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Thursday, April 06, 2006
Argument
As I wrote a few posts back, I am teaching a class in symbolic logic this semester. My former chair used to teach this course, so this is my first crack at it. I am also teaching a critical thinking course this summer, which we call Logic & Language.
These are nice courses for me to teach. If nothing else, they help me to exercise a part of my brain that I don't normally in my teaching. Usually I am trying to get students to cross boundaries. Logic, on the other hand, is intensely concerned with creating and preserving boundaries. It is enthralled to a certain sense of rigor and precision. Our majors could use at least a little of that rigor. One can bring clarity of expression even to matters that are inherently unclear.
I enjoy these classes too, especially the symbolic logic class, because they return me a little to my roots. I entered college as a mathematics major and thought at one time that I would go on to graduate work in it. In my junior year I made a conscious decision to move away from mathematics and even mathematical, i.e., analytic, philosophy, but my dissertation work brought me back to the question of number and measure. After the dissertation I largely set these concerns aside, but I find now that I still have an interest in them.
A professor of mine in graduate school once made the claim that philosophy doesn't engage in arguments. Now, it is obvious that plenty of people who consider themselves philosophers engage in arguments, and it is also clear that most every figure in the tradition trots out an argument, at least on occasion. I take his claim rather to be that argumentation is not fundamental to philosophy. In time, I have come to agree. I will now give an argument to support my point.
To begin, I take philosophy to be a speculative endeavor, by which I mean that its theoretical claims outstrip the evidence for them. Indeed, I don't know that philosophers ever deal much with evidence. We rely on examples, i.e., that which is exemplary, but we do so to illustrate thought. The concrete makes the abstract thinkable, giving vigor to our ideas. It is all too easy to turn thought into a kind of flow chart (remember those?) with boxes pointing to boxes. I have a colleague who strikes me as insane with theory, and his talk is nothing but boxes.
Insofar as we point to examples to illustrate rather than ground, it doesn't seem like we can describe philosophy as an inductive activity. If it is inductive, the induction takes place in some part of a brain that we are barely privy to.
Next, while there is an order of discovery by which we encounter the wideness of our thinking, the order seems to vary with the individual and is not particularly locatable in the thoughts themselves. In other words, I don't see that the ideas of philosophy have any special priority to them. Having learned how to argue, we learn how to put our ideas in that form, such that we settle upon one principle and then try to use it to make sense of others. It seems to me, however, that these arguments can be taken up in any direction, such that the conclusion of one argument can just as easily be the beginning. Formal logic certainly allows for this to happen.
Aristotle distinguished between the clarity that a thought has for us from the clarity that a thought has in itself. The second category might sound confusing, but his point seems to be that, as our understanding increases, we don't just become clearer about what we meant already, but that we reach ideas that self-evidently have a greater clarity than ones we began with. Insofar as we move from things that are more clear to us (initially) to things that are more clear in themselves, it makes sense to lay out this path in the form of argumentation. Having arrived at that destination, however, the path becomes less important, and the relation of evidence and conclusion becomes less meaningful.
We find support for this idea in Plato's Republic. In the metaphor of the divided line, Socrates divides thoughtfulness into two. The first part, and the lower of the two, is a kind of problem-solving that begins from one stepping stone and then carries itself to another until it reaches a final destination. The second part, and the higher, is described as a movement from form to form, like someone who changes partners in a ballroom dance.
Eddie 2:55 PM
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