by Luca
Ferrero
Dept. of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee
You should use this questionnaire to guide you in writing comments on the drafts assigned to you (and in the future to guide you in evaluating your own drafts)
In the first part of the questionnaire, you will find a series of questions about the style, organization and content of the draft. The questions are meant to alert you to potential problems with the draft. If you find any of these problems, make it clear in your marginal comments. You should not expect to be commenting specifically on each of the issues raised here. Hopefully, the draft that you will be looking at will avoid most if not all of the problems mentioned below. Nonetheless, you have to go through the entire list to make sure that you have covered all the important aspects. The list is long because there are many ways in which a paper can be defective (and correspondingly, many ways in which it can be improved). However, you should expect that in most cases you do not need to write any comment for that particular issue since the draft if perfectly fine under that respect.
In the second part, you will be asked to make some final comments on the overall structure and argument of the paper.
To repeat, do not be worried about the number of things that you have to look at. In most cases and for the most part draft will be fine and need no major correction for style, organization and attribution. What you must concentrate on is rather the discussion of the paper's argument and the writing of the overall comments.
How long should your comments be? At the very least, I expect you to do two things. First, mark the paper to individuate its basic structure and underlie the premises and conclusions of the argument (this will also be helpful for writing the overall comment). Second, write the final comment (about one page - 300 words).
This is the most that you will do in case the paper is very well-written and its main thesis is convincingly argued.
If the draft needs more extensive comments, you should focus on the issues that seems most important to you. You might want to reduce the length of your overall comments if you have already discussed some issues in more details in your marginal notes. Of course, you are welcome to write more extended comments if you want. In any event, remember that you are going to meet in person with the writer of the paper during the writing workshop and so you will have the opportunity to expand on your written comments on that occasion.
| Style | Structure | Attribution | Argument | Final Assessment |
Answering the following questions helps you assessing whether the paper is well-structured.
If a paper is exegetical (interpretive of the work of other philosophers) or if the author makes reference to the works of other philosophers or scholars (either to criticize or support their positions), you must make sure that certain standards are respected.
Although the assessment of the paper's argument comes last in this list, this is by far the MOST important kind of comments. If the papers that you are reading is well-written, you will have almost nothing to say with regard to style, structure and attribution. Nonetheless, you still need to critically engage with its philosophical claims.
The arguments of a paper should be assessed under the following aspects: explicitness and clarity, validity, soundness and consistency. For a quick look at the actions that you have to take in writing your comments look at the paragraphs in italics.
Explicitness and clarity. Is the writer making all the premises of her argument explicit? Are the premises and the conclusions stated clearly and unambiguously? It will help here for you to underline on the draft the premises and the conclusion (possibly in different colors so that you will be able to recognize them). If some premises are not explicitly stated, try to figure them out and write them on the margin. This is necessary in order to assess the argument at a later step.
Validity. An argument is valid if and only if the premises support the conclusion. In assessing the validity of an argument, you are not concerned with determining whether the premises are true, but rather whether, assuming that they are true, the conclusion follows from them.
Take, for instance, the following argument.
This is a valid argument. If the two premises are indeed true, then we should conclude that Socrates is immortal. This does not mean, however, that Socrates is immortal. If human beings are not all immortal or if Socrates is not a human being (that is, if at least one of the premises is false), then one cannot conclude from these premises that Socrates is immortal. This is not, however, a reason to reject the argument as invalid. The problem is rather that the argument is not-as the philosophers say-sound (see `Soundness' below).
An example of an invalid argument would be
This argument is invalid because the argument does not tell us whether Socrates is one of those fortunate human beings who are said to be immortal by the firs premise. What we know, from premise 2, is only that Socrates is a human being. This is compatible with his being one of the unfortunate mortal ones. Hence, the conclusion does not follow. The argument is invalid.
There are many ways in which an argument can be invalid. Some will be immediately evident to you, other fallacies are more subtle and you will learn to recognize them with time. If an argument strikes you as unconvincing and you cannot figure out what is wrong with it, you might want to consult a list of the most common arguments and fallacies at this site Some Good and Bad Forms of Argument (by Jim Pryor). A comprehensive list of fallacies is available at Stephen's Guide to the Logical Fallacies.
Soundness. An argument is sound if and only if both
(a) the argument is valid, and
(b) the premises are true.
To return to the previous example, if it is indeed true that all human beings are immortal and that Socrates is a human being, then not only the claim that Socrates is immortal follows, but the claim is also true. If you find that an argument is valid, but its conclusion is not true, this means that the argument is unsound, i.e., at least one of its premises is false.
