Philosophy Position Papers

A significant proportion of introductory philosophy students have difficulty in understanding what makes a good philosophy paper. I like to require position papers--i.e., a paper providing the student’s reasoning or insights concerning a fairly precise assigned problem. Nevertheless, often position papers do not fare well in my introductory classes.

There are a number of excellent writing guides on the Web, and while I think these guides have some recommendations in common, for the most part the guides share a family relation of suggestions, depending upon the emphases of the course and instructor. Even so, I've found these guides only useful for upper-division classes.

In introductory courses, most students have difficulty understanding the nature of a philosophical problem, and, of those who do get it, many are baffled not only as to how to go about seeking possible solutions but also as to what to comment upon the selected topic. This is not surprising since the discipline of philosophy, as I see it, is concerned with problems which have no clear or established method of solution. To the beginning student, the confusion as to how to proceed is precisely what makes the project frustrating.

It seems to me one way some of the awkwardness of learning to do philosophy could be avoided if the instructor presented the beginning student with specific logically opposed quotations from different philosophers with respect to problems studied in the course.

In this manner, the focus of the assignment would be student’s attempt to clarify and to argue for a best solution to the opposing views where the student does not just defend one of the two views presented. The presented task is not intended just to resolve opposing viewpoints or opposing doctrines by choosing one over the other. For example, if a topic were based on reading James and Russell on truth, the paper should not be an attempt to defend one theory over the other.

The burden is on the instructor to construct a list of opposed views of a philosophical positions represented in short quotations or excerpts. For example, consider a passage where Lucretius argues that the soul is biological and a contrasting passage where Plotinus presupposing the soul is extra-natural.

(1) First, Lucretius writes, "The nature of the mind and soul is bodily … [and] mortal. If the soul were immortal and made its way into our body at birth, why would we be unable to remember bygone times and retain no traces of previous actions? If the poser of the mind has been so completely changed that all remembrance of past things is lost, I regard that as not differing greatly from death; therefore you must admit that the soul which as before has perished and that which is now has been formed." (Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Bk. III.)

(2) Plotinus, second, writes, "Many times it has happened. Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvelous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the highest order; acquiring identity with the divine, stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatever in the Intellectual is less than the Supreme: yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the Soul ever enter into my body, the Soul which even within the body is the highest thing it as shown itself to be." (Plotinus, Enneads, IV, 8. 1.)

I think the interesting aspect with respect to posing fairly precise problems of this kind is the student has a wide range of responses and positions which might be taken.

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I'm reminded in this regard of Alexander Calandra's well-known “Barometer Story” where a student constructs multiple surprising solutions to the problem of calculating the height of a building with the aid of a barometer.

The burden for the instructor would be demanding in two respects: (1) the cataloging of specific passages from readings for such problem topics requires a good background in primary source readings, and (2) the evaluation of the paper on the basis of reasoning and insight (rather than the purported adequacy of solution along traditional lines) requires a open and charitable mind. Even so, I suspect position papers of this kind would offer much more opportunity for student excitement and interest.

Argument Analysis: Principle of Charity and Formal Logic

Regrettably, on occasion individuals conversant with the methods of formal logic and philosophy venture into new subject areas immediately applying their analytical skills before seeking understanding of the concepts, precepts, or beliefs being adduced. Instead, the tacit and provisional application of the principle of charity should be implicit in every new intellectual and cultural endeavor.

As an example, I'd like to recount the analysis of a passage from a computer science programming book brought to me by a former student of beginning logic. The passage is ...

Your computer, on the other hand, can understand only machine language, a compact series of computer-readable instructions that make no sense to people. They make sense to some advanced computer gurus, but my general assertion stands that they don't make sense to people. (Greg Perry, Beginning Programming (Indianapolis, Indiana: Sams, 2002), 14.)

The analysis and reconstruction skillfully provided by the student of this third-order enthymematic argument was as follows:

No (people) are (individuals who understand machine language).
Some (advanced computer gurus) are (individual who understand machine language).
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Some (advanced computer gurus) are not (people).]

and the form of the argument, EIO-2, of course, tests valid:

No P is M.
Some S is M.
--------------
Some S is not P.

Since the conclusion is obviously false, the implication is by reductio ad absurdum, that at least one of the premises is false, namely the general assertion that computer-readable instructions make no sense to people.

The heart of the analysis depends on the logical or precising interpretation of the notion of "generalization" as something all inclusive and applying to each and every individual distributively.

Certainly a charitable interpretation of the passage would indicate the author Greg Perry intended his "general assertions" to mean something like "Universally; with respect to all or nearly all ... As in A fact now g[enerally] received 1820." (William Little, et al. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles 3rd. ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), 783.)

