when one’s task is to describe the process of making a sandwich, that same relationship is complicated by several orders of magnitude when one sets out to persuade an audience that a constitutional ban on same sex marriage may or may not be a grand idea. Whatever transference might have occurred among earlier assignments, it appeared to stop abruptly when it came to argument. As we’ve since learned, when the cognitive demands of an assignment fall outside our students’ “zone of proximal development,” all sorts of other problems—with spelling, with grammar, with syntax, with style—erupt like a pox. Argument, many writing teachers reluctantly concluded based on their sad experience in such courses, should either be taught later in the curriculum or elsewhere in the university.
Clearly, thus, many of the problems students had learning how to construct arguments in a current-traditional writing course could be laid at the feet of the approach. It was as if we tried to prepare students for calculus by assigning them a series of arithmetic problems, pretending that solving addition, subtraction, multiplication and division problems prepared one to solve quadratic equations. Not every composition course was of course organized around current-traditional principles. But few of the texts apparently intended for use in stand-alone argument courses were any more promising. They mostly consisted of anthologies of canonical arguments interlarded with unhelpful advice and potted assignments. The usually brief—and one rarely wished them longer—prefaces and introductions rehearsed some classical terms, informal fallacies and model syllogisms and invited students to apply the material, some way some how, to the essays that followed. Needless to say the complexities of the essays handily eluded the dubious pieties of the opening chapter, leaving students and teachers alike to wonder if perhaps, indeed, argument was not beyond the ken of mere mortals.
What caused all this to change over the past twenty years or so? Here we run up against a confusion of the chicken and egg variety—Did our approaches to argument gain in sophistication and usefulness because of a growing recognition of how much argument mattered in the world, or did the growing sophistication and usefulness of our approaches make us progressively more aware of the capacity for argument to matter in the world? In all likelihood, the two phenomena occurred more or less simultaneously and mutually reinforced each other. Or more accurately, our belated awareness of the many fine tools available to students of argument, tools that were in many cases adapted from tools a couple of thousand years old, rendered the study of argument more fruitful and the transmission of argument skills more reliable. For whatever reasons, thus, we find ourselves today in the midst of a sort of golden age in the history of argument instruction. Later on we will look further back into the past to see just how this came about and where the present era might fit in the history of argument instruction. For now we want to concentrate on our current understanding of argument and our motivation for teaching it.
Coming to an Understanding of Argument
In our classes, we like to make an initial approach to argument directly and inductively by examining two or more arguments on an issue, working out with our students which features of our examples are most likely to be shared with other arguments. This approach is illustrative of a more general approach to teaching that we favor: bottom-up, problem-based learning, grounded in application and ascending toward principles as opposed to the more traditional top-down, “presentational” mode of knowledge transmission (i.e., lecturing). There are to be sure costs as well as benefits to our inductive approach to learning. In exchange for actively learning important elements of argument we have foregone thoroughgoing, albeit passive, “coverage” of our topic. The best we can hope for from our initial examination of argument is a better understanding of some of its more prominent features and a better sense of how to think critically about the subject. That is one of the points of the exercise and of our course—the meaning of complex terms like “argument” is always contested because they are in effect inexhaustible.
Whatever the danger that students might mistake our selected parts for the whole, the benefits of our approach in our view significantly outweigh the potential costs. While we could transmit a good deal more declarative knowledge about argument through lecture, there is no guarantee that the knowledge we transmit would arrive at its intended destination, or that if it did arrive it would be sufficiently free of noise not to garble our signal or that students would have a clear notion of what to “do” with whatever knowledge survived the transmission. Our experience of lecturing on the definition of argument suggests that the most common question we manage to provoke about the material we present is the following: “Which of this will be on the test?” We do not take that to be a positive sign. Defining matters on which there is general agreement is, among other things, boring. Defining matters that are uncertain and contested is considerably more engaging. In our initial discussions on argument, we want our students to get a sense that the definition of any complex notion like argument is contestable, that the values and beliefs we bring to the exercise of defining the term influence our choice of its meaning, and that in turn how we define it determines how we practice it.
Every semester, at the end of our inductive exercise in definition, we are left not with the same tidy set of conclusions about the meaning of argument that we have rehearsed in our lectures, but with different, oftentimes unexpected, conclusions that arose out of freewheeling conversations. To be sure, we steer that conversation enough to ensure that at least a handful of points about argument are made, and not every point offered up in our classes survives the interrogation to which we submit it. (Like the ancient master of dialectic, Socrates, we are not above putting in the fix occasionally.) But each semester produces new insights into the meaning of argument. The important point to remember is that there will be plenty of time later to address the most crucial issues of definition left unanswered at the outset. In the meantime, students are more likely to be engaged by and ready to apply ideas that they have hand in producing.
The arguments that follow are not ones that we would use in a typical undergraduate class. The issues they raise are appropriate to a more theoretical discussion of argument than the one we seek to promote at the outset of an undergraduate class. Certainly we make no claims for them as argument exemplars. But neither are they randomly selected. They are “meta-arguments” of a sort that raise questions about the nature of argument central to our approach and preview issues that recur in the pages that follow. The two arguments and the ensuing discussion obviously cannot replicate an open-ended classroom encounter with the material. In order for you to at least get a feel for that experience, we invite you to read them the way we ask our students to read them. Before looking at our discussion, ask yourself how the two essays are different and how they are similar in both the way they argue and the conclusions they reach. The conclusions you reach can then be used to interrogate our own conclusions about the two arguments.
John Leo, “Cultural Relativism Leaves Some Blind to Evil” (2001, Universal Press Syndicate), 10/15/01
The House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church put out a disgraceful statement on the terrorist attacks. After urging believers to “wage reconciliation” (i.e., not war), the bishops said: “The affluence of nations such as our own stands in stark contrast to other parts of the world wracked by crushing poverty which causes the death of 6,000 children in the course of a morning.” The number 6,000 and the reference to a single morning, of course, are meant to evoke Sept. 11 in a spirit of moral equivalence.
In plain English, the bishops seem to think that Americans are in no position to complain about the Manhattan massacre since 6,000 children around the world can die in a single day. The good bishops are apparently willing to tolerate 6,000 murders in New York* because the West has failed to eliminate world poverty, and perhaps should be blamed for causing it. But the terrorist attack has nothing to do with world hunger or disease. And the bishops’ statement is a moral mess. How many murders can Episcopalians now overlook because of the existence of crushing poverty? If 6,000, why not 60,000?
This is a minor example of what could be a major problem over the long haul. A large number of our cultural and moral leaders are unable to say plainly that evil exists in the world and that it must be confronted. Instead they are content to babble about “cycles of violence” and how “an
