump or they would be embarrassed to back down from supporting him, for instance. Partly, perhaps, we are more used to bullshit than we used to be because we suffer from an overload of information. This quote from T. S. Eliot has been doing the rounds on Twitter lately:

The vast accumulation of knowledge — or at least information — deposited…have been responsible for an equally vast ignorance.  When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields…in which the same words are used with different meanings, when every man knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.  And when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.    

Maybe he's right.

And, finally, maybe there's a sort of culture of bullshit in the US. I'm hesitant to suggest this, because I don't think that any large group of people is really smarter or dumber, better or worse, than any other. If there is a culture of bullshit in the US there may well be a similar culture in other countries. But the creation of certain sacred cows is highly visible in the US in a way that it doesn't seem to be in other countries. The flag, for instance, is idolized in a way I've never seen in any other country. Religion (of a particular, and particularly American, kind) is used to justify denial of scientific facts. The Republican Party has managed to attach itself to the flag and to this kind of religion, making itself almost an idol of sorts (and support for Democrats pretty much unthinkable for many people).  
But (still finally) there is also a history, especially in the South, of lying about the Civil War, and teaching these lies to children. When your parents as well as your teachers lie in this way, as is often the case (although maybe I shouldn't call the sincere repetition of a lie lying), then you are going to have a hard time accepting that it is a lie. Then people who tell (what you may or may not recognize at some level as being) the truth will come across as enemies of your family, your educators, and your culture. (It ought to be possible to insert something here about Wittgenstein and certainty, but I won't.) White Southerners have a huge psychological incentive to reject numerous truths and truth-tellers (as well as the psychological incentive to admit the truth, which, however painful, surely makes life simpler in some ways). If they do opt for such rejection, then more bullshit won't be such a big deal for them to accept. It might even feel like home. 

I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but this is the essay by John Stuart Mill that I have in mind when I talk about lies about the Civil War. I'll quote some of the relevant bits here:

There is a theory in England, believed perhaps by some, half believed by many more, which is only consistent with original ignorance, or complete subsequent forgetfulness, of all the antecedents of the contest. There are people who tell us that, on the side of the North, the question is not one of slavery at all. The North, it seems, have no more objection to slavery than the South have. Their leaders never say one word implying disapprobation of it. They are ready, on the contrary, to give it new guarantees; to renounce all that they have been contending for; to win back, if opportunity offers, the South to the Union by surrendering the whole point.

If this be the true state of the case, what are the Southern chiefs fighting about? Their apologists in England say that it is about tariffs, and similar trumpery. They say nothing of the kind. They tell the world, and they told their own citizens when they wanted their votes, that the object of the fight was slavery.

This was written in 1862, and the same lies and half-beliefs are still very much around. Here's more from Mill:

Let me, in a few words, remind the reader what sort of a thing this is, which the white oligarchy of the South have banded themselves together to propagate and establish, if they could, universally. When it is wished to describe any portion of the human race as in the lowest state of debasement, and under the most cruel oppression, in which it is possible for human beings to live, they are compared to slaves. When words are sought by which to stigmatize the most odious despotism, exercised in the most odious manner, and all other comparisons are found inadequate, the despots are said to be like slave-masters, or slave-drivers. What, by a rhetorical license, the worst oppressors of the human race, by way of stamping on them the most hateful character possible, are said to be, these men, in very truth, are. I do not mean that all of them are hateful personally, any more than all the Inquisitors, or all the buccaneers. But the position which they occupy, and the abstract excellence of which they are in arms to vindicate, is that which the united voice of mankind habitually selects as the type of all hateful qualities. I will not bandy chicanery about the more or less of stripes or other torments which are daily requisite to keep the machine in working order, nor discuss whether the Legrees or the St. Clairs are more numerous among the slave-owners of the Southern States. The broad facts of the case suffice. One fact is enough. There are, Heaven knows, vicious and tyrannical institutions in ample abundance on the earth. But this institution is the only one of them all which requires, to keep it going, that human beings should be burnt alive. The calm and dispassionate Mr. Olmsted affirms that there has not been a single year, for many years past, in which this horror is not known to have been perpetrated in some part or other of the South. And not upon negroes only; the Edinburgh Review, in a recent number, gave the hideous details of the burning alive of an unfortunate Northern huckster by Lynch law, on mere suspicion of having aided in the escape of a slave. What must American slavery be, if deeds like these are necessary under it?—and if they are not necessary and are yet done, is not the evidence against slavery still more damning? The South are in rebellion not for simple slavery; they are in rebellion for the right of burning human creatures alive.

