A while back someone tagged me– I can’t remember who, but seem to recall it was Mikhail over at Perverse Egalitarianism –with the question of what new practices I plan to implement in the classroom this year. At the time I didn’t respond because I was in the midst of my depression and could barely bring myself to read, much less write. Reflecting on this semester, however, a few things, while not entirely interesting, come to mind.
Since I have begun teaching, one of my absolute passions has been eradicating the words “opinion”, “feeling”, and “belief” from the vocabulary of my students. Few thinks irk me more than reading these words in a student essay or hearing them enunciated in class. In and of themselves, of course, these words are perfectly serviceable. However, in a Wittgensteinian sense, there is a grammar behind these words that is on the one hand a defense against entertaining claims, and on the other hand corrosive to critical thought. The student will remark, “It is Plato’s opinion that…”, “Nietzsche felt…”, “Saint Thomas believed that…”, etc. Why are these locutions forms of defense against thought and corrosive to critical thinking? The common thread behind these forms of enunciation is that they detach claims from grounds by which these claims are arrived at. In other words, when a claim is treated in terms of the signifiers “belief”, “opinion”, or “feeling”, it becomes like the famous smile of Carroll’s Cheshire Cat detached from the body of the cat, floating about of its own accord.
As a consequence, the person can then conveniently ignore any of the reasoning or grounds that lead to the claim, rendering themselves immune to any argument supporting the conclusion or claim.
In short, since “everyone is entitled to their own opinion”, and since “everyone has their own beliefs”, the student can then set their own opinions in opposition to the philosopher claiming “while Leibniz believes x, I believe y, so I don’t agree with Leibniz.” Here their own views are protected behind an impenetrable fortress and need never be challenged or subjected to any sort of critical scrutiny. Given that one opinion is as good as another, the student can continue to cleave comfortably to their prior beliefs without entering into any sort of becoming. Everything remains the same. Not coincidentally, I find that those students who most vigorously use the language of “opinion”, “belief”, “feeling”, “perspective”, or “perception”, are also the ones who tend to do the worst in my class. The reason for this is that they inevitably end up summarizing the “opinions” of the philosopher– “Spinoza believed that God and the world are one and the same” –without analyzing the arguments by which the philosopher arrives at his position. Everything thus remains at the superficial level of an inventory of the philosopher’s “opinions”, without any examination of just what line of reasoning leads the philosopher to such a conclusion.
Read on
So in my zeal, I strive to eradicate these words from the vocabulary of my students– and I hope whatever other educators happen to read this post will do so as well –instead advising them to use words like “claim”, “thesis”, “position”, “assertion”, “argument”, etc. The point here is not that philosophers are always right or that they can never be mistaken. Rather, the idea behind this foreclosure of words like “opinion” and “perception” and their replacement by terms like “argument” and “claim”, is to draw student attention to supporting reasons for claims or how thinkers arrive at claims. In other words, one does not argue against a position by setting another position beside it like two books on a bookcase, but instead strives to demonstrate the presence of contradictions, false premises, invalid or weak arguments, etc.
