Archive for October 2012

Resource: ProCon.org

October 31, 2012 Blog, Information Literacy, Resources, Uncategorized No comments

ProCon Logo

If you listened to this week’s podcast, you got a taste of what the non-partisan, informational web site ProCon.org has to offer with regard to well-researched information on both sides of 43 political issues.

ProCon is actually one of a number of sites that have emerged to help deal with the fact that traditional starting points for Internet research (such as Google and Wikipedia) are either so chaotic or so lacking in quality control that trusted sources need to pick up the slack (just as edited encyclopedias used to provide trusted information in days past).

The ProCon site is actually a series of microsites, each dedicated to a specific controversial issue. These range from high profile issues like standardized testing and abortion to lesser discussed (but still important, or at least interesting) topics such as the efficacy of voting machines and whether golf should be considered a sport.

Depending on the complexity of the issue, some of these microsites go deeper than others. The aforementioned golf site, for example, includes a dozen points in favor of each side of the question, while a site on medical marijuana (a topic that will be relevant during next week’s podcast) actually analyzes each and every condition this treatment is claimed to serve, providing not just strong arguments for and against, but the background knowledge needed to help you make up (or change) your own mind.

Unfortunately, the election (not to mention the world) revolves around more than 43 issues, so ProCon (like the rest of the Internet) will only provide some of the answers you’re looking for. But if you can master the Information Literacy skills discussed during this podcast (and continued on this one), you will be in a position to find those sources which, like ProCon, can provide you the building blocks you need to make informed decisions.

Hurricane Sandy and the 2012 Election - Frames

October 30, 2012 Bias, Blog No comments

This week’s storm got me thinking about a little parody I penned during the last Presidential election that went something like this:

“It’s been six days since the Reticulan battle fleet entered Earth orbit, and today this unearthly race of reptilian shape shifters issued their demands that Earth submit to their will and surrender mankind’s freedom, mineral wealth and women,” announced Katie Couric, wearing the metal bikini required of all concubines of the Reticulan High Command. “As yet, we have had no definitive statements from either the McCain or the Obama camp regarding this latest twist to an already dramatic 2008 Presidential campaign.”

Meanwhile, CNN’s “Best Political Team,” broadcasting from an underground bunker in an unknown location, wondered how the Reticulan’s recent killing of every living thing in Europe might impact the dynamic of this race. “Obama was already four points up in the polls before the alien invasion fleet blew out most of the nation’s communication grid,” said James Carville, his voice slightly muffled by the helmet of his radiation suit. “I don’t see why those numbers can’t hold until Election Day. “I disagree,” replied David Gergen, having recently escaped from the alien’s lunar mining colony. “During times when the country perceives itself to be under a threat, Americans instinctively look to experience, and, fair or not, John McCain is seen as having been tested in battle, even if his time in Vietnam did not involve atomic laser cannons.”

At the time, I used this gag to illustrate the irony inherent in the concept of the “single issue voter,” someone who feels so passionate about a single subject that they are willing to cast their presidential vote based on a candidate’s stand on this one issue alone. The issue might be domestic (such as abortion), or international (such as support of Israel or Cuba, or opposition to the war in Iraq).

Such voters tend to be criticized due to the perception that their obsession with a single cause blinds them to the many other issues and decisions that need to be weighed with regard to a Presidential choice. But this analysis misses the point that, for many people, a single issue is not thought about in isolation, but rather provides a frame through which the candidates and other issues are judged.

For instance, those who feel passionate about abortion do not tend to think about this issue and nothing else. Rather, an abortion stand becomes shorthand for a framework of values (self-labeled as “Pro-Choice” and “Pro-Life”) which apply to voters’ (and candidates’) positions on a great many issues also seen as moral questions.

Similarly, anti-Castro Cubans are often seen as the quintessential single-issue voters, and yet their opposition to the Castro regime is built into a wide-ranging anti-Communist ideology by which they have historically judged candidate’s against a number of foreign policy questions.