It will take a long time to wake up fully from this nightmare. And perhaps human beings are never fully awake. In the meantime there are going to be mixed beliefs, half-beliefs, lies, denials, and, perhaps more than anything else, confusion. Dawning consciousness, too, we can hope. But certainly confusion. And nonsense. And bullshit. Its acceptance doesn't need any special explanation.

The ethics of trolling

An interesting-looking paper here by Massimo Leone. Summary:

The article singles out and describes the main rhetorical ingredients of trolling through contrasting it with comparable discursive practices: provocation, joke, defensive anonymity, critical public discourse, controversy, and lie. The following elements are found to play a major role in the discursive construction of trolling: topic-insensitive provocation; time-boundless jest; sadistic hierarchy of sender and receiver; anonymity of both the troll and her or his audience; choral character of the ‘actant observer’ of trolling; construction of artificial contradictory semantics; disruption of argumentative logics; irrelevance of the relation between beliefs and expressions. Trolling profoundly disrupts the conversational ethics of the human civilization because it severs expression from content, signifier from signified, communication from intention.

Theories of everything

This article on Shakespeare and education is interesting. Here's the bit that most stood out to me:

Because thinking and speaking well form the basis of existence in a community, rhetoric prepares you for every occasion that requires words.

That's quite a claim. (And some might expand the claim on the grounds that thinking and speaking need not involve only words.) Although I suppose 'prepares' and 'prepares completely' are not the same thing.

Here's more:

Fierce attention to clear and precise writing is the essential tool for you to foster independent judgment. That is rhetoric.

I don't know what to make of this. I'm all for clear and precise writing, but what exactly is its connection with judgment, let alone independent judgment? Clear expression should help clear understanding, but can one write clearly and precisely about a subject one does not understand? And isn't the meaning of clarity and precision something that varies from subject to subject or context to context? Yet knowing that hardly tells one what to say or write, or how to say or write it. So it doesn't prepare you for every occasion that requires words.

I don't have much more to say about this except that the claim made here on behalf of rhetoric seems excessive. And it reminds me of some claims made on behalf of economics, e.g. that it is the science of behavior (wasn't psychology meant to be that?), so that if you know economics then you know what people will do in this or that situation. Is that a helpful connection to make? It seems like a bad sign when any subject claims, or is claimed, to have an application as broad as this. But is it necessarily? And where does that leave philosophy?

David Foster Wallace on language

If you haven't already done so you should read David Foster Wallace's essay "Authority and American Usage." It's got Wittgenstein, ethics, comedy, and more. Some bits (by the way, SNOOT is an acronym for something or other relating to language snobbery, grammar Nazis, etc.):

This maybe goes too far. I think in general we should call people what they want to be called (Wallace implicitly recognizes this when he talks about PC English as a matter of politeness), but he's right that changing language does not change reality, and excessive focus on language means turning one's back on reality. Which is not good. 

I'm not sure that any reference to either Plato or Derrida is really helpful here, but this otherwise looks like a nice disposal of a badly thought out position.

This, on the other hand, is poor. Arguing from universal acceptance is weak, a is true only if we take 'interpret' in a special sense (as 'understanding', roughly), and b is only true if we take 'ideology' in a special sense (as 'way of thinking', perhaps). The main idea is that all language is political. This, it seems to me, is both true and false. It's true in the sense that language is a human product, a social product, and reflects various social relations and practices, past and present. There is obviously something political about this. Perhaps social relations are just by definition political. But the claim is false in suggesting that all attention to language is political and therefore important. Wallace's own insights on political correctness show this. 