In working through Lucretius, Leibniz, and Spinoza this semester I was astonished to discover that my students did not know what an argument is, nor what explanations and theories are. How strange courses in the humanities must sound to their ears. For them an argument is a disagreement between two people, a dispute, rather than a set of reasons in support of a claim or a conclusion. What must they think when a professor asks them to examine a philosopher’s argument? Likewise, a theory is an unproven guess or hunch, rather than an explanation (a “why?” or “how?”) for some phenomenon or other. Upon hearing the word “theory”, they must immediately assume that something unproven and undemonstrated is being referred to. As a consequence, it seems to me that the first week or two of my intro classes must be devoted to the three following topics prior to jumping into the material:
1) The Relationship Between Theories and Facts: Theories are explanations of facts and facts support theories. Theories do not, at some point become facts, but always remain explanations or accounts of facts. A fact, by contrast, is some state-of-affairs in the world. The relation between theories and facts is thus not one of transition from one state (being a theory) to another state (being a fact), but is rather a dialectical relation (not in the Hegelian sense), where the two terms always refer to one another. Of crucial importance here is the recognition that a theory is not less than a fact, but is in many respects one of our crowning achievements as humans. Facts do not speak for themselves, nor explain themselves. They are brute things that sit there like rocks rising out of the desert. Thus, it is a fact, as Lucretius observes, that water changes color as waves crash or as the wind blows across it. Yet while this is an obvious fact about the world, this fact does not explain itself. It requires a theory to be explained, an account of what causes this phenomenon. Lucretius’ brilliant explanation is that atoms do not themselves have color, but rather color is an emergent property of relations among and combinations of atoms. Thus, when waves crash or wind blows the atoms are combined in news ways generating the varieties of colors we encounter. It is also a fact that the sun moves across the sky. Yet there are a variety of theories through which this phenomenon can be explained. We can take the counter-intuitive Copernican route and explain this as an optical illusion produced by the spinning of the earth as it revolves around the sun. We can take the intuitive Ptolemaic route of explaining this by the rotation of the sun about the earth. Or we can take the Homeric route of explaining this as a result of Apollo dragging the sun across the sky. The strength of a theory will be a function of both how many facts it is able to explain and predict. A theory that has been able to explain and predict a number of facts will not be thrown out when it encounters a counter-example, but rather it will be assumed that there must be a hidden cause capable of explaining the anomalous fact in question until so many anomalies mount that it is clear the theory must be mistaken. I realize the philosophers of science will jump all over me for this simplistic account of the relationship between theories and facts, but it is a good heuristic for the classroom.
2) Arguments and Conclusions: As I remarked, my students seem to have little conception of just what an argument is, so it seems appropriate to explain the relationship between premises and conclusions, as well as the difference between deductive arguments and inductive arguments. This latter distinction is especially important in philosophy classes as it is often assumed that the only way to “prove” a conclusion is inductively through observations of the world. A number of philosophical issues and positions can’t be understood at all without a clear understanding of the difference between induction and deduction.
3) Truths of Reason and Truths of Experience: I find that clearly making this distinction is one of the most challenging things confronting those that teach philosophy. It is impossible to understand Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, etc., if it is assumed that the only truths are truths of experience. In the absence of this distinction it will be assumed that the only way to prove something is through direct observation. This can lead to extreme skepticism when a bright student recognizes that many events are remote from us in time and space and therefore cannot be observed (i.e., they refuse to grant that we can make inferences based on the regular structure of the world). Consequently, if any form of rationalism is to be taught in a class it is absolutely vital that this distinction be introduced early– preferably using mathematics as a model or example –so that the nature of rationalist arguments can be understood. However, this distinction is also relevant to non-rationalistic forms of inference. Thus, for example, a student might protest that Lucretius cannot “prove” that the atoms exist because we cannot directly observe the existence of these atoms. What this ignores is our ability to make inferences from facts– as in the case of water changing color given above –allowing us to legitimately conclude the existence of entities that are not directly observed. It will be noted that this style is a favorite of evolution deniers who argue from the premise that we can’t directly observe what took place in such remote history, therefore warranting the conclusion that evolution is “just a theory” that cannot be “proven”.
The introduction of these distinctions at the beginning of the semester is thus my resolution for the Spring semester. In many respects, these simple distinctions are some of the most valuable things that can be taken from an introductory philosophy course. Above all they encourage students not simply to evaluate claims abstractly, but to look closely at texts, determining the supporting reasons and explanations the philosopher himself provides.
December 12, 2008 at 4:25 am
I completely enjoyed this post (and others). I’ve added your link to my newly started blog. It’s a really pleasant surprise to read a thought provoking blog for once. Thanks!
December 12, 2008 at 8:10 am
Your observation about the hatred of being wrong is very interesting. I don’t think this is something that is restricted to students. Rather, personal identity– of the academic –seems deeply bound up with this as well. Lacan famously says that “the love of truth is the love of castration”. In part I think Lacan is referring to the subtraction of the dimension of the imaginary, of the ego, and the self-value that comes with “being right” in the pursuit of truth. That can be a bitter pill to swallow. One of the persistent themes in Deleuze’s thought is the idea of friendship in the context of ancient Greece, not as a space of imaginary identification or sameness, but as a sort of athletic agon in pursuit of truth. I’m not sure how to promote this. So much about academic life is tied up in our identities, institutional pressures, the necessity of choosing particular sides for the advancement of our work, that it’s extremely difficult to produce such a space. Or perhaps that’s just my pessimism.
