Paper Guideline

Due Date: the beginning of class on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

Worth: 5% of final grade

Length/Format: Papers must be typed, and must be between 300-600 words long. Provide a word count on the first page of the paper. (Most programs like Microsoft Word & WordPerfect have automatic word counts.)

Assignment:
1) Pick an article from a newspaper, magazine, or journal in which an author presents an argument for a particular position. I will also provide some links to potential articles at the course website. You are free to choose any article on any topic you want, but you must show Sean your article by Monday, Novemer 16th, for approval. The main requirement is that the author of the article must be presenting an argument. One place to look for such articles is the Opinion page of a newspaper. Here’s a short list of some other good sources online:

• The New Yorker
• Slate
• New York Review of Books
• London Review of Books
• Times Literary Supplement
• Boston Review
• Atlantic Monthly
• The New Republic
• The Weekly Standard
• The Nation
• Reason
• Dissent
• First Things
• Mother Jones
• National Journal
• The New Criterion
• Wilson Quarterly
• The Philosophers' Magazine
  

(for even more sources, check out the left-hand column of Arts & Letters Daily)

2) In the essay, first briefly explain the article’s argument in your own words. What is the position that the author is arguing for? What are the reasons the author offers as evidence for her or his conclusion? What type of argument does the author provide? In other words, provide a brief summary of the argument.
NOTE: This part of your paper shouldn’t be very long. I recommend making this about one paragraph of your paper.

3) In the essay, then evaluate the article’s argument. Overall, is this a good or a bad argument? Why or why not? Check each premise: is each premise true? Or is it false? Questionable? (Do research if you have to in order to determine whether the author’s claims are true.) Then check the structure of the argument. Do the premises provide enough rational support for the conclusion? If you are criticizing the article’s argument, be sure to consider potential responses that the author might offer, and explain why these responses don’t work. If you are defending the article’s argument, be sure to consider and respond to objections.
NOTE: This should be the main part of your paper. Focus most of your paper on evaluating the argument.

4) Attach a copy of the article to your paper when you hand it in. (Save trees! Print it on few pages!)

TIP: It’s easier to write this paper on an article with a BAD argument. Try finding a poorly-reasoned article!

Possible Paper Articles

Here are some links to a variety of articles you could use for your paper on explaining and evaluating an article's argument:

1. Bad Stereotyping: race & gender = insufficient info
2. The Idle Life is Worth Living: in praise of laziness
3. In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: are some people just not meant for college?
4. Who Would Make an Effective Teacher?: we're using the wrong predictors
5. Study Says Social Conservatives Are Dumb: but that doesn't mean they're wrong
   
6. The Financial Crisis Killed Libertarianism: if it wasn't dead to begin with
7. How'd Economists Get It So Wrong?: Krugman says the least wrong was Keynes
8. An Open Letter to Krugman: get to know your field
9. Consider the Lobster: David Foster Wallace ponders animal ethics
10. Genetically Engineered Pain Free Animals: would it be ethical to make 'em feel no pain?
11. Is Worrying About the Ethics of Your Diet Elitist?: since you asked, no
    
12. Loyalty is Overrated: adaptability & autonomy matter more
13. FBI Profiling: it's a scam, like psychic cold reading
14. Singer: How Much Should We Give?: just try to think up a more important topic
15. Can Foreign Aid Work?: it has problems, but we should use it
16. The Dark Art of Interrogation: Bowden says torture is necessary
17. Opposing the Death Penalty: it's not about innocence
18. You Don't Deserve Your Salary: no one does
    
19. Against Free Speech: but it's free, so it must be good
    
20. What pro-lifers miss in the stem-cell debate: love embryos? then hate fertility clinics
21. Is Selling Organs Repugnant?: freakonomicists for a free-market for organs
22. Why I Have No Future: Strawson's intuition that death's not bad
    
23. Should I Become a Professional Philosopher?: hell 2 da naw
24. Blackburn Defends Philosophy: it beats being employed

Midterm Reminder

Just a reminder: The midterm will be held Wednesday, October 28th. We'll be reviewing for the midterm in class on Wednesday. It's worth 15% of your overall grade, and will cover everything we've done in class so far:

• definitions of 'logic,' 'reasoning,' and 'argument'
  
• evaluating arguments
• types of arguments:
  -deductive (aim for certainty, are valid/invalid and sound/unsound)
  -inductive (generalizing from examples, depend on large, representative samples)
  -args about cause/effect
  -abductive (inferences to the best explanation)
  
• the ten fallacies covered in class so far
  

Finally, here's a sock puppet displaying the fallacy of appealing to ignorance.