  

(SWE = Standard Written English.) I think this is true, and why we owe it to our students to teach them SWE. It is easily understandable why many people would regard this truth as a bad thing, but that doesn't justify pretending that it isn't true. And it is understandable that many people would not want to teach SWE, because it's tedious or seemingly unchallenging intellectually, but that isn't a good reason not to do it. Matt Reed, in talking about college composition courses, writes:

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that most grammar instruction has been delegated to the K-12 system -- elementary schools were once called “grammar schools” for a reason -- with developmental courses available for the many students who still need to work on that. 101 [i.e. an introductory course on composition] is intended to address college-level skills.

I don't think the assumption he wants to make is reasonable at all. The reason we have these courses is because so many students do not know SWE well enough. Wallace again:

Reed's assumption "for the sake of argument" is contrary to a well-known fact. That's a bad kind of assumption to make for any reason. Not that we should necessarily have classes explicitly in SWE. They might not be needed at every college. And Wallace notes that such courses are said to have been proven ineffective. He suggests teaching them in a different way. Whether that would work remains to be shown. I have never had a class explicitly on English grammar or style, and I write as well as I want my students to. So direct instruction in how to write English might not be necessary. Perhaps all we need is the teaching of writing across the curriculum, and one or two courses in which students read excellent writing and are required to write in correct SWE about it. But Wallace is right to point out the practical (however regrettable or immoral) need for students to learn SWE and the fact that they aren't generally learning it now.   

In short, there is a lot of good stuff in Wallace's essay. It's a long essay, packed with footnotes (which is, and are, not always as funny as I take it they are meant to be, but hopefully you'll react differently), but well worth the time it takes to read it. 

Rhetoric again

We had an interesting discussion of rhetoric on Friday with all the rhetoricians and philosophers at the school plus some others trying to explain and understand what it is that the discipline of rhetoric takes itself to be. I'm not sure how far we got. Here are some points that the rhetoric people seemed to agree on:

• the goal of teaching and studying rhetoric is to achieve social harmony, specifically the avoidance of world wars and genocide but also lesser evils such as government shutdowns
• rhetoric is the art of persuasion, and studying it enables you both to persuade and to detect when others are trying to persuade you of something
• it is founded on a belief in relativism that rejects the idea of "truth with a capital T" 
• it is a habit of mind, something active that is never still and can never be pinned down or really defined
• it is also interested in human relations and power structures in something like the way that sociology is interested in such things

I don't know how all this is meant to go together, but it is quite possible that the subject doesn't see itself as having an essence that ties its various aspects together. My questions, still, would be something like these:

• if it is deeply relativistic, how can it also stand for good and against evil? what does it take 'good' and 'evil' to mean?
• if it is a kind of tool for non-violent combat, or simply persuasion, why should we expect this to lead to agreement rather than victory for one side or the other? or is agreement achieved through non-violent persuasion regarded as inevitably or necessarily harmonious? 
• if so, what reason is there to believe that the good guys will always win, or that the bad guys (or others) won't resort to non-rhetorical means when they sense that they are losing the rhetorical battle? 
• how does awareness of attempts to persuade lead to harmony rather than suspicion?
• if it really is about what actually persuades people (rather than, say, what ought to persuade people), why aren't empirical studies of the kind psychologists conduct a bigger part of the discipline?  
• if nothing really ties the parts of the subject together then how does one progress within the discipline from introductory to intermediate to advanced? and if one doesn't, or can't, do that, then is it really an academic discipline in which it makes sense to have students major, or would it better as a supplement to other majors?

I think that the questions about relativism, world peace, and whether something so diverse can be a real discipline are probably best regarded as red herrings. What remains seems strikingly close to the idea of the hermeneutics of suspicion (an approach to reading and interpretation that brings together ideas from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud). So how might a course of study be built on this idea? 

I think you would need to know some of the history of philosophy before you could understand Nietzsche, so you would probably start with a couple of courses in philosophy. Perhaps one course dealing with ethical theories from Plato to Mill, and another focusing on modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant. Some Schopenhauer would be handy, too, and some political philosophy wouldn't hurt. Next would come Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, either together in one course (which sounds like a lot, but might be possible) or else in three separate courses (ideal but perhaps not practical). Then you could finally get to the business of reading and interpretation, probably looking at both classic works of literature and art and contemporary 'texts' that can usefully be interpreted in this kind of way. For the latter I would think that literature and art would be less appropriate choices than political slogans, journalism, various forms of popular entertainment, and so on. 

