Frauds, Hoaxes and Pseudoscience: a course in argumentation.

Abstract

Lowar-division science students may have a naive view of science and a limited understanding of the role of argumentation in science. To make scientific arguments more visible, Patton designed a course, Frauds, Hoaxes and Pseudoscience, that required students to read "bad" scientific arguments, to critique those "bad" arguments, and to write their own "good" arguments. To assist students in their analysis of argumentation, Patton provided several models of argumentation and practical reasoning, including those of Stephen Toulmin and Chaim Perelman, which consider not only the reasons and evidence supporting a claim but also the warrants, backing, qualifiers, and reservations. Patton identifies antecedents for the course in classical and modern rhetoric, describes the course and its relevance to the modern college curriculum, and concludes that, while it is only one way of approaching argumentation, it might provide ideas for faculty in the humanities and social sciences as well as in the sciences.

Introduction: Making disciplinary arguments visible

While most undergraduates are challenged by the need to write good arguments, science students are especially challenged, particularly lower-division science students who may still think about science in terms of right/wrong, black/white, the-textbook-said-it-so-it's-true. Such dualistic thinkers may not yet understand that most of what we accept as scientific truth is the product of probabilistic, evidence-based arguments. Such dualistic thinkers may not yet understand that scientists typically narrow their claims to match the degree of probable truth permitted by the evidence and attending theories. For such thinkers, scientific arguments may be largely invisible. To make scientific arguments more visible and to offer several models for analyzing and producing arguments, I designed the course that will be described below, Frauds, Hoaxes, and Pseudoscience.

I offered this course as a topics course in English, but I have since become aware of similar courses designed by philosophers, biologists, and physicists. Our common premise is that students better understand the elements of a sound argument if they are first exposed to some blatantly flawed arguments. By offering this course, I hoped to practice what I preach: to offer a writing-intensive course that promotes critical thinking through revision of written assignments, something that my colleagues and I advocate in our writing-in-the-disciplines workshops at the University of Missouri. I wanted to offer a course in argumentation that might appeal to majors outside of English, including science majors, as well as design a course that might provide sample argument-based assignments for science faculty at a loss for ideas. Although I had the unique needs of science faculty in mind, the idea behind Frauds, Hoaxes and Pseudoscience could be applied by social science and humanities faculty as well: first make disciplinary arguments visible (through bad examples), then critique them, and then improve upon them.

Antecedents of the Course in Classical and Modern Rhetoric

To clarify what I mean by "argument," I would like to distinguish the arguments of formal logic from those of informal logic. The arguments of formal logic, based on the syllogism, are absolute and unqualified, and are best suited to ideal, symbolic, or abstract disciplines, such as mathematics. The arguments of formal logic are usually ill-suited to complex, real-world problems, which are usually time- and situation-dependent. But just because "real-world" problems tend to be time- and situation-dependent does not mean that we must give up reasoning about them to find, if not the "correct" answer, the "best possible conclusion," given the available evidence. For real-world problems with uncertain premises, we need a system of informal logic.

Today we witness the use of informal logic in the courtroom, in the senate, in grant reviews, and in virtually every aspect of policy making. We may use a truncated form of informal logic in most of our daily decision-making. Such informal logic can be abused--can be used for persuasive purposes without regard for truth; indeed, it often has been. However, informal logic can also be used to reason about probabilities and uncertainties with a conviction to discover the "best" available conclusion, given the evidence at the moment. Informal logic, more so than formal logic, is that which is most often employed in academic arguments.

Informal logic may employ different standards of evidence for different problems, with more "quantitative" evidence required for problems in the natural and physical worlds and more "qualitative" evidence for problems in the social world. Aristotle demonstrated a sympathy for this kind of logic in Nicomachean Ethics when he claimed that ""it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits ..." (162). While Aristotle employed syllogistic reasoning for problems with certain premises, he realized that some problems that require our attention are rooted in probabilities. His study of such problems was called "rhetoric." The word today, primarily used as a pejorative, actually refers to a two-thousand year old discipline that has recognized the necessity of practical reasoning about open-ended problems. The discipline of rhetoric, ancient and modern, recognizes that formal logic is a limited tool of rationality.

Toulmin, a Cambridge-trained mathematician, physicist, and philosopher, argued early in the twentieth century that a system of informal logic is needed to reason about practical knowledge: the local, the oral, the timely, and the particular. He developed such a system of practical reasoning in his books The Uses of Argument and Introduction to Reasoning. Toulmin realized late in his career that what he called practical reasoning had been lived for centuries under the name of "rhetoric." Whether called a model of rhetoric, of informal logic, or of practical reasoning, Toulmin's model provides one way to help students develop their skills in argumentation.

Toulmin Model of Informal Logic

Toulmin's model is illustrated in a book on argumentation with the following "because clause," a mini-argument of sorts. (Bean and Ramage, 63) "Because" clause: Ms. Smith is a good trial lawyer because she is an effective arguer.

Claim (an inference or conclusion drawn from the grounds): Ms. Smith is a good trial lawyer.

