This Is Not News

When people ask about the advantages of studying philosophy, one of the things you often hear is that the discipline helps promote “critical thinking.” We hear a lot about how it’s important for schools to help develop students’ critical thinking skills. But the precise nature of those skills is a little vague. What do we mean when we say someone is thinking critically? For that matter, what would it look like to think uncritically?

It actually took me a few years of teaching philosophy courses to develop a short answer to these questions that I could put on the syllabus. I’m a little miffed that I took so long, but I’m pretty happy with the final result. I share it here as an invitation to criticize my thinking about critical thinking.

Philosophy is often described as a discipline that improves critical thinking skills. What does that mean? I believe that two questions are central to philosophy: “Why?” and “What if?”

When we ask “What if?” we are using our imaginations and our intelligence to figure out the consequences of an event or an idea. We want to know as much as possible about how the world – or our lives – would be different if one particular claim were to be true.

Not coincidentally, science fiction got me asking these questions at an early age. I suspect that’s why I remain hooked on both SF and philosophy. What do you think?

This post is discussing a bit of old news, but it may be relevant news in light of recent events. Over the weekend I came across this old post from Scientific American’s Bering in Mind blog. There are two parts to the post, and both are worth discussing. There’s a report on recent studies about how ideas can affect behavior, and a discussion of the “Would you kill Hitler as a child?” question. I’ll start with the former, even though the blog author leads off with the latter.

Bering cites two studies that indicate that when people have been primed to think about, or accept, the position of determinism, they are more likely to engage in less ethical behaviors. Here’s how Bering describes one of the studies.

In fact, a study published last year in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Roy Baumeister and his colleagues found that simply by exposing people to deterministic statements such as, “Like everything else in the universe, all human actions follow from prior events and ultimately can be understood in terms of the movement of molecules” made them act more aggressively and selfishly compared to those who read statements endorsing the idea of free will, such as, “I demonstrate my free will every day when I make decisions” or those who simply read neutral statements, such as, “Oceans cover 71 percent of the earth’s surface.” Participants who’d been randomly assigned to the deterministic condition, for example, were less likely than those from the other two groups to give money to a homeless person, or to allow a classmate to use their cellular phone.

Now, it’s important to note that results like this do not provide evidence for or against determinism. You could say that the results happen because we do have free will, but when we think about the idea that we don’t, we give ourselves more leeway to be selfish. Or you could say that we do not have free will, and that somehow whatever part of our brain is activated when we think about determinism also causes an increase in selfish behaviors. The question is, what do we do with the results? Do we say that even if determinism is true, the results of acknowledging that truth are so negative that we should not do it? Or do we find some way to build up a buffer, to help introduce a counter-force that will lead people to less antisocial behavior?

The irony, of course, is that if human behavior is fully determined, the question of what we should do is irrelevant, because we are going to do what we are going to do. But our asking and pondering of the irrelevant question can not be prevented by our understanding of its irrelevance, because we are determined to do it. So we can really only hope that our deterministic process is leading us to a result that we find desirable. (Or maybe we can’t hope anything at all, if we are so determined.)

If determinism is false, then it seems like we need to find a way to emphasize responsibility even when discussing determinism. Stay away from talking about fate and maybe even the idea that everything happens for a reason. Point out that if what we do is determined by who we are and the circumstances that we find ourselves in, our brains and minds possess the structures that can produce beneficial choices. If who I am determines what I do, let me be the best me that I can. I’m not sure the idea hangs together coherently, but again, we’re trying to discuss the idea of determinism without losing sight of personal responsibility.

You can see the tension I’m talking about in Bering’s discussion of the question, “Would you kill Hitler as a child?” He says that he can’t help but feel that Hitler could have prevented the Holocaust; that regardless of social forces Hitler had the choice not to be so destructive. He didn’t make that choice, so he must be inherently evil, and therefore deserves to die. But if Hitler is essentially evil, then it was never possible for him to choose good. So his essence, or nature, is what determined his actions, and there was never any choice. If there was no choice, was there responsibility?