Those that accuse others of voting based on narrow interests fail to perceive the irony that voters who are allegedly looking at the “big picture” are (as illustrated in the parody at the top of this piece) capable of boiling any and all issues into a single question of who to vote for in the Presidential race. For partisan voters also have a frame they use to understand the world: a frame in which the issues of the day get filtered through the ultimate question of whether it helps “my guy” or his opponent.

Such frames are normal, indeed required if we are to make sense of the world. For while we may espouse an ideal in which each and every issue is looked at on its own merits and analyzed based on reason alone, such an ideal is only suitable for computers and Vulcans, not for human beings (and, as we talked about in a previous podcast, even Vulcans do not live by this ideal).

Here on earth, emotion and human connection (pathos and ethos) will play a role in both our decisions and the fact-gathering and logical analysis (logos) that goes into those decisions. And the frames we use to choose our facts and make our decisions (be they partisan frames or something else) are built on the natural tendency to associate with communities and prioritize some issues and concerns over others.

Our challenge comes not from having such frames (which are necessary to see the world as something other than a random set of occurrences), but to ensure those frames are not so rigid that they cause us to make errors, ignore important matters, or refuse to see any part of the world outside of how it fits into this frame.

This week’s storm is a good case in point. One cannot help but remember that Hurricane Katrina was part of the bill of indictment against George W. Bush, which meant that even before the flood waters had receded from places like Louisiana and Mississippi, we were talking about that last storm of the century in terms of who it “helped” and “hurt” politically.

Republicans hoped that the oil spill that impacted the Gulf in 2010 would provide a chance to tie a subsequent disaster around a Democratic President’s neck, and I anticipate that once the initial shock over this week’s hurricane has been absorbed, talk will increasingly focus on Hurricane Sandy and the 2012 Election (notably the success or failure of Federal recovery efforts mean for next Tuesday’s Presidential contest).

This is where tools like the Principle of Charity become particularly useful. For if you’d become enraged if someone from “the other side” started using a natural disaster like Sandy for political gain, you should also feel embarrassed (even a bit ashamed) if “your side” started doing the same thing (emotions that would likely come naturally if you or a loved one was directly impacted by the storm and had to watch partisans bicker while you and those you cared about suffered).

And here we have a perfect example of how human emotion (even ones we normally don’t consider constructive, such as anger, embarrassment and shame) can actually be beneficial to our thinking, by providing us an alternative frame (in this case the frame of someone suffering who we should naturally sympathize with) vs. a frame that only cares about how this or that issue impacts the polls.

Facts of Life

October 29, 2012 Blog No comments

Hurricane bearing down on city

I may just need to take today off.

But tune in tomorrow to see if Hurricane Sandy will pick the next President!

And before the power goes out (again), stay tuned (and dry).

The Critical Voter

Critical Voter - Podcast 13 – Facts and Interview with ProCon President Kamy Akhavan

October 28, 2012 Argumentation, Bias, Blog, Information Literacy, Logos, Pathos and Ethos, Media Literacy, Podcast, Rhetorical Devices No comments

Just the Facts - Joe Friday from Dragnet

Presidential candidates can no longer make a statement during a speech, debate or TV ad without hundreds of fact checkers immediately descending to determine whether that statement is true or false.

The fast and furious fact-checking accompanying this year’s election is something new and has led to questions such as whether the candidates actually make factual assertions that can be checked for truth or falsehood, which leads to other questions regarding the nature of truth in our scripted, media-driven political age.

But before deciding that we are entering unknown territory with regard to the role factual information plays in our thinking, it might be best to take a look at the subjects covered during this series such as bias, argumentation and rhetoric to see if they might shed light on the role facts can and should play in our decision making.

To round out the discussion of this important topic, we are joined by Kamy Akhavan, President and Managing Editor of ProCon.org, a site dedicated to providing an accurate and balanced presentations of facts behind both sides of important issues.

Whatever role facts might play in our thinking and deliberation over whom to vote for, the millions of people who have visited ProCon this election year to find out where the candidates really stand on the important issues of the day demonstrates the desire to obtain the highest quality background knowledge available to support our arguments and beliefs.

