Introduction
When I was a student at UC Santa Barbara, choosing classes
was never easy. The most important requirement of a class was that it fit into
my cycling schedule. A two-hour span between classes, followed by a one-hour
class, was either a total waste of riding opportunity, or truancy waiting to
happen. Beyond this, I tended to go with classes that looked interesting,
or—better yet—easy. So when I came upon Philosophy 3 – Critical Thinking, a
class essentially about logic, I was really intrigued.
Right off the bat, I wondered if you can actually teach
somebody how to think logically. I suspected that you couldn’t—that this was a
kind of talent. I also felt like I kind of had
this talent, since I was pretty good at math and at writing persuasive papers.
Moreover, a childhood nickname my brothers gave me was “Logic Lad.” Believe me,
my brothers were not given to ever saying anything nice to me, so this nickname
must have been a grudging capitulation around an undeniable trait.
This confidence was tempered by (or perhaps a delusion
brought about by) an insecurity, which was that I only thought I was a rational, logical person. To have such swagger and
be woefully ignorant of my own inability to think critically was a frightening
proposition. So, as a hedge against being an unknowing intellectual poser, I
thought I better take this class in order to validate, or possibly bring about,
my (supposed) capability to think critically.
Little did I realize, when signing up, how much drama this
course would occasion. Read on for the torrid tale of our first midterm exam
and its aftermath.
Drama in Philosophy
Class – February 8, 1989
I had high hopes right from the beginning about Philosophy 3
– Critical Thinking. The textbook is really cool. Verbal arguments are encoded
with all these cool symbols, bridging the gap I always felt there must be
between math and clearly written arguments. But I was kind of disappointed,
right off, by the professor. She just didn’t strike me as the total braniac
that I hoped she (and all my professors) would be.
How could I assess this so quickly, and who am I to declare
such a thing? Well, it’s mainly due to her imprecise, unstructured delivery. She
loves to ramble worthlessly during lecture, repeating herself continually in a
monotonous, tiresome tone. Also, her grammar is pretty bad for a UC professor: “Does
anyone else need a syllabi?” or “Another criteria we look at is…” or “While the
price of gold really might have fell…”
I know grammar knowledge isn’t the same thing as
intelligence, but still … I don’t think an Oxford professor would ever slip up
like that. But beyond all this, my main problem with this professor is that her
lectures dang near put me to sleep every time. (I know, I know … this could be
me. I’ve slept through all kinds of classes, even ones I know would be
interesting if I were only awake to hear them.)
But you know, the professor isn’t that bad, actually … she
does impart some useful lessons. But the Teaching Assistant (T.A.) for the
class bugs the hell out of me. He seems to have recently moved here from some
Eastern Bloc country, which wouldn’t be a problem except that his poor grasp of
English hinders his ability to clearly teach this subject, given the importance
of clarity when dealing with tricky argument forms. For example, when teaching
a syllogism, it’s really important not to say “In case he” instead of “In the
case that he.” Consider this sentence: “In the case that he does not bring an
umbrella, he will get wet.” No problem there, right? But if your T.A. says, “In
case he brings an umbrella, he will get wet.” This has an entirely different
meaning and makes our protagonist seem pretty deranged, wouldn’t you say? I
tried to explain the difference but this T.A. absolutely could not follow me.
His English skills were not up to the job. Usually after he talks for a while,
everybody ends up shrugging at the futility of it all, and loses interest.
As with most T.A. discussion
sections, much of the period is devoted to the Question & Answer session. There are two possible scenarios for how this goes.
If the entire class is unprepared or asleep (or both), nobody will ask any
questions and the T.A. will wait patiently for about ten minutes before
becoming irritated. Then he quizzes the class, perhaps to try to snap us into attention.
He doesn’t get any satisfactory answers, either because the students are
actually clueless, or they’re toying with him (I can’t figure out which). After
five or six students give unsatisfactory answers, I’ll try to end the stalemate
with the correct answer. For example, if the question is, “What is a sound
argument?” I will say, “It’s a valid argument that has true premises.” Then
T.A. will shake his head and field five more wrong answers, growing increasingly
frustrated. Finally he will announce the correct answer: “It’s an argument
which has true premises and is valid.” How does he not recognize my answer as
correct? Perhaps it’s his poor grasp of English … maybe he has memorized the
correct answer by rote and thus requires the wording to be identical. Critical
thinking indeed!
The
other question and answer scenario is somewhat less common. Here, a student
actually comes to class having read the material and attempted the homework,
but is completely lost. Well, the T.A.’s job is to eliminate confusion, so the
student has come to the right place. Or so he thinks! Invariably, the student gets
nowhere. He will ask something like, “What is the difference between cogent and
sound arguments?” and the T.A. will throw the question out to the class: “Anyone?
Anyone?” After waiting for about five minutes for a response from another
student, the T.A. will say, “Hasn’t anybody
done the reading?” After another awkward pause, he lets the question die,
hoping the student has given up hope. If the student repeats the question, the
T.A. says, “Well, it’s in your textbook.” If the student still persists, then
the T.A. says, “You’ll have to come to my office hours.” This last resort is
brutally effective, as no student in the history of higher education has ever
gone to a T.A.’s office hours.
But you know, the T.A. isn’t actually my main gripe with the
class. After all, being surrounded by other students could lead to a
stimulating discussion anyway, right? That’s the whole point of the small
discussion sections. But I have yet to hear a single intelligent utterance from
any of my classmates. Mostly I just hear a lot of whining. And after the
midterm exam, they turned their bitching up to 11. In fact, our discussion section
was so heated, it was almost like a student revolt.