As for me, I wouldn’t do it. I can’t reliably predict the effect of Hitler’s death. If could see a fairly direct link between saving lives and killing someone, I could see the argument. But in a more nebulous situation, all I have to go by is my own ethical compass, which doesn’t support homicide.

I’ve been loosely following the goings-on in the Screen Actors Guild negotiations, and I admit that much of my info seems to come from the dueling statements by various factions which are reposted on Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood site, but it strikes me that there’s a really interesting case study here of an idea I’ve seen expressed by Gandhi (and certainly elsewhere). In a nutshell, SAG has gotten nowhere in its negotiations with the main group of production companies, the AMPTP. In order to try to gain some leverage in the negotiations, the national board of SAG wants to hold a strike authorization vote. They don’t actually want to strike yet, they just want to make it clear that a strike is a possibility if a suitable deal isn’t worked out. Various factions within SAG, along with many unions and industry participants outside of SAG, make the argument that given the current economy, it’s a terrible time to strike and possibly put people out of work, and SAG should just hurry up and try to get the best contract it can now.

OK, so where’s the Gandhi come in? One of the major tenets of his strategy of non-cooperation was that no minority can exploit a larger group without that group’s permission and cooperation. If the larger group simply refuses to cooperate, then the smaller group can not accomplish any of the things it wants to accomplish and therefore can not benefit from the oppression. In the case of India, Britain could gain no advantage from its empire without the labor of the colonial subjects, the general acceptance of colonial rule, and the work of native administrators and officials. If every man, woman and child in India refused to do any work that would benefit the British Empire, the British in India would be at a loss and Britain itself would gain no raw materials or profitable market. The oppressed must go along with their oppression. Why would the oppressed willingly cooperate with their oppressors? Because the oppressors have the power to inflict suffering. They can take away what small amount of resources and freedom the oppressed have obtained for themselves. They can even take away the oppressed’s lives. And so, in order to preserve the small bit that they have, the oppressed cooperate and do not demand the much greater amount of resources and freedom to which they are entitled. You know the expression that no one is more dangerous than someone with nothing left to lose? Well, the flip side is that if you give someone just a tiny amount to lose, they become a whole lot less dangerous. Read the remainder of this entry »

I managed to get sucked into a discussion of pragmatism as it’s understood politically vs. how it’s understood philosophically. There are some things I want some time to chew on, especially regarding the political weakness of Dewey’s pragmatism. But it’s a pretty good discussion as it stands.

As my noodling about deliberation intersects with my near-obsessive following of Democratic presidential delegate selection results, it is probably worth examining the undercurrent of controversy about the use of caucuses in some states to select delegates. The argument for caucuses is that they encourage interaction between voters, encourages people to stand behind their choices, and allows for some chance of voters persuading each other to change their minds. All of these are similar to the advantages proposed by deliberation. Many supporters of Hillary Clinton’s campaign have pointed out a potential downside – there is a limited time window and a long time commitment required than in a straightforward election. This drives down participation because some people are unwilling or unable to participate. As much as I have enjoyed Barack Obama’s advantage in garnering support from caucus states, I can definitely see the point here and would certainly support any state that wanted to move from a caucus to a primary. So do various deliberation schemes suffer from the same problem? Well, if you’re doing a deliberative panel to work on a specific issue, you’re going to need to build some support for lost wages, child care concerns, and similar considerations. If you wanted to do a larger-scale deliberation project, you’re probably going to need to space it out over a period of days. I think participation is worth the costs, but it’s worth looking at the practical examples in order to appreciate just how large that cost is.

• Dave Thomer posted on February 27, 2008
  Yeah, I'm trying desperately to stay on the horse. I think that if you go to a caucus, it feels more ...
• Robn posted on February 23, 2008
  I'm so glad to see you're blogging again, and doing analysis of the way US "democracy" works. I haven't ...