You would need philosophers to teach the foundational philosophy courses, philosophically literate professors of literature and art to teach the classics, and some people (probably rhetoricians) to cover the contemporary stuff, although I don't know how much help, i.e. how many courses, students would need in this area. If you can read Shakespeare and Melville through Marxian, Freudian, and Nietzschean lenses then you probably don't need a lot of help doing the same with much simpler material. There wouldn't be much pure rhetoric in there, but then rhetoric doesn't seem to be pure so much as it is the application of certain philosophical ideas to literary (and other) criticism.

This could be quite a good program, although I don't know how different it would be from a fairly standard English curriculum with a more than standard philosophy requirement. I'm also not sure that the special promotion of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud is justified. It wouldn't be likely to be all that popular, or to lead directly to a job. But it would be interesting. 

Required-course college essays

If you care about this kind of thing at all you've probably already read Rebecca Schuman's anti-essay essay. It's all over the place (where "the place" is Facebook). So maybe you haven't seen it. In a nutshell, what she argues is that student essays in required courses are a waste of time:

Most students enter college barely able to string three sentences together—and they leave it that way, too. With protracted effort and a rhapsodically engaged instructor, some may learn to craft a clunky but competent essay somewhere along the way. But who cares? My fellow humanists insist valiantly that (among other more elevated reasons) writing humanities papers leads to the crafting of sharp argumentative skills, and thus a lifetime of success in a number of fields in which we have no relevant experience. But my friends who actually work in such fields assure me that most of their colleagues are borderline-illiterate. After all, Mark Zuckerberg’s pre-Facebook Friendster profile bragged “i don’t read” (sic), and look at him.

For this she has been pilloried. Quoting only from some of my Facebook friends:

• Wow. She's bitter. She's selfish. And she seems to miss entirely the point of what college is all about. Or, rather, what it should be all about. Methinks she's part of the problem, rather than an enlightened bearer of an A-ha solution.

  16 hours ago · Like · 2
• 
  

  Yeah, I have to say I think it's pretty crap. She generalizes, she simplifies, she claims she's tried everything when she hasn't tried much and her approaches aren't in any way shape or form informed by that reading thing she claims her students never do.

It struck me that the author of the first of these comments, and both the people who liked it, are very well paid, tenured professors, and that the author teaches at a school with unusually good students. Part of Schuman's point is that she isn't paid enough to do the hard work of teaching mediocre students how to write. So there's that. But let me get out of the way the criticisms that seem accurate and then move on to what Schuman gets right, or at least is right to bring up for discussion.

Of course she's bitter. See here, for instance, if you want to know more about that. Selfish? I don't see evidence for (or against) that here. I think he means lazy, but there is reason to believe that's not true. See here, for instance (worth looking at anyway, as it's a response to some of the misguided pillorying (and for another response to that see here)). Does she seem to miss the point of what college should be about? I don't think so. One of her points is that college is not what it should be. More on that below. She does generalize, of course, and simplify, and she has not tried literally everything. But she has tried more than you might think from just reading that one essay (see the last two links above in this paragraph).

So what is she right about? She's right that a surprising number of students manage to get into college despite being more or less illiterate. In graduate school, when I was at a very highly regarded "public Ivy" university, I taught students who apparently could not write a single sentence without a grammatical mistake in it. I'm told by a colleague that we have students here (in a college that has produced two Rhodes scholars in the last fifteen years) who cannot comprehend a newspaper editorial. That is, given an editorial in the Wall Street Journal they were unable to read it with enough comprehension to answer even the most basic questions about it (like: what is it about?, which side of the debate does it support?, etc.). At less prestigious schools these problems must be even worse. If it were one or two special cases that would be one thing, but it isn't. There are a lot of these people. The obvious response would be to admit fewer illiterate students, to help those who can be helped as much as possible if they are admitted, and to flunk those who are admitted but don't respond well to the help available.

