Sometimes people aren’t sure what counts as a good philosophical move. Do you have to disagree with the author’s entire view? Do you have to present your own entire view? And so on. This document is meant to give you ideas about what kinds of things count as philosophical contributions in an oral comment or an essay. It’s split into Dos and Don’ts. But first, I want to make sure you are not thinking of philosophy as consisting mostly of “debate.”
We are sometimes encouraged to think of intellectual activity as something that is expressed in “debate.”
When we hear the word “debate” we think of two sets of people aligned into teams, with a proposition before them, one team being the Yes team and the other team being the No team.
My beef is that this is a ridiculous setup. All genuine inquiry is iterative and involves clarification and modification. There’s almost never a static proposition that just sits there while we throw Yes or No darts at it.
Moreover, the answer should almost always be No, no matter what the proposition is. The reason for this is that most propositions are formulated imperfectly.
Any one of these perfectly common failings suffices to justify a No answer. (The main exceptions I can think of are propositions of mathematics. But notice: nobody debates those.)
You might think ok, fair points. Debates are artificial. But they could still be useful, in the absence of something that is more realistic. To this I reply: it’s easy to come up with formats that are more realistic.
What is more realistic is that someone makes a proposal, then people get to work on it: they suggest modifications; suggest alternatives; suggest interpretations. This isn’t to say that there is never disagreement. There is, always! (Because, remember, No is almost always the right answer.) But productive disagreement results in an advance in the discussion, which often takes the form of a new proposition being considered. This is not allowed by the “debate” format, in which the battle has to be over the one unchanging proposition.
So when you’re doing an assigned oral comment, or contributing to a discussion in seminar, try to avoid thinking that there are “sides” or “teams” and that you need to choose one of these to fight for. Just say something intelligent and interesting that helps the discussion.
Someone states a generalization—that is, a statement saying that there is a feature that all things or situations of a certain kind have. You can dispute this generalization by giving an example of something that is of that kind but lacks that feature. This is called a counterexample to the generalization. Giving one counterexample is enough to show that the generalization is false.
Colin says that all cultures have engaged in warfare. But this isn’t true: Margaret Mead lived among the Samoans before modern lifestyles reached them, and she found that they lived in peaceful harmony.
A good counterexample is one that everyone will agree on. The more controversial your counterexample is, the less well it works. (The one in the example doesn’t do so well on that score, because other anthropologists have maintained that warmaking was important in Samoan culture.)
Suppose someone offers a good counterexample to some general claim that you made. All is not lost. In response to a counterexample, one move is to qualify the generalization: to change the kind of cases that it’s about, so that the counterexample case is no longer at issue. (E.g. ”All agricultural cultures have engaged in warfare”—now the Samoans are no longer at issue.)
We often say things of the form “if , then .”
If we built more housing, then the price of housing would fall.
Philosophers, too, often make conditional claims.
In his dialogue Euthyphro Plato presents an argument about morality that involves conditional claims nested within each other:
If God’s choices make things right or wrong, then either those choices are based on reasons, or they are arbitrary. If they are based on reasons, then it is those reasons that explain why things are right or wrong, not the fact that God chose according to them. On the other hand if they are arbitrary, then they do not make anything right or wrong, any more than tossing a coin does. Either way then, it is not the case that God’s choices make things right or wrong.
(That is my crude summary of it, not Plato’s presentation.)
You may want to dispute such a claim. Something about it doesn’t feel right. You can disagree by describing a scenario in which is true, but is false. In the first example given, = we build more housing and = the price of housing falls. Against this, a scenario might be: we build more housing but the population of housing-seekers increases even more. is true in this scenario, but is probably false. So, the conditional claim is itself false.
If a conditional claim strikes you as false, one thing that might be going on is that the author is implicitly assuming something that you, as a reader, do not assume. In other words, although their stated claim is “If then ,” what they mean is “If and , then .” Your point, then, would be that they should have said the “and ” part explicitly. (This is often an A move. The reason is that it brings more of the argument into the light of day.)
In the example about housing given above, a good candidate for would be, “the population stays constant.”
Someone says one thing, , and another thing, , and you think that the implications of one of these conflict with the implications of the other.
In its simplest form, such a conflict would show up as someone saying and also saying not-. But people rarely do this because it’s so obviously hopeless. What usually happens is that you have to do some work to show how the conflict arises.
Erica says that it’s worse to harm someone than just to try to harm them. She also says that right and wrong has to do with intentions, not the results of actions. These can’t both be right though. The intention is the same when you try to do something, as when you succeed in doing it, even if the results differ. So the claims conflict.
If such a diagnosis is correct, then some retooling of the original claims is required. One has to modify one or more of them so as to remove the conflict. Another move is to deny that there is such a conflict, by further explaining the claims in question. Each of those is a great example of how things can progress in a discussion.
Someone says that someone else, S, says that . But you think this is wrong: S didn’t say , they said .
Kenji said that according to John Stuart Mill, each of us has a duty to be as happy as possible. But this is not Mill’s view. His theory, Utilitarianism, says that each of us has a duty to make the total of human happiness as great as possible. Doing this might involve giving up some happiness for yourself, so as to help others have more.