December 12, 2008 at 1:44 pm
What are your feelings about the locution “for S, P”, e.g. “For Badiou, mathematics is ontology”? I think the “for” functions as an English correlate for the French “chez”: chez Badiou, in the house of his thought, there is an identity between mathematics and ontology.
One has sometimes to talk about aspects of a thinker’s system that are not really argued for, that are more like prejudices or presuppositions, more or less deliberately chosen starting points. They’re not so much “beliefs” or “opinions” as postulations, and what supports them is less a prior chain of reasoning than the novel perspective that is opened up by pursuing their consequences. So, for Meillassoux (for example), if we suppose the principle of factiality, all sorts of other interesting things follow; it isn’t that “Meillassoux believes in hyper-chaos”, but that chez Meillassoux hyper-chaos is, somewhat disquietingly, one of the postulates holding the rest of the system up. If one takes an interest in that system, the way in is through the door marked “hyper-chaos”.
I have a difficulty with Deleuze that I think comes down to just not being able to accept certain of his premises – the suspension of disbelief that would be necessary for me to enter into his system and see how well it grokks the world is somehow more difficult for me with him than it is with other thinkers. It’s almost like an allergic reaction. The door won’t open, or I won’t go through it. There’s a threshold I don’t want to cross.
When students refer to thinkers as holding “opinions”, it’s partly an evasion of argument but also sometimes, more deeply, an evasion of the necessity of suspending disbelief, crossing a threshold. My opinion is something separate from yours, private to myself as yours is to you; nothing obliges me to hold your opinion or even try it on for a while. I can take it or leave it. Another way of saying this is in referring everything to matters of opinion, students are not only refusing to be persuaded; they are also refusing to be seduced.
December 12, 2008 at 6:23 pm
I try to get over students fear of being wrong by telling them what to argue – assigning them positions they have to attack and defend. That separates out some the formal skills of argument making from the personal investment. And by making them argue with each other someone usually ends up right and wrong, so they get used to seeing people be wrong or being wrong themselves – or thinking they’re right when others think they’re wrong – and it makes them less anxious.
About belief, opinion, etc, I don’t think I understand the issue is. We tend to walk around in the world with all sorts of positions that are more hypothetical than fully established – for instance, my wife will continue to love me and my marriage will work out, my department will renew my contract for the fall, etc. Philosophically we do this a lot too – it’s incredibly hard to defend axioms to people who don’t share those axioms or the requisite meta-axioms. For instance – why study ontology at all? That’s actually a really tough question, and (in my opinion!) ends up looking a lot more like a belief than something we know. To put this another way, it can be hard to tell the difference between someone voicing an argument we reject and someone voicing an opinion. I think sometimes students using the idiom of belief and opinion and “I feel like” is a way for them to try and foreground the tentative and revisable nature of their claims while still asserting some justification in having a claim which has yet to be substantiated.
take care,
Nate
December 12, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Hi Nate,
I think this is an overly generous or charitable interpretation of what’s going on:
In my decade or so of teaching, the one thing I’ve consistently noticed is that those students who insistently use categories like opinion/fact, subjective/objective, are also those students that are most likely to ignore textual details and arguments, reducing the material to barebone claims and insisting that they’re just opinions. The issue is, I think, that the very grammar of terms like opinion cognitively guides the user to ignore or be oblivious supporting reasons altogether. This is because, in their thought process there are only two categories: either facts or opinions, where a fact is understood to be something that is directly observed or scientific. I think the whole problem is precisely that there is a focus on claims alone– as you remark in your last sentence –rather than supporting reasons for claims. I suspect that this cognitive phenomenon is partially the result of an educational system that privileges standardized tests and a media environment that treats things in terms of soundbites rather than the supporting grounds of things.