This doesn't happen. If colleges and universities did not admit illiterate students then they might not have enough students to stay in business. They certainly wouldn't be able to field competitive sports teams or to keep alumni with illiterate children happy. Once the academically weak students are in they cannot be flunked out because attrition is bad for a school's US News & World Report ranking. And professors who give Fs and Ds aren't popular. Unpopular teachers don't get tenure at teaching schools. And unpopular majors have their departments shut down. Unpopular adjuncts, of course, just get fired. Everyone must be kept happy, but there is no incentive for anyone to help students learn how to read and write. Or almost no incentive.

Here's what we do at my school. Every student takes two semesters of composition and then two more writing-intensive courses. There's a Writing Center to help students with problems, but the people there don't proofread student papers, they only give general advice and instruction. Any other writing that students have to do is up to individual professors, as long as their department heads approve of what they are doing, and as long as what they do is deemed good enough to get tenure. Teaching people how to write is not something most of us have been trained to do, it isn't in our job description, it takes time away from teaching our subjects and doing research, and it isn't what students want. There is no incentive to do it, in other words. And writing-intensive courses require a lot of writing, but they are not courses in composition. Papers need not be graded on anything so mundane as grammar or spelling, and these courses are not taught by people with any training in the teaching of composition. I mention all this because I suspect it is pretty typical, not to take a dig at my school. In short, the only courses that students have to take that are aimed at improving their writing are those two first-year composition courses, and as far as I can tell it isn't possible to teach students how to write in that time.

Schuman's suggestion is that professors teaching required (but, presumably, non-composition) courses should not assign traditional essays in their courses because it will just be an exercise in frustration. I think she has a point. The conclusion I draw is not that those professors should not assign essays, but that everyone else should assign them too. And we should be prepared to give Fs to the students she describes who simply don't turn major assignments in. That means not caring so much about popularity and rankings. Which means caring about education, not money. Which means it isn't going to happen. But if the schools we work for don't care about education, why should some professors work hard to educate when many of their colleagues don't bother with the more onerous parts of the job, and when they aren't being compensated by their employers for doing it? Shit is fucked up and bullshit, to coin a phrase. And that, I take it, is Schuman's point.      

Nice things are nicer than nasty ones

Two striking examples of the terrible (I would say chilling, but that's too weak) effects that incivility can have, one in connection with climate change and one in philosophy. I've said nothing about the McGinn case because I have nothing to say that hasn't been said before, but his threat to write a book about the case makes me wonder whether everybody shouldn't say something, so that there is a chorus of opposition that makes any such manuscript unpublishable. Sadly it would just as likely have the opposite effect. Anyway, the New York Times has a story about it (not the possible book, but the case and sexism in philosophy generally), which quotes Jennifer Saul:

In an essay on implicit bias in the forthcoming book “What Needs to Change: Women in Philosophy,” Ms. Saul recalled the terror of overhearing faculty members at Princeton, where she earned her Ph.D., casually sort graduate students into “smart” versus merely hard-working — or worse, “stupid.”

Women, she said, are more likely to be categorized as “stupid,” to the detriment of the field as a whole.

Fear of being labeled not smart “is bad for philosophy,” Ms. Saul said. “It makes you not want to take risks.”

Of course in a free country people can express such views as that this or that student is stupid. But they ought not to do so, especially when there is a chance they might be overheard. And one reason why they ought not is that, as Saul says, it is bad for philosophy. (There are words people can use other than 'stupid,' I mean, and a Princeton graduate student is unlikely to be stupid in fact.)

The second example is from a Financial Times article on climate science. The whole thing is well worth reading, but this part stood out to me:

In the wake of the “Climategate” and “Glaciergate” controversies four years ago, a raft of inquiries eventually found no evidence of serious wrongdoing, let alone anything to raise doubts about the IPCC’s conclusions. But the scientists remain the target of a vigorous group of critics sceptical about their work. They have been branded “criminals” (Britain’s Lord Monckton) guilty of “massive international scientific fraud” (US senator James Sensenbrenner) who should commit “hara-kiri” (US pundit Glenn Beck) for duping the world with “snake oil” (former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin).