Grounds (reasons & evidence): Polly Smith has won three recent cases as a result of her courtroom arguing techniques.

Warrant (what gives you license to draw an inference from your grounds): Since effective argumentation is a criterion for being a good trial lawyer.

Qualifier: For most kinds of cases.

Backing (a secondary argument to justify the warrant): Because the judges we polled cited effective argumentation as being what distinguishes good trial lawyers from mediocre ones.

Conditions of rebuttal (not a qualifier but a recognition of exceptions to the rule): Unless the case involves a complex corporate law. Unless she doesn't have time to prepare extensively.

Most of our university students are skilled writing a basic argument: They expect that arguments should be well supported with reasons and evidence and can usually produce such arguments. What they might not expect--or might not be skilled in analyzing--are the warrants, the reservations, the backing for the warrants, and the resulting qualifiers. By emphasizing the warrant and its justification and the resulting reservations and qualifications, Toulmin's model provides students with a means of analyzing arguments with subtlety and critical awareness. In an academic context, the warrant might be the method of conducting the research and the backing is the justification for using this method instead of an alternative. In law, for example, the warrant would be the case or statute justifying a given inference; the backing would be the justification for using that case instead of another. In engineering, the warrant might be the method of measuring stress, and the backing might be the justification for using this method instead of another.

Frauds, Hoaxes, and Pseudoscience

I opened my course Frauds, Hoaxes, and Pseudoscience by introducing two models of informal logic and probabilistic reasoning, those of Stephen Toulmin and Chaim Perelman. Like Toulmin, Chaim Perelman sought a system of practical reasoning about debatable claims and contributed to the revival of rhetoric or the "new rhetoric" of the twentieth century. We initially used these models to discuss prominent examples of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pseudoscience and hoaxes. Why, we asked, would anyone find credible the idea of mesmerism, learned pigs, fireproof women, or bleeding paintings? We discussed the degree to which audiences are persuaded not only by reasons and evidence, but also by warrants or premises that may be unstated. We discussed the degree to which hoaxters prey on an audience's readiness to respond to unstated warrants--including unstated fears and desires--and we speculated about some of the fears and desires that might have left particular nineteenth-century audiences, whose beliefs were increasingly challenged by science, vulnerable to tales of the spiritual, miraculous, and marvelous.

We then used Toulmin and Perelman's models of argumentation to analyze one or two literary hoaxes as well as numerous scientific ones. While we looked for the reasoning and evidence in the "bad arguments," we focused on the warrants, stated or unstated, and the backing for the warrants. We discovered that mass persuasion is most possible when an audience readily accept unstated premises. When the premises are not shared, a writer faces an uphill battle--and, in the case of literary hoaxes, may be moved to employ irony or satire to expose what is perceived to be a false premise.

Such was the case when Benjamin Franklin duped audiences on both sides of the Atlantic with his Polly Baker hoax, a "news report" about an unwed mother who was tried for bearing a bastard son. The real object of Franklin's hoax was a law against fornication, which Franklin believed to be unreasonable. Instead of directly arguing the case, Franklin created a persona, Polly Baker, who couldn't imagine what her offense was, since she thought murdering children, not bearing them, was criminal. In a speech that not only echoed Swift's "Modest Proposal" but also included all of the elements of classical oration, Polly argued that she would gladly marry and bear more children--if only the father would marry her. So compelling was her speech that the judge allegedly dispensed with the penalty and married her instead. By absurdly reducing the argument to a question of marriage, Franklin exposed the unstated warrant for the law against fornication: a system of double standards whereby unmarried fathers could levy penalties on "fornicators," while unmarried mothers were treated as common criminals.

In Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould recounts numerous "bad arguments" within the frame of his own carefully reasoned "good" argument, a critique of nineteeth-century craniometry and twentieth-century intelligence testing that makes as explicit as possible the warrants, reservations, and qualifiers. He cites examples of outright fraud as well as inadvertent pseudoscience. Gould critiques genetic explanations for intelligence (such as measuring intelligence by the size of skulls); he critiques Samuel George Morton's inadvertent but racist finagling of data; and he critiques Cyril Burt's fraudulent data. This permitted us to view pseudoscience, finagling of data, unintentional bias, and science-in-the-making on a spectrum, rather than as distinct, clear cut genres. In what might seem paradoxical, Gould argues that the best protection from unwarranted cultural biases is to admit that such biases exist and to look for them, implying that an unguarded pretension to objectivity is counterproductive. According to Gould, scientists "must identify preferences in order to constrain their influence." Indirectly, Gould encourages us to seek the warrants and their backing in each of our arguments and in our critical reading of others' arguments. Gould goes so far as to suggest that argumentation (critique, in particular) is at the heart of science, that debunking is a necessary part of science. "Science advances primarily by replacement, not by addition. If the barrel is always full, then the rotten apples must be discarded before better ones can be added." (352) Whether or not scientists accept Gould's strong Popperian view of falsification, most scientists would agree with Gould that a critical attitude and a certain degree of skepticism are vital.