OK, so brainstorming about the general idea of creating something deliberative juries to set policy – what are the drawbacks?

A major one is participation. I think to work, this is something where you’d have to get large swaths of the population involved. You can’t let people out of it because they have very busy very important jobs, because the perspective given by those very busy very important jobs needs to be represented. We’re not looking for an “unbiased�? or “neutral�? panel – we’re looking for a panel whose collection of biases resembles the collection of biases in the nation. But that means mandating participation and closing a lot of loopholes. Is one of the rights in a democracy the ability to avoid participating in a democracy? My gut instinct says no – that if you want to enjoy the fruits of certain rights and political structures, you need to pay into the cost of having them. And if a deliberative democracy is going to work, you need people to understand what deliberation is and how a group of citizens can set a policy. If understanding comes through doing, then people need to do it. We make people go to grade school and high school not just for their own benefit but because the costs to society are too large if they don’t.

Why do I think it’s dangerous for citizens to not understand the deliberative process through participation? Because if the process isn’t something you participate in, it becomes something external to you – it becomes a “them�? that is against normal folks like “us.�? Listen to the way most people talk about “the government�? and what it does with your money, your time, your life. “The government�? is an Other, a disconnected powerful force that exerts power over us but over which we have no control. So whenever “the government�? tries to do something, there’s distrust, suspicion, opposition, and resistance. As a result, “the government�? becomes a force to be disparaged even by those people who want to exert power through the government. Watch how many Democratic and Republican presidential candidates complain about Washington and the way it works – even though many of them are senators who are part of the existing Washington power structure, and all of them want to be a very significant part of the Washington power structure. Candidates are more than willing to exploit our alienation from what should be a democratic government. Imagine what will happen to a citizen deliberative body. If a large segment of the population refuses to participate, elites will have incentives to rail against the citizen deliberators in order to muster votes and other types of support from the nonparticipants. This will create added pressures on the deliberators and make the whole process even less attractive.

There are also a lot of logistical issues to work out in setting up a citizen deliberative body, and for the moment I’m leaving those questions aside. I figure I ought to at least raise them. What kind of issues will citizen deliberators discuss? What role, if any, would the existing branches of government play? Do we need a professional legislature to go along with the citizen deliberators? Should laws passed by citizen deliberators have a sunset clause so that they can automatically be reviewed by future deliberators? How long would a particular panel of deliberators meet? Who would pay their salaries? How would this affect the families of the deliberators? How long could the deliberators stay away from their jobs?

Lurking behind these logistical questions is the idea that someone is going to have to maintain the program. Someone has to identify the experts, edit the briefing materials, supervise the selection of the panel, moderate the discussions, perform and interpret any surveys or polling. There is still going to be a bureaucracy and a set of experts involved. While they won’t be setting policy, they’ll be exerting a large influence over the folks that do. How do we avoid Dewey’s problem of experts here? Familiarity helps, so part of each deliberative panel’s process should include an explanation of how the panel and materials were selected and what the goals of deliberation are, something along the lines of the introduction potential jurors get before they are interviewed. This way the citizenry will understand how the process is supposed to work, and if they see it being abused, they are more likely to rise to its defense. (This will only work if the system is sufficiently established that a number of the citizens care about its continues integrity, which I admit is an uncertain bet.)

OK, I still need to flesh out some of what I’ve said here, plus I’m kicking some ideas around about the importance of institutional memory and how a deemphasis of expertise would affect that memory. That’ll be the first weekend thought to tackle.

Doing some thinking out loud that may end up as a blog post regarding a paper I’m trying to put together, about people’s capacity for deliberation in democratic societies and what kind of institutions might work and not work.

It starts with the problem of experts. As an empiricism-driven philosophy, pragmatism supports the idea of gathering information about a problem, predicting how various potential solutions might play out, and then making a decision based on what the evidence suggests is the best possible solution. But a democracy has to make a lot of decisions, so that’s a lot of empirical information to gather, process, and interpret. No elected official can do it – that’s why they have staffs, and sometimes they don’t even have time to read the text of a bill before they vote on it. So the average citizens can’t really be expected to do it either – and I don’t know about you, but I know I don’t have a staff.