This has had an impact on the people doing this latest IPCC assessment, according to several of the scientists interviewed for this article. “I see it in the tension in the author team,” as they check, recheck, then check again all their work, said David Vaughan. “I think there is a point at which that kind of stress can become difficult to manage,” he added, explaining it has made IPCC work “a very cumbersome, slow process”.

Free speech is one thing, but the free market in opinions has an ugly downside (although I don't know that Beck's and Palin's positions can even be called opinions, i.e. things they actually believe). It might be the least bad way to do things, but there is a lot to be said for rational and civil debate (and for good old-fashioned shutting up) rather than the (conscious or otherwise) manipulation of opinion through rhetoric and the abuse of access to a large audience.

We're hiring again (but not in philosophy)

Job ad here:

Assistant or Associate Professor of English

March 14, 2013Multiple tenure-track positions, beginning August 2013, to teach in an English major that integrates fields in the humanities and the arts - rhetoric and writing, literature, fine arts, and philosophy - through a central focus on rhetorical studies. 

We seek candidates who demonstrate a strong interest in engaging in the opportunities that an interdisciplinary department like ours presents for teaching, scholarly engagement, community outreach, and mentorship of students. Assistant or associate professor rank possible. Preference will be given to candidates with Ph.D. by August 2013, but ABDs will be considered. 

Candidates must both fill out an on-line application at the Virginia jobs site and submit required supporting materials (a letter of application, résumé, official transcript, and three letters of recommendation) either by e-mail to RCSearch@vmi.edu or by mail to Dr. Emily Miller, Head, Department of English and Fine Arts, Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, VA 24450. 

Review of applications will begin immediately and continue until the positions have been filled. Interviews via Skype and/or at CEA. 

In a continuing effort to enrich its academic environment and provide equal educational and employment opportunities, VMI encourages women, minorities, disabled individuals and veterans to apply. 

Virginia Military Institute is a state-supported undergraduate military college of engineering, the sciences, humanities, and the social sciences with a strong emphasis on teaching excellence. 

Military experience is not required for faculty.

"Language is Sermonic"

This is a famous essay by Richard M. Weaver. Some selected passages:

the course itself [i.e. rhetoric, aka, I guess, freshman composition] has been allowed to decline from one dealing philosophically with the problems of expression to one which tries to bring below-par students up to the level of accepted usage.

the most obvious truth about rhetoric is that its object is the whole man.  It presents its arguments first to the rational part of man, because rhetorical discourses, if they are honestly conceived, always have a basis in reasoning.  Logical argument is the plot, as it were, of any speech or composition that is designed to persuade.

Rationality is an indispensable part to be sure, yet humanity includes emotionality, or the capacity to deal and suffer, to know pleasure, and it includes the capacity for aesthetic satisfaction, and, what can be only suggested, a yearning to be in relation with something infinite.  This last is his religious passion, or his aspiration to feel significant and to have a sense of belonging in a world that is productive of much frustration. These at least are the properties of humanity.

When we think of rhetoric as one of the arts of civil society (and it must be a free society, since the scope for rhetoric is limited and the employment of it constrained under despotism) we see that the rhetorician is faced with a choice of means in appealing to those whom he can prevail upon to listen to him.  If he is at all philosophical , it must occur to him to ask whether there is a standard by which the sources of persuasion can be ranked.  In a phrase, is there a preferred order of them, so that, in a scale of ethics, it is nobler to make use of one sort of appeal than another?  This is of course a question independent of circumstantial matters, yet a fundamental one.  We all react to some rhetoric as “untruthful” or “unfair” or “cheap,” and this very feeling is evidence of the truth that it is possible to use a better or a worse style of appeal.  What is the measure of the better style?  Obviously this question cannot be answered at all in the absence of some conviction about the nature and destiny of man.  Rhetoric inevitably impinges upon morality and politics; and if it is one of the means by which we endeavor to improve the character and the lot of men, we have to think of its methods and sources in relation to a scheme of values.

every use of speech, oral and written, exhibits an attitude, and an attitude implies an act. 