Perhaps the most famous scientific hoax discussed in the course was the Piltdown Hoax, the "discovery" in 1912 in the gravel pits of Piltdown, England, of a "missing link" between ape and man, a skull that appeared to be part human and part ape. This hoax permitted us to examine not only the reasoning and evidence put forth by hoaxter Charles Dawson, but also the values, hopes, and fears of a culture adjusting itself to the implications of Darwin's theory of evolution. In The Panda's Thumb, a collection of essays on natural history, Stephen Jay Gould attributes the longevity of the Piltdown Hoax (almost fifty years) to the imposition of strong hope on dubious evidence and to the uncritical acceptance of a strange event that reinforced a cultural bias.

To further explore historical, cultural, and disciplinary contingencies affecting both audience reception and text production, we examined arguments from several disciplines, culminating in the Sokal Hoax. In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal successfully passed off as serious a bogus piece of literary fluff that was loaded with meaningless scientific metaphors and references to the editors' scholarship. He wagered that the editors of Social Text could not distinguish between a lousy argument, deliberately constructed as such, and something worthwhile. While the essay was satiric, the hoax was a serious jab at the "lack of standards" in literary criticism. This hoax invited plenty of analysis and our own arguments, for many of Sokal's premises have been openly debated. When discussing Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, my students engaged in an argument about scientific arguments. They read Kuhn's argument as well as critiques of Kuhn's argument by philosopher Stephen Toulmin and physicist Steven Weinberg. For Toulmin, Kuhn is too relativistic. Like Kuhn, Toulmin believes that standards change, but, unlike Kuhn, Toulmin believes that standards change through evolution, not revolution. Even more devastating than Toulmin's critique of Kuhn was physicist Steven Weinberg's critique, "The Revolution that Didn't Happen." My students, after comparing and contrasting various views of the structure of science, critiqued critiques ... and engaged in multi-level argumentation.

Throughout the course, students both analyzed and produced arguments. For example, we reviewed a special issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association devoted to alternative medicine, which permitted us to examine unstated assumptions as well as the methods, results, inferences, and error analysis in each published argument. Students produced their own arguments in the form of critical reviews. Because the JAMA issue revealed Western medicine reassessing some of its previous conclusions, students had a glimpse of science in the making and of a "trial" of the warrants underlying both non-traditional and traditional practices. Through Frauds, Hoaxes, and Pseudoscience, I hoped to help students learn to distinguish among various purposes, audiences, and genres for argumentation; to analyze the argument presented in various texts and to identify the author's major claim, reasons, evidence, and assumptions; to evaluate historical, cultural, and cognitive contingencies affecting an argument; and to evaluate different standards of evidence for different claims, methods, and disciplines.

Conclusion: The Relevance of the Class to the College Curriculum

One goal of undergraduate education, certainly at the University of Missouri, is to help students become literate citizens capable of thinking critically about complex problems. To work with such rhetorical models of practical reasoning, students must move beyond absolutism to discipline-specific, evidence-based reasoning. When students move beyond absolutism to discipline-specific, evidence-based reasoning they also move from what William Perry in Forms of Intellectual Development calls dualistic thinking to what Perry calls committed relativism, a stage in intellectual development that typically occurs well after the freshman year.

I cannot claim that this course alone made more critical thinkers of my students. I can claim, though, that the written arguments my students produced at the end of the class were far more sophisticated than those produced at the beginning. Not every student warmed up to the course, but some wrote on the course evaluations comments such as "The course was unlike any other taken at Mizzou. It was way out there and very eye-opening. A good example of what writing-intensive should represent."

Bibliography

Aristotle. Rhetoric. in The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1990.

--. Nicomachean Ethics. The Pocket Aristotle. (Translated under editorship of W. D. Ross) New York: Washington Square Press, 1958. Page 162.

Gould. Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. Rev. Ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.

--. "Piltdown Revisited." The Panda's Thumb. New York: W. W. Norton, 1980. Hall, M. Benjamin Franklin & Polly Baker: History of a Literary Deception. Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh P, 1990.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1962. Perelman, Chaim. The New Rhetoric and the Humanities. Boston: Reidel Publishing Co., 1979.

--. The Realm of Rhetoric. Notre Dame IN: U Notre Dame P, 1982.

Perry, William G., Jr. Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970.

Ramage, John D. and John C. Bean. Writing Arguments: A Rhetoric with Readings. New York: Macmillan, 1989. Page 63.

Sokal, A. "A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies" Lingua Franca v. 4, May/June 1996., pp. 62-64.

--. "Transgressing the Boundaries." Social Text. V 46.47. Spring/Summer. 1996, pp. 217-52.

Toulmin, Stephen. The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1958.

--, Richard Rieke and Allan Janik. An Introduction to Reasoning. New York: Macmillan, 1979.

Weinberg, Steven. "The Revolution That Didn't Happen" New York Review of Books. October 8, pp. 48-52.

Martha D. Patton, University of MIssouri-Columbia

Patton, Adjunct Professor of English, helps direct the Campus Writing Program. She teaches writing, women's literature and humanities classes, but her research focuses on writing-in-the-disciplines, especially writing in biology and in engineering.