I will say that you’re conflating the category opinon and argument. An opinon is simply a claim. An argument is a relation between premises and claim. If I say “you should study ontology.” I have made a claim. In and of itself, this claim falls into the category of opinion because no supporting reasons are given for that claim. If, by contrast, I say “we should study ontology because how we understand objects and entities makes a difference in how we investigate the world and relate to things about us” I have now entered the domain of presenting an argument. That argument might be weak, it might not definitively support or “prove” the conclusion, but in putting forward this premise we have entered the domain of arguments where we can then begin to examine the merits of the claim and its relative strength. I tend to think that “proof” in the most rigorous sense only exists in mathematics, the broader field of claims belonging to the domain of induction and classified in terms of strength and weakness. I would say that at least potentially all claims have arguments or supporting reasons for them, even if we have never bothered to make them or search for them. One of the aims of teaching would be to foster this activity of finding reasons. The thing to be avoided is any locution– common in papers in my intro classes early in the semester –that have the form “I disagree with Thomas because in my opinion God does not exist”. This remains purely at the level of claims or opinions without giving any reasons beyond “it’s my opinion and its different!” At any rate, in entering the domain of argument we exist the world of nebulous and free floating claims that are held “just because” to questions of why that claim should or should not be endorsed.
December 12, 2008 at 7:35 pm
Dominic, right, which is one of the reasons that I argued that the grammar of opinion is also defensive in character:
I take it that one of the roles of the educator, however, is to get the student to “try it on for a while”. The aim is not to get the student to endorse the position, but simply live in that universe for a bit. In this regard, the aim is not unlike the comparative religion professor who has his or her students be a member of a different world religion each week. The aim isn’t to get the student to convert to Judaism or Islam or Hinduism, but to encounter the world from within that frame. In the domain of philosophy, occupying the value of occupying the philosopher’s position a bit in exploring his texts is that you come back with a clearer understanding of your position in contrast to that position and become capable (hopefully) of more rigorously arguing your position.
December 13, 2008 at 6:27 pm
hi Synth,
I agree with you that students saying something like “well, I just believe this” is a habit we need to address as teachers, to show them that their beliefs don’t have the weight for others that they think they have. I think a lot of students are used to “I believe X” being accepted as evidence for X – among other things, they’re used to relating to people who care about them enough that the simple fact of them thinking something to be the case is reason to consider that that something may indeed be the case. I think part of the shock of coming to college for many students is finding out that other people don’t really care what they think simply because they think it, instead they have to offer.
All of that said, I don’t understand the claim that there’s a grammar to opinion that leads students to act this way. And while I take your point that an argument consists of not merely an assertion but rather an assertion plus evidence – arguments have premises – I’m not convinced that arguments and opinions are so distinct as all that. Say one student says “I reject that argument because in my opinion immigrants are lazy.” That’s clearly insufficient. Let’s say another student say “the immigrants are all poor where I come from, immigrants must have some quality that makes them poor, therefore I reject the argument about loosening immigration policy.” The student has technically speaking made an argument, but the bad inference and unsound premise involved in that argument, combined with other problems in that sort of argument, makes it little more than an opinion with maybe some window dressing.
Ah, hang on — are we talking about students’ writing or students’ speech in discussion?
December 13, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Nate,
I’m talking primarily about student writing. By a “grammar” I just mean that certain terms function in a particular way at an almost unconscious level, immediately leading to certain forms of cognition. I’m committed to the thesis that the words we use also influence the manner in which we think. Consequently, when we only have two categories– opinions and facts –this has certain consequences for how we parse the world.
I think you’re conflating arguments with whether or not the arguments are good arguments. Once the argument has been made we can then begin to examine whether or not the conclusion actually follows from its premise or whether or not the premises are true. Pointing out that the argument you present about immigration is merely an opinion does no good here as it invites the student to maintain or sustain their opinion because, after all, “it’s just an opinion and we’re all entitled to our opinion” (i.e., part of the grammar of the signifier “opinion”). It is far more effective to instead take the argument as given:
Clearly the problem with this argument emerges in the inductive inference from premise 2 to the conclusion. Once the argument is actually stated, however, real intellectual progress has been made. We can, for example, take it as true that immigrants have some property that makes them poor. However, now we can investigate what that property might be.