The implication of all this seems to be that it is not just advisable but essential and fundamental to rhetoric to study the philosophy of human nature, ethics, logic, and philosophy of language. The rest might be studying the techniques of great writers (and maybe some artists, film-makers, etc.), and probably some psychology too. And I don't really see what would be left to cover, other than more philosophy, more literature, etc., plus plenty of practice in persuasive writing, speaking, and so on. It sounds pretty good to me. And a far cry from some of the things I've heard about rhetoric.

Rhetoric

If you're wondering about my allergy to rhetoric (or 'rhetoric,' at any rate), try watching this video. Some of the people in it come across as intelligent and make good points (there's one doctoral candidate in particular who seems sound to me), but not everything is uniformly excellent.

If you would rather not watch it all, here are some parts transcribed. People don't always speak in perfectly formed sentences, of course, but I have done my best to write what I think they mean to say accurately.  

1. An education of rhetoric enables communicators in any facet of any field to create and assess messages effectively. 
2. What rhetoric does is to help you to become more self-conscious about your practices so that you can tailor them for a wide variety of individual situations.
3. Rhetoric [...] is language.
4. When we decide which browser we'll use we're making a rhetorical decision. Which is going to be the best for my career? Which is going to be the best for my research? ... Take digital photography. We make decisions of how I will crop the picture, what lighting I will use, ... These are just as important to the person who is doing visual rhetoric as the person who is using oral rhetoric would consider how loudly they speak, what terms they use. It's the same principle at work.
5. How people make purchase decisions can be rhetorically informed or not.  [The speaker then points out that people tend to be much more careful and systematic when buying a car or choosing a university than they are when choosing which toothpaste to buy.] That's epistemic rhetoric.
6. [Next comes a story about two young women going to college. One does a lot of research before choosing a school, and is therefore said to have made an informed decision, while the other picked the school that most of her friends were going to, which is said not to be an informed decision. After this we are told that many people do not question their lives at all because they don't have the capacity to do so. The implication is that studying rhetoric will teach you not to be so foolish as to pick a college without careful research, e.g. into what majors each college offers, and will, in general, help you lead a more thoughtful, rational life. The narrator later tells us that "Julie" used epistemic rhetoric and made an informed decision, while "Kate" based her decision on someone else's opinion.]
7. Rhetoric, among other things, is epistemic, that is, it creates realities. It's not going to create that wall over there, but it's going to create your perception of that wall or understanding of what that wall means to you, your understanding that the wall actually is there. So when I say it creates reality what I mean is not that it creates some physical world but it creates our understanding of the physical world and our place in the physical world. 
8. The one sentence definition of epistemic rhetoric that I like to use is that rhetoric is a means of adjudicating between competing knowledge claims.
9. To say that rhetoric is epistemic is to say that rhetoric is a way of knowing.
10. Rhetoric is one of the processes we use to create facts, to construct facts.
11. A fact is raw data plus interpretation.

There's a lot going on, and going wrong, there, it seems to me. Passages 1-4 suggest that one problem is trying to do too much. How can one discipline enable people to assess messages effectively in any facet of any field? I can't assess a chemistry textbook without knowing any chemistry, for instance. Of course, I might check the spelling and grammar, or I might be a design expert and check the layout, but there cannot be a single discipline that specializes in every aspect of every kind of communication. And making people more self-conscious about communication might make it harder for them to communicate effectively. Point 4 suggests that rhetoric is the study of presentation, which perhaps could be a discipline. But I doubt that one can reliably guide people in matters of presentation without some knowledge of what is to be presented. Otherwise the presentation might distort the content or mislead the audience.

Points 5-11 seem almost like a philosophical nightmare. 5 and 6 suggest that "epistemic rhetoric" is (the study of) rational decision-making. This has nothing to do with presentation, though, except in the sense of point 3, that it all has to do with language. This is about as much as I can get from point 7. Point 8 suggests that, if rhetoric is language, epistemic rhetoric is reason. And then 10 and 11 seem like garbled Nietzsche. 