This week’s resources include:

Critical Voter - Facts - Quiz

Critical Voter - Facts - Lesson Plan

ProCon.org

New York Times Stone column on whether the candidates are making verifiable factual statements

New York Times Stone column on why fact checkers should be logic checking as well

Critical Voter – Podcast 13 – Facts and Kamy Akhavan Interview [ 34:33 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Steven Pinker - Red and Blue

October 25, 2012 Bias, Blog No comments

I’m hoping anyone who was not already an avid Stone reader (the New York Times column moderated by the guest on this week’s podcast) is now becoming a regular visitor to the site.

Personally, I’m finding the contributions of regular columnist Gary Gutting particularly interesting and relevant to subjects brought up on Critical Voter. But the remarkable Harvard psychology professor and all-around big thinker Steven Pinker has a piece in today’s Stone that illustrates two important subjects covered on this site.

The piece, entitled Why Are States so Red and Blue? tries the answer the question of why our electoral map has stayed so stable for the last several decades, with states that voted Republican or Democrat predictably doing the same year after year.

In the first half of the article, Pinker makes the argument that political ideologies provide a placeholder that can help guide people on a wide range of issues. He then proceeds to lay out the nature of the two predominant ideologies in America today: Conservativism and Liberalism.

While his argument and interpretations are open to critique and even criticism, the point I’d like to highlight is that the author has put the effort into describing each ideology in a way that would likely be accepted by a thoughtful holder of either political persuasion. In other words, he has employed the Principle of Charity or (as Kevin deLaplante might put it) has assumed the role of an actor whose job it is to portray a Liberal or a Conservative ideas in a way that would convince a sincere holder of either political belief system that the author understands where they are coming from.

Far from discrediting him as a wishy-washy, on-the-one-hand-and-at-the-same-time-on-the-other, “No Label” un-ideologue, the presentation Pinker makes provides his argument enormous credibility. For by using the strongest arguments of Conservatives and Liberalism as his starting point, his own arguments cannot be easily dismissed as biased (as would a story that began with a reasonable description of one political party and a parody of the other).

Having said this, the author’s piece does end up suffering due to bias. Just not political bias.

In this case, the author has spent the last several years working on a book entitled The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined which makes the controversial argument that our current day and age represents the least violent period in human history and that this lowering of violence is the result of the spreading of modern political beliefs and economic principles.

Pinker’s thesis has already raised a number of hackles, the nature of which I won’t go into (although you can read some serious debate on the subject here).

But the point I’d like to make is that Pinker’s fascination with the subject (understandable since he’s been thinking about, writing about and defending it for so long) has caused him to interpret a phenomenon (the sorting of voters into politically like-minded states) through the lens of an issue (violence) that might not be as important as the author thinks it is.

Yes, Western states are places where men once had to take the law into their own hands, and thus people who live there (especially those whose families were involved with maverick industries such as ranching and wildcat oil drilling) will gravitate towards political ideologies that emphasize rugged individualism (vs. descendents of farmers who might think in terms of cooperation and community).

But then why should Southern states (which were every bit as agricultural as Northeastern ones) ally with the cowboys of the West vs. their fellow farmers of the North? Perhaps their history of slavery and plantations can square the circle, but this might only serve to shore up an argument that suffers from other weaknesses.

For instance, how does Pinker’s formula square the South’s swing from Democratic to Republican since the 1960s? The common wisdom is that Democratic-led desegregation caused this switch, which (even if you want to argue that common wisdom) at least highlights the fact that contemporary political events and party dynamics play more of a role than historic determinism going back a century earlier.

We could go on in this manner (looking at shifts in population as industries moved south and west, for example, or thinking about how people have sorted themselves into like-minded communities at the local as well as state level of the last few decades) to find other reasonable explanations for the stability of our current red-blue political map.

Pinker’s explanation deserves a seat at the table, but only alongside these and other additional or alternative explanations. And anyone holding one of these positions needs to examine the biases they may be bringing to that table, including biases towards ideas you care about enough to have written a best-selling book about them.