The student, in this case, has an essentialist theory about immigrants arguing that they have some intrinsic property that makes them lazy. On the one hand, it becomes possible to contest this conclusion through observations of the work life of immigrants. On the other hand, we can begin to develop alternative theories or explanations for the poverty of immigrants– The dynamics of capitalism that push wages down coupled with the absence of rights that would allow them to contest their wages, for example.
Were we to remain at the level of claiming that “this is just an opinion”, none of this would take place because the charge of being an opinion is far too vague and empty. Everything halts at that point. As I see it, one of the primary aims of the humanities classroom is to get students actively involved in both providing reasons for the claims they make and evaluating whether or not those reasons actually support their conclusions well. Along these lines, I think that there are a whole set of terms or words that just aren’t helpful in accomplishing that aim. “That’s just an opinion” comes to function as an all purpose tool that a student can evoke whenever he or she likes, without saying anything directly about the claims involved. For this reason, I think it’s incumbent on educators to work to push terms like “opinion”, “perception”, “subjective”, etc., out of the vocabulary of students. All too often they function as ways of appearing to give an argument without giving any argument at all. In other words, part of the issue here lies in devising strategies that help these students become specific. To point out that the claims about immigration are “opinions” says nothing specific about what is wrong with these claims. No development takes place and the student is not actively involved in refining their argument or developing better theories to explain the phenomenon in question.
December 22, 2008 at 6:55 pm
I wonder how the “grammar” of your thinking would be altered if instead of thinking in terms of a “grammar” you would think of “grammar(s).”
The words which you wish to wage a war of “eradication” upon have multiple significations and uses. The students aren’t wholly ignorant to be using them in the way they are using them, and you aren’t entirely doing them a favor by requiring their elimination.
I notice one of the words you want to get rid of is “feeling”– the use of the the phrase “I feel”– and I wonder what a range of feminine significations you will thereby “eradicate,” and what pathological effect that will have on your students, should they be so subjected.
As I reflected upon this post, I realized I was angered and disturbed by your use of the word “eradication”, which comes up more than once. I jumped to a conclusion about your “grammar” of cognition, and what consequences this grammar has for how you parse the world–but with effort I was able to consider your grammar(s) and know that you do not “parse the world” the way your use of the word “eradicate” appears to indicate.
December 22, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Thanks for the thoughtful poke, Yusef. I’m more than happy to speak of grammars(s) rather than grammar. “Eradication” is a poor choice of words. Talk of feeling, for example, would be appropriate when discussing affects. The problems arise when students write something like “Plato feels…” As in the case of the words “opinion” and “belief”, this often has the undesirable consequence of leading the student to ignore any supporting reasons Plato is making for the claim he is putting forth. The issue lies in helping students develop careful reading skills rather than detaching claims from their framework, and skills that enable them to examine the reasons a thinker might be led to make such and such a claim. These skills are almost entirely glossed over in the American educational system due to a focus on rote memorization, testing, and repetitive exercises. In the grander scheme of things, I think this is also a part of encountering alterity and difference in others, i.e., developing the capacity to place yourself in their world of thought and coming to understand how another person comes to such a position. Respecting another person, in my view, does not simply consist in acknowledging that “they have a right to their opinion and have their own beliefs” but in taking those beliefs and opinions seriously and striving to understand the grounds by which they arrive at them. All too often terms like “opinion” lead the person who uses them to paradoxically ignore the other person’s opinion altogether as “I have my opinion and you have yours and there’s no point in talking about them anyway as it’s all a private affair.”
December 24, 2008 at 11:07 am
I have often thought that thinking is completely different from believing or holding opinions. It seems to me that our beliefs and opinions are at least partly related to our self concepts, the way we present ourselves, the way we want to be. When something challenges that self concept it can be a very painful and difficult experience. But thought, I think, is impersonal. It has nothing to do with what I believe except insofar as my beliefs and opinions form a barrier to thought. To think, at least in part, must be to break down that barrier, and to go beyond the limits of oneself to the realm of the impersonal. Just a thought (or maybe a belief, opinion?) Thanks for the interesting post.