Arguments and the Adversary Method

Arguments and the Adversary Method

• Online comments often display racism, sexism, and nastiness, leading to disillusionment despite the initial hope for diverse viewpoints.
• Eric and Cassandra disengage from diversity conversations due to frustration with others' framing of their identities, opting out of simplified debates.
• The chapter explores circumstances where people engage in social issue conversations by "fighting" and arguing.
• "Argument" has two meanings: a heated disagreement or a set of statements supporting a conclusion with reasons (premises).
• Logic and philosophy primarily focus on the second meaning, downplaying its connection to the "fighting" sense.
• Arguments with reasons do not necessitate hostility, and anger can be expressed without justification.
• Shouting or name-calling can replace reasoned arguments, exacerbated by political blogs, talk radio, and cable news shows engaging in insults.
• Incivility, bullying, and rudeness are increasing in various areas of life.
• Arguments based on reasons and justification are challenging to find in social identity and difference issues due to their personal nature, historical inequality, and opposition.
• The adversarial history of argument, combined with the personal nature of social identity, escalates dialogues about social differences.
• Online comment forums can become "perfect storms" of aggression and defensiveness.
• The nastiness observed in online comments may reflect limited aspects of social identity discourse rather than core beliefs.
• Viewing it as a reason to transform standard discussion methods around social difference and identity is important.

History of Argument

• Transforming discussions requires understanding the history of argument as the foundation of logic and critical thinking.
• Argument as justification involves examining reasons or premises supporting a viewpoint.
• A good argument includes:
  • Acceptability or believability of premises.
  • Relevance of premises to the conclusion.
  • Sufficient reasons for believing the conclusion is true.
• Objections can be raised if an argument lacks acceptability, relevance, or sufficient justification.
• A good argument has premises that are acceptable, relevant, and provide grounds for the conclusion.
• Arguments differ from mere statements of belief by providing reasons for opinions.
• Evaluators assess whether the presented reasons are believable, relevant, and provide grounds for the arguer's conclusion.
• Minimal criteria for good arguments are often abandoned in discussions about social identities.
• People may resort to incredible statements, irrelevant reasons, and unjustified assumptions, even raising their voices to intimidate dissenters.
• Aggression can masquerade as arguments when unsubstantiated claims are asserted aggressively.
• These are arguments only in the first sense because the arguers make no effort to engage with the issues and provide evidence and justification.
• Pseudoreasoning is persuasion that does not meet minimally good arguments, appearing to support a conclusion but falls apart upon inspection.
• Pseudoreasoning involves appeals to emotions, but the problem lies in using emotions as a substitute for reasons or when they are irrelevant to the issue.
• Emotions can enhance arguments when used with reasons relevant to the conclusion
• Pseudoreasoning is common in social issue debates, and hostility and defensiveness are frequent emotions in social difference contexts.
• Examining the history of argumentation can help clarify what has been inherited from Western civilization's classical and medieval periods.