This is what in philosophy we call a scholarly dispute. The writings of historical figures in philosophy are often not as clear as we would like. Moreover they are often in languages other than English, and written by people in cultures different from ours. So there is ample room for disagreement among readers, as to what the philosopher really meant. People are still having disputes—often, very interesting ones—over what Plato or Aristotle meant, for example.
Here you take a generalization about some set of cases, and extend it to cover a wider set. Basically you’re saying that the author could have made that stronger (i.e. more general) claim to begin with.
Monique says that it is a human right to get medical care. I think that her reasons for this claim also apply to dental and mental health care. So, her position should be that those too are included in the right.
This isn’t disagreeing, but that’s ok. You don’t always have to disagree. (Remember, we’re not doing debates.) This is one way to suggest a “friendly revision” to the claim you’re discussing.
We’re all used to “compare and contrast” type exercises from school. These are often boring: A says this, B says that, and wow, they’re kind of different and kind of the same. But this kind of thing can be illuminating if the comparison is not so much between what two people say but between what they assume.
John Stuart Mill focuses on happiness, but only the happiness of humans. Peter Singer is more true to the basic idea of Utilitarianism, because he focuses on happiness no matter what creature possesses it.
Here too, it’s not that you’re disagreeing with anyone. But you are making an illuminating comparison, and that is helpful. In the example given, the comparison suggests an extension of Mill’s claim.
Sometimes someone will make a claim and you think that it can be supported with reasons that are better than, or even just different from, the reasons that they give in support of it.
Lilla says that we should help the poor because otherwise they will commit crimes out of desperation. I agree that we should help the poor, but differ on the reason why. I think we should help the poor because almost always, their situation is not their fault.
It is 100% legitimate to explain why you don’t understand something! And it is useful, too, because it can help the writer to improve their writing. Very often, when we write something, we fail to take into account the ways in which it might be misunderstood.
Of course there are better and worse ways to do this. Just saying “I don’t understand” is not helpful. Try to explain why you don’t understand.
Ethan says that it’s not permitted to tell lies, so there should be a punishment for this. But I don’t understand what he means here by ”permitted.” Does he mean permitted by the law, or permitted by morality? These are different claims. If he means “permitted by the law” then his claim is false, because there’s no law against telling lies. But if he means “permitted by morality” then the claim is plausible, although I don’t think everything that goes against morality should be punished.
These are things that in one way or another hinder, rather than help, philosophical progress.
Just saying “I found this reading interesting” or “I did not agree with the author’s claims” or “This statement greatly offends me” doesn’t move the discussion along. Not worth saying.
A rhetorical question is a sentence that has the grammatical form of a question, but is not meant as a way of asking the reader for their opinion. Rather it meant to suggest that there is a particular answer to it that the reader should give.
I saw this on a Guelph bus once:
Why assisted suicide for some, and suicide prevention for others?
Presumably the answer that the writer thinks I should give is that it doesn’t make sense to do both these things, and that (I’m guessing) we should stop assisting suicide, and continue doing suicide prevention counselling.
So a rhetorical question is not a sincere question. The point of a sincere question is to find out the answer, which only makes sense if the questioner thinks that they don’t know what the answer is. A rhetorical question, by contrast, is asked by someone who thinks that they do know the answer; their point is merely to secure the reader’s agreement to it. The assumption they make is that merely by asking the question they can get that agreement. In other words, their assumption is that the reader already agrees with them.
It is very often tempting to use rhetorical questions. They’re snarky and provocative. But they are always weak, especially in philosophy. When your reader is a philosopher, they could very easily not give the answer you’d like, in which case the tactic completely fails. It’s always better to make your point directly: just state your claim and give your reasons for it.
This is when you criticize something about the person making the claim, rather than something about the claim itself. (The name is Latin for “to the man.”)
Jeremy says that we don’t owe anything to poor people in other countries. It is convenient for him to say this, because as a middle class Canadian I’m sure he doesn’t want to give any of his money away.
This move is always labelled as a fallacy, meaning, a mistake in reasoning. For good reason. One problem with it is tactical: it usually just results in making people angry, rather than changing their minds.
The other, deeper problem with it is intellectual. The error is that you are just ignoring the topic, which is the claim being made. If there’s a problem with the claim then it just confuses things to frame it as if it’s a problem with the person making it.
And, finally, it backfires. Talking about the person, rather than about the claim, suggests that you don’t actually have a good criticism of the latter. You give the impression that insults are all you have.
This move is a version of the ad hominem move. In this case you identify a conflict between someone’s behaviour and the claim they are making. This sort of move has all the problems of the ad hominem move: ultimately it makes you look like you haven’t identified a problem with the claim, so you have to resort to this irrelevant stuff.
But this particular version of it has another problem as well. It neglects the fact that someone can propose a change in the social order, without heroically trying to enact that change all on their own.
John says that we should drive on the left, instead of on the right. I notice though that he drives on the right! What a hypocrite.
Is that a good criticism of John’s claim? Well, no, because his idea is about our general practice. It’s not relevant to focus on what one particular person does. (An example closer to home for me is this. I think that tipping is a vulgar and degrading practice. But I tip well. I don’t think that this proves a problem with my belief.)
In a discussion your focus should be on the claim that a person makes, not on them as a person (as in the ad hominem move), or things that they do (as in the pointing-out-hypocrisy move).