If you find that a premise in an argument is false, make that clear in your comments. Make sure, however, to distinguish between an argument that is invalid and an argument that is valid but unsound.
It is important to notice that if a conclusion strikes you as being manifestly true, this is not a reliable sign of the argument in its support being both valid and sound. Invalid arguments can issue in true conclusions. Likewise, valid but unsound arguments can issue in true conclusions as well (for instance, if it is false that all human beings are immortal, one cannot conclude from it and the fact that Socrates is a human being, that Socrates is indeed immortal. This is so even if the argument is valid and even if it might be true that Socrates is immortal. However, if the latter claim is true, it must be so for a different reason than the one suggested by the valid, but unsound argument).
Notice that if a conclusion strikes you as being patently false, this is not a reliable sign that the argument in its support is either unsound or invalid. First of all, as I have already remarked, the validity of an argument is independent of the truth of both its premises and conclusion.
However, if an argument is valid, but the conclusion is false, this is usually a sign that the argument is not sound, that is, that at least one of its premises is false. So, if you know for sure that Socrates is mortal and you are presented with a valid argument to the contrary, you should expect that at least one of its premises is false: it is false either that all human beings are immortal, or that Socrates is a human being.
An interesting situation arises if you cannot find any false premise in a valid argument that supports what you take to be a patently false conclusion. That is, you might find that an argument is sound and yet it supports a conclusion that goes against your intuitions or deeply held beliefs. The situation is interesting because the soundness of an argument is a guarantee of the truth of its conclusion. This is the point of looking for sound arguments. We want an argument to tell us what derives from premises that we accept. So what should we do if a conclusion is counterintuitive? At first, we might inspect the argument more closely to see if the argument is unsound or invalid in a subtle, not immediately apparent way. But if the argument withstands closest scrutiny, then we must accept the conclusion and revise our beliefs accordingly. An interesting and challenging philosophical paper is often one that presents a sound argument for a counterintuitive claim. Of course, if the claim is deeply counterintuitive you might not give it up too easily, but you cannot dismiss an argument simply because you do not believe or like its conclusion. You must challenge the argument on its own ground, so to say, by showing that there is some fault with its logic or its premises.
The moral of this is that in assessing a piece of philosophical writing, you do not consider claims in isolation, but only together with the arguments that are offered in their support.
In writing your comments make sure not only to individuate the arguments, but also to assess them for validity and soundness.
Consistency. Usually in a piece of philosophical writing there is more than one argument. If there is unity in the piece, the arguments are related to each other. There are three basic relations. The arguments can be in a sequence. The conclusion of the first argument serves as the premise of the second argument, in turn the conclusion of the second argument serves as the premise of a third argument and so on.
The arguments can be related like the branches of a tree. The conclusion of argument A is taken as one of the premises of argument C, the conclusion of argument B is taken as another premise of argument C. The conclusion of C can thus be drawn on the basis of the conclusion of A and B.
(Strictly speaking, in the previous cases we might speak of just one argument made of simpler steps. In any event, the validity of the more complex argument depends on the validity of the simpler steps).
Finally, several independent arguments can be offered in support of the same conclusion. Although in principle, one sound argument is sufficient to establish the truth of a claim, there is a sense in which the claim is reinforced if it is proven from different sets of premises. This is basically for two reasons. First, there is the benefit of redundancy. If one of the supporting arguments is later on found out to be invalid or unsound, the claim is not affected since it is still supported by alternative arguments. Second, if the conclusion can be supported from different premises, the conclusion can be convincing for people that do not share the same beliefs, provided each of them accepts at least one argument (but not necessarily the same one) in support of the claim.
Notice that in a paper, the order in which the arguments are presented is not necessarily the order in which they support each other. The writer can first present the main argument, taking the premises for granted for the time being. Then she can backtrack and offer arguments in support of the premises that she originally assumed to be true.
The fact that some premises are taken without explicit support is not a always a defect for a paper. Any paper will necessarily rely on some claims that are not proven in the paper. If these claims are relatively uncontroversial, then there is no problem. However, if the premises are highly controversial or known to be not yet proven, the author should justify her choice to run an argument from these particular premises. There might be good reasons to do so, but the author must make them explicit.