Argument as an Adversarial Method

• Walter J. Ong chronicles aggression in Western philosophy from ancient Greeks to the Enlightenment through the "Socratic method."
• Opposition to a reason yields the greatest chance for truth.
• The Socratic method involves subjecting reasons to objections, diminishing their value if objections cannot be adequately answered.
• Successfully withstanding objections strengthens justification.
• The Socratic method created a militaristic approach to reasoning in all-male monasteries and early universities during the Middle Ages.
• Young men eligible for intellectual study endured hardships, fostering an adversarial attitude toward teachers.
• Oral disputation and examination pitted students against teachers in verbal battles, favoring self-confidence and aggression.
• Relevancy, coherence, and consistency were secondary to arrogance and disdain.
• Early monasteries and cathedral schools in Europe modeled higher education and academic reasoning.
• Only male children of European nobility, then the middle class, were eligible for academic argument.
• The Latin Church shaped modern science, associating women with properties opposed to reason and excluding them from institutions of learning and power.
• Women demonstrating aptitude for argument were considered heretical or hysterical, not scholarly.
• Men of color, particularly African men, were stereotyped in opposition to the "civilized" nature of white European men.
• Renaissance Europeans defined "Whiteness" by encountering Black Africans, categorizing them as inferior.
• Women were deemed irrational, while men of color were deemed uncivilized, excluding them from justified argument.
• Attempts by men of color to argue intellectually were seen as insolence and violent aggression.
• Overarching arrogance and disdain in academic argumentation were reserved for "rational" and "civilized" European white men of privilege, excluding women, men of color, and the poor.
• Walter Ong, David Noble, Janice Moulton, and Deborah Tannen explored how aggression and opposition in arguments developed alongside universities, science, and technology.
• Aggression and opposition constructed women and men of color as aggressive opposites to intellectual life.
• Describing arguments and debates involves language revealing strong undercurrents of aggression and opposition.
• Lakoff and Johnson's "argument as war" metaphor illustrates how the term "argument" is conceptualized as a battle.
• Phrases like "He attacked my idea," "I defended my position," and "I won the argument" reflect this.
• Janice Moulton's "adversary method" is problematic because it favors aggressive traits encouraged in privileged white men and discourages them in others.
• It impedes genuine efforts at evaluating reasons and providing justifications by isolating disagreements.
• Argiers raise objections by citing counterexamples and inconsistencies to individual claims, narrowing the debate and disconnecting it from related matters.
• Philosophers revive ancient debates on God's existence while ignoring contemporary issues.
• Climate change pundits isolate data instead of considering broader systemic claims.
• Denying Earth's temperature increases by citing one year's heat ignores broader systematic data.
• One reason climate debates remain controversial is that showing Earth's warming and its human causes requires complex thinking, unlike the traditional adversarial method.
• The adversary method discourages improving arguments, viewing arguers as opponents rather than collaborators.
• The impulse is to make opponents fail, discouraging moves to improve their arguments.
• This leads to false dichotomies of victim-culprit, guilt-anger, and winner-loser when social identity and difference are at issue.
• Catherine Hundleby raised concerns about the adversary method undermining logical and critical thinking skills.
• Most textbooks sampled encourage an "Adversary Paradigm," treating argumentation as a battle of wits with only two sides and one winner.
• The Adversary Paradigm creates problems in philosophy and reinforces social exclusion and dominance.
• Opposition to an idea is not always bad, but treating disagreement as opposition gives priority to aggressive voices.
• Aggression and opposition have been encouraged as masculine behavior but discouraged as nonfeminine behavior or for those lacking power.
• The adversarial method silences voices in debates about social differences, including women, people of color, the poor, the young, the old, and the disabled.

Arguments Online

• Argument, along with its adversarial and oppositional history, moved beyond the monastery and the university and into social and political institutions.
• Argument has moved to the virtual world thanks to the Internet, social media, and online forums.
• These technologies could create more inclusive and democratic debates but online comment sections produce hostile and poorly reasoned arguments.
• Some of this could be due to uncivilized behavior.
• In a post titled “Why We're Shutting Off Our Comments,” Popular Science details how comments on the Internet are actually bad for science at large.
• Negativity sways people more than positivity.
• A study led by Dominique Brossard found that people were swayed far more by negativity.
• Including an ad hominem attack made study participants think the downside of a technology was greater than they'd previously thought.