Interestingly enough, we hadn’t even gotten our tests back,
so the class wasn’t responding to poor grades, not exactly. But I think they
highly suspected they’d augered in, based on two things: one, almost nobody
finished the test (or even came close), and two, the professor had announced at
the post-exam lecture that almost everybody crashed and burned. The median
score was a 56%. So my classmates came to class armed with numerous reasons why
the test was like, totally unfair. The T.A., arrogant as ever, took a big risk at the beginning of
the period by venturing that the students, not the test, were at fault.
Instantly the jackleg spokesman for the students fired off a rebuttal: “Isn’t
your argument fallacious?” Well, at least the guy had picked up a bit of the
lingo.
The T.A. responded: “At my Thursday review section, before
the exam, I asked how many people thought the class was easy. Almost everybody
raised his hand. Then I asked how many people had done the review problems. Out
of 48 students, four raised their hands. Out of that four, only one had gone to
the Reserve Book Room to check his answers. If this is indicative of the whole
class, we can conclude that the students did not study hard enough.”
I have to admit, this
makes some sense. But, this being a class on logic, he probably should have
trod more carefully. For one thing, it’s not necessarily a given that his
Thursday section was intellectually similar to ours. They might have all chosen
that section (day and time) based on their athletic or party schedules, for all
we know. Second, it’s possible that after his first boring question, a lot of
the students lost interest and couldn’t be bothered to keep raising their
hands.
Our class demanded a “recount.” I found this absurd. The
T.A. hadn’t asked our section these questions, so he had counted nothing … how
could he now “recount”? And if he asked our class the same questions now, what
were we going to say? That we had also neglected to do the review problems?
Yeah, right. Amazingly, the T.A. indulged this “recount,” and guess what? It
turns out everybody in the class had done all
the review problems and had gone
to the Reserve Book Room to check our answers! Obviously the test was a gross
miscarriage of justice! Of course all this was immaterial. It’s not the T.A.’s
job to write the test, so if the test is unfair, that’s not his problem. Nor
could he do anything about it.
This pointless debate went on and on, the class growing
increasingly impassioned and the T.A. becoming increasingly flustered. I had no
interest in the proceedings because, notwithstanding the median score, I felt
pretty confident that, unless I was the most self-deluded person on the planet,
I’d done fine. The test had seemed easy to me, almost eerily so, and I had
finished early. I couldn’t get too worried about my grade because, if I had done poorly, the low grade would be
the least of my worries. Being the most self-deluded person on the planet would
be a deep, deep hole that I’d probably spend the rest of my life trying to
climb out of.
Feeling a strange combination of boredom and discomfort, I
began doodling. Unfortunately I am a very poor doodler. I find my doodles
tiresome and annoying and end up scribbling them out. So I got sick of that and
picked up a flyer advertising a Spring Break trip to Mexico. Then I read a
flyer about how I, too, could earn extra income at home doing
telecommunications. Before long, I decided that the discussion had to be more interesting
than the flyers. Tuning back in, I realized that there was actually an
educational opportunity available to me here: I could listen for, and document,
the all the logical fallacies committed by the students—proof of their unpreparedness,
as these same fallacies were the very subject of the exam! So here they are,
taken directly from my notes:
“We did fine on the homework. But when you put a gun to a
guy’s head and tell him to recite the Constitution, he won’t be able to do it.
Likewise, with our time restrictions, we couldn’t perform well on the test.”
WEAK ANALOGY
“We couldn’t be expected to study that long. We got so many
tests right now we just don’t got time for everything. If we spent all our time
studying for this class, we’d, like, fail all our others! Besides, think of the
stress we’re going through!” APPEAL TO PITY
“Exams are always too long. Like this History test I had we
had basically fifty minutes to write three essays. And one of them was on
material we hadn’t even covered! Soooo lame!” RED HERRING
“Look: 300 students did poorly. Four T.A.’s and one
professor blame us for it. Obviously, you guys must be wrong.” ACCIDENT
(general rule applied incorrectly to a specific case)
“Two of my friends didn’t even finish the test and neither
did I. So don’t eee-ven try to tell me you gave us enough time!” HASTY
GENERALIZATION
“I saw this one dude walking up to turn in the test, and he
was just filling in random dots like crazy.” RED HERRING
Some of the arguments I wrote down, while not committing
specific fallacies, seemed illogical anyway. See if you can pinpoint the
weaknesses in the following arguments:
“In the categorical syllogism problems, the examples were
too hard. I mean, what if we don’t know the difference between reptiles and
mammals?”
“When you said ‘open book,’ you set a trap for us to fall
into. That’s not fair!”
“We only had a minute for each [multiple choice] problem.
Maybe we’re just not fast enough readers!”
“When you have that many problems in front of you, they just
all start to melt together.”
“What if the ten percent of the class that did well were
just a product of chance?”
“I got ahold of last year’s midterm and it was a lot
shorter. How do you explain that?”
“I tried to calculate how much time we had for each problem,
but it was hard because each section had its own numbering. By the time I
figured it all out, I only had half an hour left and I didn’t finish!”
“It was totally bogus. I mean, they were all the kind where
you have to, like, stop and think!”
“All the examples seemed like they were from poems.”
This last statement caused me to almost burst out laughing.
That would have been unwise indeed … the whole class could have turned on me! From
this point forward I was focused purely on not smirking or snorting … not only
would I look like a dick, but I would actually be one. For once in my college
career, I wished I couldn’t stay awake.
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