Homework #2

Just a reminder that homework #2 is due at the beginning of class on Friday, October 23rd. The assignment is to determine the fallacies in the arguments of #1 (a through t) of exercise 5-3 on pages 150-151 of our textbook.

That's an Ad Hominem, Jerk

Here's some links on the ad hominem (personal attack) fallacy:

• Sure, some critics of Obama are racist, but does that mean we can dismiss their arguments? As much as we might want to, logically, no we cannot!
• Some variants on the personal attack: tu quoque (hypocrite!) and guilt by association (she hangs around bad people!).
• I should note that tu quoque isn't always fallacious reasoning.
  
• "The ad hominem rejoinders—ready the ad hominem rejoinders!"
• Remember our rallying cry: "STUPID PEOPLE SOMETIMES SAY SMART THINGS."
  

Get to studying, you ignorant sluts.

Take My Wife, As Amphiboly

Here's some stand up from Henny Youngman, the violin-toting comedian who came up with "Take my wife... please!"

Fallacies, Fallacies, Everywhere

Looking for links on fallacies and equivocation? This is your post! First, there's a nice series of short articles on a bunch of different fallacies, including many that aren't in our book.... but also an entry on equivocation.

Speaking of, my best friend the inter-net has some nice examples of the fallacy of equivocation. Here is one good one:

A feather is light.

What is light cannot be dark.
Therefore, a feather cannot be dark.

Murder on the Abductive Express

Here's that paper I talked about in class about the importance of considering and testing multiple possible explanations rather than a single hypothesis:

• J.R. Platt's "Strong Inference" (pdf)

(NOTE: Platt uses the word "inductive" in a more general way than we do in class, to refer to any non-deductive kind of reasoning.)

Also, in honor of abductive arguments, here's a dinosaur comic murder mystery.

Learning From Mistaking

Based on our super-short no-power class, here's some audio of Jonah Lehrer on Open Source talking about the importance of figuring out your mistakes.

“How experts learn, they really learn by looking at their mistakes. And this can be an unpleasant way to live, because who wants to get home after a long day’s work and think about all the stuff you messed up that day. And yet that tends to be a very effective way to learn. As Beckett said: ‘Fail. Fail better. Fail. Fail better.’ It’s that process of realizing that we all make mistakes. We all fail.

“I talk about it in terms of a variety of domains. I talk about it in terms of a backgammon player. After every match, even matches he wins, he goes back and looks at all the moves he did badly.

“I talk about a soap opera director who, after a day of shooting–a 16-hour day–he goes home and puts in the raw tape from that day and forces himself to make a list of thirty things he did wrong. Thirty mistakes so minor that no one else would notice them.

“Tom Brady: when Tom Brady watches game tape for hours every week, he’s not looking for the passes he did well. He’s looking for the passes he missed, for the open men he didn’t find.

“We need to think about how we think about learning and see mistakes as the inevitable component of learning. You can’t learn at a very fundamental level unless you get stuff wrong. And so not to fear our mistakes. Not to loathe them. Not to be so scared of making them. But to realize that we have to, in a sense, celebrate them. That they are an inevitable component of learning and you can’t learn without them.”

If you like stuff like this, you'll probably like the "Owning Our Ignorance" club.

Group Presentations

Here are the assigned groups for the group presentations on fallacies, along with your topics and the date of each presentation:

1. Accent & Division (10/12): Alisha, Ryan
2. Ad Hominem & Appeal to Force (10/14): Ashley, Kristina
3. Appeal to Pity & Popular Appeal (10/16): Kyle, Sam
4. Appeal to Ignorance & Hasty Generalization (10/19): Dan, Johnny, Matt
5. Straw Man & Red Herring (10/26): Christopher, Dominick
6. Begging the Question & Loaded Question (10/28): Jonathan, William
7. Appeal to Authority & False Dilemma (10/30): Amy, Elaine
8. Slippery Slope & The Naturalistic Fallacy (11/02): Kathi, Lola
   

Causalicious

Here's the stick-figure comic William was talking about in class today.

Correlation is a tricky concept. We tend to see the world in all-or-nothing terms, rather than in shades of probability.