Resources: Dream of Reason

October 24, 2012 Blog, Resources No comments

Book Cover from Dream of Reason

As mentioned during the latest podcast, there are different “onramps” for learning more about some of the philosophy and history of philosophy you’ve gotten a taste of during the course of listening to Critical Voter.

You could always start by reading the original works of philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, and more power to you if you decide to go down this route. But for most people, a likely next step would be one of the many secondary sources, including books, web sites, classes and online or audio courses that provide a survey of philosophical material integrated into an historical context.

The Critical Voter Resources page has a smattering of secondary resources I enjoyed learning from, my favorite being a book mentioned during the podcast entitled The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance by Anthony Gottleib.

Gottleib, former Executive Editor of The Economist Magazine in Great Britain, has also (like this week’s guest) taught philosophy at New York’s New School. And his book is a hugely informative as well as entertaining read which can put you in a strong position to start diving into specific or primary materials if you choose to do so.

Dream of Reason is probably too high level for younger students (such as Middle Schoolers) involved with the Critical Voter curriculum. But for anyone else who wants to find out how the Pre-Socratics begat the “Big Three” (Socrates, Plato and Aristotle), who begat the Hellenists, who begat the Middle Age philosophers and theologians, who began the world we live in today, Gottleib’s book is a great starting point.

And by the time you finish reading it, I expect you’ll be as anxious as I am for the second volume the author is currently writing which will complete the work with a look at modern philosophy.

Rhetoric and the Third Presidential Debate

October 23, 2012 Argumentation, Blog No comments

Let’s start by highlighting the biggest prediction I got wrong in this piece and this one that tried to use the critical thinking principles (particularly those involving rhetoric) to anticipate what the candidates would do during last night’s third Presidential debate.

To begin with, tropes did not take center stage, despite the fact that the foreign policy subjects being debated beg for the simple and concrete images tropes provide to get around how much detail and disagreement can’t be fit into a two minute talk on subjects as complex as the Middle East and China.

“Apology Tour” made an appearance, as predicted; as did a trope that combined the notion of “Trillion Dollar Wars” and foreign soldiers “Standing Up While America Stands Down” (Obama’s repeated mentioning of using money to “do some nation-building here at home”). But to my shock, Obama’s rival seemed to have made the conscious decision to leave the phrase “Leading from Behind” on the cutting room floor.

The only person who seemed more surprised than me at the absence of this phrase was the President who found himself making a long argument regarding the intricacies of crafting complex coalitions behind the scenes with only we rhetoric dweebs recognizing this explanation for what it was: a pre-fab retaliation for a trope that never got deployed.

As anticipated, the debate itself followed the template of most debates these days with the candidates finding ways to bring the conversation around to their preferred topics, regardless of the question being asked. And the topic of choice was clearly domestic politics which took up between one-third and one-half the entire debate (despite the alleged foreign policy focus of last night’s event).

Again, if you understand that the real audiences for last night’s contestants were: (1) a base that still needs to be energized; (2) undecided voters in swing states; and (3) the media, responses that seem clumsy and bizarre make perfect sense, such as:

  • Why did Obama keep punching away, even though it was clear early on that his opponent was not going to repeat his aggressive performance of previous debates? In order to assure the President’s base that he was a fighter whose passive performance in the first debate was a fluke.
  • Why a repeat of economic talking points and attacks that were thoroughly hashed out in previous debates (such as Romney’s Five Point Plan for economic growth or fights over Obamacare and Medicaid)? Because these are the domestic issues that “resonate” with women between the ages of 35-55 in Ohio and other key battleground states.
  • Why did a debate ostensibly on America’s relationship with the rest of the planet never seem to get beyond the Middle East? Because other parts of the world are not aflame, meaning our relationships with them are “boring” (i.e., not media worthy).

I was definitely wrong with regard to the type of name dropping I thought we’d hear last night (generals remained an abstraction, such as the “Joint Chiefs of Staff” who are supposedly not asking for the military hardware Mitt Romney wants to buy). And leaders were identified by the country they led (such as “The Prime Minister of Israel” vs. “Prime Minister Netenyahu” or Joe Biden’s “Bibi”), which may simply reflect the formal language both candidates chose to use during the few parts of the debate they could not swing back to their preferred subjects of economics and employment.