Of course, the student assumes that passage implies the author is asserting that computer-readable instructions make no sense to each and every individual person, whereas the common-sense interpretation of the passage implies the author is asserting that computer-readable instructions make no sense to most people.

It's certainly arguable that the student's logical analysis results from not so much the lack of tolerance or charity as it is a case of the fallacy of straw man, since the sense of the word "generally" to mean "almost all" is perhaps more common in everyday discourse than is the meaning "including each and every one without exception."

Argument Analysis: From Casual Logic to Formal Analysis

An article from Jan Korger and Florian Leber's Spacezone published on the Website Linux Today compares Ubuntu Linux with Microsoft (c) Windows in the following argument:

Ubuntu is not Linux. Linux is not Windows. Then, Ubuntu is ...

Penguin Pete told us Ubuntu is not Linux in an infamous post he later deleted. An unrelated article tells you Linux is not Windows. Anyone bad enough at math will conclude a relationship between Ubuntu and Windows and secretly that’s the real subject of both articles...

You can interpret this as Ubuntu is (like / similar to) Windows or Ubuntu is not Windows depending on your point of view if you're into such questions. However, this doesn't tell us whether Ubuntu is actually any good! (www.spacezone.de)

What I find interesting about this article is that the logic used, although not mistaken in an informal sense, illustrates several common confusions of many persons beginning their study of formal logic:

(1) expression in mathematics and logic are interchangeable,
(2) the "is" of identity and the "is" of predication are the same kind of thing, and
(3) reasoning using the principles of logic are a matter of opinion.

In observing these student misconceptions, I am reminded here of Ernst Haeckel's generalization of the similarity of embryonic development of human beings to the evolutionary development of species: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Ofttimes, in mastering a discipline such as logic, there seems to be a similarity of the stages of learning the discipline to the historical development of the subject.

For example with regard to (1) the relation of mathematics to logic, historically Pythagoras, in his geometrical demonstrations, used logical reasoning, but it was Aristotle who later formalized and distinguished logical reasoning in the Organon from geometrical arguments. (Of course, there is the similarity that syllogistic logic and geometrical reasoning are both deductive forms, but that is insufficient to imply the logistic thesis.)

With respect to item (2), in the Sophist, Plato addressed Parminides' confusion of the "is" of predication:

Well, when we speak of a man we give him many additional names--we attribute to him colors and shapes and sizes and defects and good qualities, and in all these and countless other statements we say he is not merely a 'man' but also 'good' and any number of other things. And so with everything else. We take any given thing as one and yet speak of it as many and by many names.

(Plato, Sophist, trans. F.M. Cornford in Plato: Collected Dialogues, ed.,Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (1969 rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 251 a-b.

And with Aristotle, there was little confusion left:

...(1) an attribute is predicated of some subject, so that the subject to which 'being' is attributed will not be, as it is something different from 'being.' Something, therefore, which is not will be. Hence 'substance' will not be a predicate of anything else. For the subject cannot be a being, unless 'being' means several things, in such a way that each is something. But ex hypothesi 'being' means only one thing,

(Aristotle, Physica in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (1970 rpt. New York: Random House, 1941), I,3 (186a35-186b1).

The third misunderstanding, that logic is "the last refuge of a scoundrel" is reflected in the conclusion (of the quoted passage above):

You can interpret this as Ubuntu is (like / similar to) Windows or Ubuntu is not Window depending on your point of view if you're into such questions.

The implication from these authors is that you can draw whatever conclusion you wish from the premises provided in accordance with your own opinions. In truth, however, no conclusion validity follows from a syllogistic argument with two negative premises.

Translating Korger and Leber's argument into standard form yields ...

No [M Linux OSs] are [P OSs similar to Windows].
No [S versions of Ubuntu] are [M Linux OSs].
------------------------------------------
All [S versions of Ubnutu] are [P OSs similar to Windows].
OR
No [S versions of Ubuntu] are [P OSs similar to Windows].

The reason why no conclusion validly follows from two negative premises is negative statements exclude partly or wholly the subject class from the predicate class. So what is being asserted in in the premises relating S to P through M is being asserted regardless of the kind of statements being used.

By referring to the mnemonic of the mechanism of the syllogism sketched here, we can surmise that the basis of the syllogism is captured by noting that two things related to the same thing should be somehow related to each other, if at least one of them is completely related in some manner.


However, when both premises are negative, our mnemonic shows the classes are not related in some way to each other, and this information is of no use to see how the terms in the conclusion are related. From the observation that two things are not related to a third thing, it's impossible to tell whether or not they would be related to each other. This state of affairs can be illustrated in the diagram to the right.

So it's simply not true that we may conclude whatever we wish; in fact, whenever both premises of a syllogism show an exclusive relationship between the subject and predicate classes, no conclusion can be correctly drawn.