In short, I'm not impressed. The idea seems to be that rhetoric is somehow both the art of presentation in any medium and of any content, and that rhetoric is philosophy, or something very like it. If you really wanted to learn this stuff I'd suggest something like the following curriculum:

• freshman composition
• graphic design
• critical thinking
• cognitive psychology
• epistemology
• philosophy of language
• Nietzsche
• Wittgenstein

That doesn't sound so bad, although it might be a challenge to make it all fit together and to teach the courses lower on the list (philosophy of language, etc.) to undergraduates. I wonder whether anyone does something like this? Maybe it's the future of philosophy at VMI.

Contemporary moral debate

I'm developing an allergy to the word 'rhetoric', but reading Don Levi's "In Defense of Rhetoric" got me thinking. He takes an interest in the actual arguments people present regarding such issues as abortion. Arguments like this, the kind you find in real life, can be simply bad in one way or another (they may be based on ignorance, fallacious, expressions of prejudice, etc.) but they can also be revealing. Sometimes people misunderstand their own beliefs, their own values, and can come to see them more clearly when pressed to be consistent and to express more accurately exactly what they mean. (I don't mean to suggest that pressing for consistency can never go too far.) This is an example, I think, of how studying philosophy can be useful. It can help us to understand both ourselves and some of the issues that shape and divide our society.

Studying only sophisticated arguments about, say, abortion might not be especially likely to have this effect, though, because philosophers (and legal theorists, et al.) tend to respond to other philosophers more than to ordinary people. There are exceptions. Ronald Dworkin has studied popular opinions about abortion and euthanasia, trying to make the most sense possible of the various things people say they believe about them. Jonathan Haidt does something like this, too, and somebody or other (Greg Pence?) has gone through public statements by politicians and political groups about cloning and tried to make sense of the moral arguments contained in them. But a lot of philosophy is not like this. Often people will start with far-from-ordinary concerns with personhood and rationality, and go from there. I think we ought to assign wise work to our students, expose them to serious attempts to get at the truth as well as the rubbish we read and hear every day on tv, for instance, but I wonder whether we should also have them study the rhetoric of more ordinary arguments too, to make more explicit the connection between careful philosophical argument and the chatter and journalism that surrounds, and sometimes fills, our heads. After all, often the bad arguments are just corrupted versions of good ones, and perhaps we should point out the corruption explicitly rather than leaving students to see it for themselves.

One source of such arguments would be the students themselves, and in discussing issues like abortion in class we might hope to identify and then work on various kinds of confusion and ignorance. But this limits the class to the opinions its members happen to have. What if none of them is confused in some particular common way that you would like them to understand? For instance, they are all on the same side of the abortion debate but you want them to understand both sides (or more), not only the best version of their own opinions. If part of the point is to help them understand society, maybe opinions and arguments from outside the classroom should be studied. They might even poll other people and then (try to) do a Dworkin on the results. I can see students enjoying this, and college administrators lapping it up (how innovative!, x-phi!, inquiry-based learning!, interdisciplinary!), but perhaps that is precisely what makes me suspicious.

First let me spell out what I have in mind a bit more. It would have at least two parts. One would be looking at specific arguments, such as the ones you hear about making sure that only good people and not bad people have guns (do good people exist as an ontological category?). Another would be looking at a range of opinions to see how consistent they are with each other. This is where conducting surveys might come in. But would there actually be anything to be gained from something like this that students would not get from a normal course in contemporary moral issues? Is there anything obviously bad about the idea? Has anyone tried it and found that it did or did not go well? Or have I failed to describe the idea well enough for anyone to answer these questions? I'm curious to know.  

I can easily imagine people I know thinking that this was a great idea. But I also know and respect people who would hate it. If nothing else, I think I could use a reminder about why this kind of thing seems so bad to some people. My own opinion is not so much torn as just in the middle. I want to take my students' minds and acquaint them with those of great philosophers, so I want the attention in my courses to be on both the students and the great philosophers. Is that impossible? Or too indulgent of the students? There is a danger that the course would turn into an exercise in amateur sociology, but if we applied the principle of charity, wouldn't it be philosophy too? That is, even in the parts of the course that focused on the beliefs of ordinary people, we wouldn't only be trying to figure out what they believe or how they think, but what they ought to believe and how they ought to think, given what they say and do, on the one hand, and truth and logic, on the other. I sort of like the idea, but I also suspect I am being, or have already been, corrupted by administrative pressures.