Interestingly, Governor Romney forewent the “gotchas” that didn’t work so well for him in the second debate, although that seems to have been part of a strategy to “look Presidential” by not repeating the hostile, stalking performance both candidates gave in the second debate.

Of course, the fact that they were sitting down vs. circling around each other like hungry predators may have contributed to the overall lowering of hostility we saw last night (as did the presence of the great-grandfatherly moderator). And the structure of the debate coupled with the genteel manner of that moderator all but guaranteed that the debate could only be analyzed based on the pre-written talking points both candidates had at the ready, as opposed to how they managed to deploy those points on stage.

Obama’s “bayonets and horses” crack, for example, was not a spontaneous response to an unexpected Romney statement regarding the size of the navy, but a pre-written line laying in wait in case Romney’s pre-known talking point on the matter came up.

Similarly, Romney’s statements on Syria and Afghanistan were crafted in such a way as to (1) try to create the appearance of differences between he and the President on matters where there is actually not much daylight between both candidate’s positions and (2) assure undecided voters sizing him up that he’s not smacking his lips in anticipating of starting another foreign war (a sentiment that helps explain the Republicans choice to include the word “peace” in his closing statement nearly half a dozen times).

While these choices are all interesting at the strategic level, unfortunately they make both candidates far less interesting with regard to their use of rhetoric and argumentation. For genuinely interesting rhetoric requires a level of risk taking and spontaneity you won’t find in candidates whose key goal is avoiding error. And argumentation requires opponents to actually debate one another, rather than reassure out-of-work college grads in Florida, Pennsylvania or other swing state that everything is going to be OK (as long as they cast their ballot correctly).

Third Presidential Debate Predictions

October 22, 2012 Argumentation, Logos, Pathos and Ethos No comments

Criswell the Great

In a pre-debate piece at the Huffington Post, I decided to go out on a limb and make some actual Presidential debate predictions regarding what the candidates will do during tonight’s final exchange.

Now I suppose it’s possible that Romney and Obama will go off script and jump right into a Lincoln-Douglas style debate where they respectfully acknowledge each other’s opinions and respond with arguments fueled primary by the Principle of Charity (in which case, all of my predictions will be out the window).

But assuming they take advantage of the format of the debate, and likely inability of the moderator to enforce much discipline, I think it’s safe to assume that nothing much will be said tonight that doesn’t already exist on index cards one or the other candidate is currently practicing from.

And since this is a foreign policy debate, we should expect not just tropes but other sorts of “stand-ins” for positions on issues that would take too long to describe (much less discuss seriously) within the limited format of a televised debate.

Some stand-ins to look out for:

  • “Leading from behind” – As mentioned in the HuffPo piece, this is a phrase originally used by an anonymous White House official which could be charitably translated as “pulling strings behind the scenes,” but has instead taken on a life of its own as a trope for overall lack of Presidential leadership in international affairs
  • “Trillion dollar wars” (or some similar term) designed to characterize military action in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last decade primarily in terms of economic cost (which allows the user of this term to avoid having to argue for or against them based on complex geopolitical realities)
  • “Apology Tour” – A trope used to create the image of President Obama traveling the globe trying to win over other nation’s leaders (including dictators) by agreeing with them about the awful things America has done in the past. (Expect similar images such as “bowing before dictators” to also make an appearance tonight.)
  • “Politics ends at the shore” – This is the phrase the political party in power traditionally uses to imply that any criticism of the administration’s foreign policy puts the country’s world standing at risk. (A variation on this theme is to imply that an opponent’s comments are actually putting American lives in jeopardy.)

Given that both criticism of a sitting President’s foreign policy and this technique to shut it down are used every four years (with only the roles of who does what changing, depending on who’s in the White House), expect to see accusations regarding who is breaking (or broke) this principle come up with regard to nearly every sensitive foreign question.