Ad Hominem Arguments

• The Latin phrase ad hominem means “to the man” or “to the person.”
• An ad hominem argument is an example of a logical fallacy, or an argument that fails to meet the ARG (acceptable, relevant, and grounding) conditions of a minimally good argument.
• They target the person rather than the relevant issue.
• YouTube has tried to manage negative comments.
• The popular video site YouTube instituted a new ranking and personalized system of commenting to address what one journalist described as “a hotbed of spam and idiocy.”
• The new system requires commenters to log on using a Google+ account, and commenters can decide who among their “circles” can see the comments.
• Video posters on YouTube can also edit comments, and readers can rank comments so that relevant issues stay near the top of the discussion.
• The goal of the new system is to reduce anonymity and add accountability and evaluation to YouTube conversations.
• Online comments proliferate and become negative and hostile when social media discusses race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion.
• They range from hate-filled speech to biased accusations and faulty reasoning.
• Approaching online debates with an open heart and a presumption in favor of human rationality can be dangerous.
• Suler describes a variety of factors that lead people to respond very differently in anonymous online communications than they would in face-to-face interactions.
• Commenters are not known or seen by their audience.
• People imagine their audience as a set of characters with qualities and values that they (the commenter) creates.
• Viewing their participation as a game.
• They try on different roles and take different positions with no accountability to anyone in their audience.
• They are not never directly responsible.
• This kind of distancing between what people do and who they believe they are is what psychologists call disassociation.
• Leading to the conclusion that there is an online disinhibition effect.
• People interacting online are likely to take on personas that they would rarely exhibit in face-to-face interactions.
• Lacking of the kind of sensitivity and nuance they generally apply to people in face-to-face meetings, they feel no accountability for their remarks.
• We are most likely getting very little evidence from online comments about what lies close to the core of a commenter's web of belief.
• Each media allows for a particular expression of self that differs—sometimes greatly, sometimes subtly—from another media.
• In different media people present a different perspective of their identity.
• The self expressed in one modality is not necessarily deeper, more real, or more authentic than another.
• Returning to the metaphor of the hornet's nest, one thing we can take away from Suler's research is that the venom we find in many online comments may not reflect commenters' true beliefs or real self as much as they reveal one aspect of people's media self-expression.
• Anonymous online expression is a particular kind of context where people can try on risky personas with few consequences.
• The very oppositional and constricted nature of our social identity language.
• People lack of tools for thinking and reasoning effectively about social identity and social power.
• The result of people's pent-up frustration with social differences and their lack of tools for thinking and reasoning effectively about social identity and social power.
• It is important for us to see them as symptomatic of the structural and institutional constraints of social inequality and the personal and emotional costs of social divisions.
• They too contribute to the oversimplification and polarization of these issues by prioritizing adversarial styles of argument or treating the problems like impossible jokes with no chance for social change.
• Consider a recent case involving feminist blogger and media critic Anita Sarkeesian that illustrates the type of anonymous online response.
• Decided to choose video gaming as one of the sites for analysis and mounted a web campaign to raise funds for a series of short films that she planned to produce on the topic.
• Sarkeisian's web campaign was met with an avalanche of negative comments on her fund-raising site, the YouTube page where she posted the video announcing the project, and her online blog.
• Commenters have created bogey women, as in Sarkeesian's case) with all the worst qualities the commenter associates with that particular social identity.
• Given the lack of opportunities and tools for engaging in honest dialogues about social identity and social differences, anonymous online comments become the release valve for a frustrated segment of the society.
• Participants shelter themselves within their own beliefs, and further debate becomes unproductive.
• Research on social bias and prejudice shows that “dehumanized groups are thought not to experience complex emotions or share beliefs with the in-group.”
• Anonymous Internet forums with a focus on controversial issues of social identity present a strange new context.
• hostility in online comments is evidence of the essential racism, sexism, etc., in the hearts of our fellow citizens, I would suggest instead that we see it as the result of a variety of interrelated and unique factors.
• Fourth, the strangely public-private nature of online discussions means that they can encourage our worst tendencies to dehumanize and publicly humiliate others while, at the same time, giving us the illusion that we are engaged in a private conversation.
• In that we lack are effective methods for thinking and reasoning about social differences. Given this, anonymous online discussion forums are probably the worst contexts for trying to work out these issues.

Moving from an Adversarial Model to a Cooperative Model

• Rather than seeing the pointlessness of debates about social issues.
• It is a first step toward understanding why most of these debates are not actual efforts at critical thinking or social justice.
• Ad hominem and abusive attacks are so common in these forums because they are the easiest form of adversarial reasoning.
• How can an intellectually empathic critical thinker work against these negative factors to promote constructive and effective dialogues about social issues?
• It time to introduce the third skill involved in intellectual empathy: cooperative reasoning.
• Cooperative reasoning involves thinking and reasoning cooperatively about social identity and difference, because when we reason in an adversarial manner, we fail to access the relevant feelings, experiences, and data that are all necessary for understanding the oppressive aspects of social identity.
• Cooperative reasoning is the recognition that not all arguments have to be battles aimed at persuading and winning.
• Gorski writes that the most important revelation of my life as a social justice educator-activist is that I am a facilitator for people's cognitive dissonance.
• This realization has changed virtually everything I teach about Page 97 → poverty, racism, sexism, imperialism, nationalism, heterosexism, and other oppressions, not because I want to protect the feelings of those who are experiencing cognitive dissonance related to one or more of these issues, but because everybody experiences cognitive dissonance related to one or more of these issues.
• Cognitive dissonance often feel hostile, surprised, confused, or withdrawn.
• Gorski recognizes that though cognitive dissonance is difficult to experience and work through, it is nevertheless common for anyone who thinks and reasons about social privilege and disadvantage.
• This provides him and his students with the opportunity to think together about the experience of cognitive dissonance, since it is a state they will all experience at some point in their discussions and debates.
• Metacognition allows us to reflect on the obstacles in our own thinking so that we might get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Finally, cooperative reasoning contributes to revealing the false dichotomies that constrain so much of our thinking about social identity and difference.
• Philosophy professor and argument theorist Michael Gilbert provides a very thoughtful and well-developed model of cooperative reasoning in his book Coalescent Argumentation:
• Gilbert's model seeks to find points of intersection between our webs as well as points of disconnection. You are no longer a culprit and I am no longer a victim if we are working together to understand how we have both been shaped by history.
• In that they knew this kind of conversation was difficult and risky.