In any event, whatever conclusion the writer can reach from these controversial premises, the conclusion is said to be conditional. Her argument shows that, to the extent that such and such a premise is acceptable, then a certain conclusion follows. The argument does not show, that is, that the conclusion is true. In order to do so, the assumption should be first shown to be true (the assumption should be discharged as the philosophers say). This, however, is a work that can be legitimately left for another occasion.
Reductio ad Absurdum. Notice that there are some cases in which the writer does not want to discharge the assumptions. Quite the opposite, she wants to use the conclusion of her argument to reject the premises. How can this be so? Normally, what we want to establish is the truth of the conclusion. However, there are cases in which one can argue in the opposite direction, from a conclusion to the falsity of a premise. This is what philosophers call a reductio ad absurdum (a Latin expression that means reducing to the absurd). Here is how it works. Let's imagine that a certain claim C (say that Socrates is immortal) has already been proven. Now there might be a valid argument from a certain premise to a conclusion that is the opposite of C (that is, to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal). For instance, one might argue that since All human beings are mortal and Socrates is a human being, then Socrates is mortal. This argument is valid. However, since we already know that Socrates is immortal, at least one of the premises must be false. Imagine that Socrates' humanity is uncontroversial. In this case, we should reject the premise that All human beings are mortal (This is not the same, however, as claiming that All human beings are immortal, but this is another story). This rejection is an instance of the reductio ad absurdum. If we take the claim that All human beings are mortal as true, an absurd conclusion follows, namely that Socrates is mortal. This conclusion is absurd since it has been independently proven that Socrates is immortal.
Notice two things about a reductio ad absurdum. First, the reductio works only if the conclusion of the argument can indeed be considered absurd. Hence, there must be independent and stronger reasons to believe that it is absurd. Usually in order to reject a premise via a reductio, it is not sufficient that you find the conclusion of the argument counterintuitive (see above). You must rather have an independent argument against the conclusion. Otherwise, the alleged reductio is rather an argument that proves that your intuition is wrong. For instance, in order to reject the premise that All human beings are mortal, it is not sufficient that you have a hunch that Socrates is immortal,. If you have no stronger argument in support of Socrates' immortality than your intuition, then the conclusion that Socrates is mortal forces you to give up your intuition, rather than being a reductio against the claim that all human beings are mortal.
Second, a reductio is often used against the claims of a theory that the writer wants to reject. In this case the writer will proceed as follows. Let's A be the claim that the writer ultimately wants to reject. She will take A for granted only temporarily. As the philosophers say they are temporarily granted for the sake of the argument. She then shows that from claim A an unacceptable conclusion C follows. Hence, she will determine that the original assumption A cannot be sustained and must be rejected.
Internal Inconsistency. A reductio is a particularly strong kind of argument when the philosopher shows that the conclusion C is absurd in the terms of the theory that she wants to reject. She is not saying that the theory cannot be accepted because its claims clashes with claims that she has stronger reasons to believe. Rather, she shows that the conclusion clashes with other claims supported by the theory itself. The theory is shown to be internally inconsistent. The writer need not believe herself in any one of the mutually inconsistent claims. The refutation depends simply in showing the existence of the inconsistency.
This is a very strong form of refutation. This is because the writer does not need to commit herself to any potentially controversial claim in order to reject a theory. She simply shows that the theory does not stand in its own terms. In order to show that the theory cannot work, there is no need to appeal to any claim outside of those accepted by the theory itself. Of course, the criticism of internal inconsistency is merely negative. It tells us what we should not believe, not what we should believe. But it allows to make some progress toward a positive answer to the philosophical issue at stake. This is because it eliminates one of the potential candidates for the final answer.
Internal inconsistency is the most serious trouble for a theory. In reading a draft you should always be alert to the possibility of this internal failure. If there is any evidence of inconsistency, it is your priority to point it out in your comments.
Any paper that contains more than just a simple argument faces the potential threat of internal inconsistency. However, consistency is just a minimal requirement for the acceptability of a paper. What we are looking for in a philosophical paper is not just a set of consistent claims, but claims and arguments that are substantial, interesting, challenging and original. Unfortunately (or fortunately) this is not something that can be determined as simply as the internal inconsistency of a theory. However, it is beyond doubt that a paper fails to be interesting and challenging if, although consistent, it does not address the most obvious objections and counterexamples to its main conclusion.
Answer the following two final questions. I suggest that the total combined length of your answers should be around 300 words. These questions ask for an overall assessment of the paper. Convey the overall impression of the draft and concentrate your suggestions for improvement on the most important issues.
Created by Luca
Ferrero
http://www.uwm.edu/~ferrero
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