As for who I’m going to predict (i.e., “guess”) wins the debate, I would expect that another index-card set of performances (like the one we saw during the second debate) will end up being judged a draw since, this time around, expectations for each candidate are even (as opposed to the first debate where big things were expected of Obama, and the second debate where just doing better than he did previously would be judged a success).

As a sitting President with foreign policy decisions under his belt, Obama is clearly at a disadvantage vis-a-vis Romney who does not have to defend his own foreign policy record (although the President will try to assign him the historic Republican one). That being the case, the President is even more likely to play it safe, avoid errors and try to push discussion of sensitive issues out of bounds.

For his part, if Romney continues his reliance on “gotchas” (thinking that foreign policy gives him endless material to work with), this too will likely just lead to a draw. Partly this is because such a “gotcha strategy” is exactly what the Obama team is likely to be expecting. But largely because such sound bites will not provide the Republican the ethos he needs to be considered the more reliable, trusted (and thus preferable) candidate.

Finally, if anyone is looking for a drinking game tonight, I suggest it involve taking a shot every time you hear the word “failed.”

Important note: That last line was simply a cheap gag and does not condone the drinking of alcoholic beverages or drinking to excess in any way.

Cheers!

Critical Voter - Podcast 12 – Fallacies and Interview with Simon Critchley

October 21, 2012 Argumentation, Blog, Fallacies, Podcast 2 comments

All dogs are catsThis week, we are joined by Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy at New York’s New School and moderator of the New York Times’ philosophy column The Stone.

The Stone has run a number of columns this year discussing philosophical topics related to the current campaign. Professor Critchley describes the reaction to these and other pieces that have run in The Stone, as well as providing his own insight into the importance of rhetoric and a knowledge of history in building a foundation for our critical thinking about the election (or any other subject).

This podcast also returns to the subject of fallacies as we take a look at some of the 100+ fallacies we’ve not discussed yet, using language from the current Presidential political campaign (especially the debates) as source material.

As much fun as it is to play “spot the fallacy” in real-world political speech, we need to keep in mind some important points:

  • As Kevin deLaplante mentioned during an interview two weeks ago, we should not judge real-world political rhetoric by the same standards we might use to analyze a Socratic dialogue since Presidential candidates during a debate, for example, are trying to accomplish goals other than a common search for “the truth”
  • Not everything that looks like a fallacy is a fallacy. For instance, during the second Presidential debate, the candidates used every question from audience members as an occasion to slip in prepared talking points masquerading as answers. And while it might be tempting to classify each and every one of these faux-responses as red-herring fallacies, there are often other (sometimes legitimate) reasons for changing the subject that don’t involve fallacious argumentation

The show ends with a reading recommendation for those interested in exploring some of the topics brought up by this week’s guest further.

This week’s resources include:

Critical Voter - Fallacies - Quiz

Critical Voter - Fallacies - Lesson Plan

Directory of Common Fallacies

The New York Times Stone Column

Recommended Reading: Anthony Gottlieb’s Dream of Reason

Critical Voter – Podcast 12 – Fallacies and Simon Critchley Interview [ 34:22 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Resource: Jay Heinrichs’ Daily Figure

October 20, 2012 Argumentation, Blog, Resources, Rhetorical Devices No comments

If you liked this week’s interview with Jay Heinrichs and can’t wait until the next edition of Thank You for Arguing comes out, I suggest you visit his Daily Figure web site in which he serves up figures of speech from news events, pop culture and everyday conversation with the same wit and enthusiasm you heard during our discussion of rhetoric and the Presidential race.

Given the wealth of material being generated hourly by the candidates, Jay’s been focusing on the latest election-year turns of phrase over the last few weeks. But the site also includes language lessons learned from Monty Python, Homer Simpson and even George Bush, as well as general thoughts on how to write a college essay and how to teach your kids to argue (a mixed blessing, as I’m coming to find out).

As they used to say here in Boston: visit early and often.

And tune in to tomorrow’s Critical Voter podcast when, in addition to hearing about the fallacies of the campaign, you’ll also get the chance to hear an interview with Simon Critchley, moderator of New York Times philosophy column The Stone.

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