Now, if we can’t have out own staffs, maybe we can at least rely on experts. We can read recommendations or endorsements and make decisions from there. But that brings in what Dewey calls the problems of experts. If you spend a lot of time researching issue X and figuring out how to solve it, talking to other people who care a lot about issue X, and putting enormous amounts of your time and energy into minute details and permutations of issue X, all of a sudden you are not thinking like the average, non-issue-X expert does. You can’t quite relate to how he or she sees the world. You can’t understand why Average Joe doesn’t care passionately about marginal tax rates and sugar tariffs.

Or, to put in other terms: every time there’s a comic book movie made, the film-makers make some small change to the comic story. The millions of filmgoers who haven’t picked up a comic book in years happily see the new movie and hopefully they enjoy it. The thousands of people who are familiar with the comic and can share details of its history with you notice the change, and it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard to them. And they can’t understand why there’s not a mass of people with torches and pitchforks at the movie studios, or at least a halfway decent boycott. They’re experts, and their concerns are very different from the average filmgoer. They see the world, and the movie, differently. So their view of what makes, say, a good Spider-Man movie is not necessarily a correct view, even though they’re the experts. As Dewey says, the experts can become their own class, their own community, far removed from the communities that their expertise is supposed to solve. Read the remainder of this entry »

I’ve spent the last last nine-plus years of my life with philosophy as the focus of my academic and professional life. So it was a little bit of a kick in the teeth to read this article in the Inquirer this week about Anita Allen, a professor of law and philosophy at Penn who has made philosophy a secondary academic and professional focus in no small part because because she doesn’t see the discipline as particularly relevant right now.

“I’m in a livelier, more hands-on world,” Allen says, offering a sharp view of the discipline with which she fell in love as an adolescent.

“I have not been able to encourage other people like me to go into philosophy because I don’t think it has enough to offer them.

“The salaries aren’t that great, the prestige isn’t that great, the ability to interact with the world isn’t that great, the career options aren’t that great, the methodologies are narrow.

“Why would you do that,” she asks, “when you could be in an African American studies department, a law school, a history department, and have so many more people to interact with who are more like you, a place where so many more methods are acceptable, so many more topics are going to be written about? Why would you close yourself off in philosophy?

I do not mean this to be vindictive or defensive, but when a fellow academic is saying you’re not hands-on enough, there’s something of a problem.

Part of the issue is probably the very real diversity problem that Allen cites. Part of it is the fight within the discipline over what counts as being properly philosophical and sufficiently rigorous.

I’ve spent roughly a quarter of my life in philosophy and I’ve done it because I think the discipline has something to tell us about the problems we face in today’s society. And because I think it helps show us some methods that will work to help us solve those problems. Every day I step into a classroom and try to pass along that idea to a group of skeptical students. And some days I realize just how hard of a sell that is.

In the aftermath of Marion Jones’ admission of steroid usage, one of her relay mates says that she should be allowed to keep the bronze medal that the team won in 2000. Passion Richardson says that “I should not have to suffer the consequences for someone else’s bad decisions and choices.” And maybe that’s so – but should she be allowed to profit from them? When you participate in a team event, you’re getting the benefit of your teammates’ skill, but you’re also taking on some responsibility for their actions as well.

It’s a dicey issue, and there are plenty of parallels to contemporary society – I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that I am drawing some benefits from the unjust actions of others, but then what responsibility do I have to correct those injustices?

For some reason I got this Kids in the Hall sketch in my head today, and it occurred to me that it might be useful the next time I have to teach about skepticism. We may not really believe that David Foley has a speech impediment, but all the available sensory evidence agrees with that possibility. So if you can’t rule it out, can you say you know what’s going on?

Or maybe I just wanted an excuse to go hunting for old sketch comedy and call it research.