Why Should Educators Care about Argumentation? HARVEY SIEGEL

University ofMiami

Key words: argumentation, education, educational aims, educational ideals, rationality, critical thinking, character, respect, feminism, postmodemism, indefiniteness of language, Derrida, particularity, male bias. Abstract: Educators who are reflective about their educational endeavours ask themselves questions like: What is the aim of education? What moral, methodological, or other constraints govern our educational activities and efforts? One natural place to look for answers is in the philosophy of education, which (among other things) tries to provide systematic answers to these questions. One general answer offered by the philosophy of education is that the aim of education consists in fostering the development of students' rationality. On this view, education has as its fundamental task both the development of students' reasoning ability, and also the fostering of a complex of attitudes, habits of mind, dispositions and character traits, such that students are not only able to reason well; they also care about reasons, and organize their beliefs, judgments and actions in accordance with the deliverances of the reasoned evaluation of reasons. Argumentation theory is also concerned with the analysis of the power and convicting force of reasons. When do reasons for a claim warrant acceptance of that claim? By what criteria are reasons evaluated? How are these criteria themselves justified? Such questions as these are the meat and potatoes of argumentation theory, which, in pursuing these questions, promises to shed light on the character of rationality as the aim of education. Rationality, which links education and argumentation theory, provides educators with a reason to care about argumentation-if rationality can be cogently defended as an educational ideal. In this paper I will try to provide such a defense, and in doing so explain why educators should care about argumentation. The defense will be a moral one: I will argue that we are morally obliged to endeavour to foster the rationality of students, because that is what is required to meet our obligations to treat students with respect as persons. I will also consider some general criticisms of the Enlightenment ideal of rationality, offered by Feminist, Multiculturalist, and Postmodemist scholars. If these criticisms are cogent, then both argumentation theory and the view that the aim of education is the fostering of rationality are threatened. I will argue that the criticisms, while important and instructive, are not so destructive of the ideal of rationality as some contemporary scholars suppose.

Educators are busy people. They must worry about classroom management and discipline, about students' self-esteem, about building- and system-politics, about parents and their attitudes and involvement (or lack thereof), about misguided administrators and teachers, about funding, and about a million other things as well. Why on earth should they care about argumentation? In what follows I will argue that they should so care, and I'll try to explain why they should.

1. What should educators care about? As is typical in philosophy, so it is in this case: in order satisfactorily to answer a given question, it is necessary to tum one's attention to a prior question. In order to know whether educators should care about argumentation in particular, we Informal Logic Vol. 17, No.2 (Spring 1995): 159- I76

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must first figure out what they should care about in general. Then we'll know whether argumentation is included in that broader set of legitimate educational concerns. So: What should educators care about? Obviously, they should care about many things. Educators are people, after all; they should care at least about all the things people generally ought to care about: hunger, world peace, whether the newly invented proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is successful, whether there will be a World Series this season-and if so, whether the Blue Jays will win it-and so on. But these cares, legitimate and important as they are, are pretty clearly not the sorts of things with which our question is concerned. So we need to sharpen our question a bit. We need to ask: What should educators, qua educators, care about? The first answer here is obvious: educators, qua educators, should care about education. However intrinsically important the (Major League Baseball) umpires' strike and owners' lock-out might have been, given the looming resultant prospect that the Blue Jays would have had to play their home games this season not only not in their home stadium, but in an alien, hostile, foreign land, it is clear that these are not the concerns of educators qua educators, since they have nothing directly to do with education. So educators qua educators ought to be concerned with education. So far, so good. But this doesn't tell us very much, since education is a many-layered, many-faceted activity. Should they be concerned with student crime? Of course. With the architectural layout of the proposed high school classroom addition? Obviously. The list could be extended indefinitely. What unites all these legitimate educational concerns is their relation to the aim of the activity: they are legitimate educational concerns because they impact upon our ability to achieve our educational ends. Consequently, a central and abiding concern of educators qua educators involves the nature of those ends. What are we trying to accomplish by engaging in our educational activities? What ends are we trying to achieve, and how should we try to achieve them? The legitimate concerns of educators qua educators depend upon the ends, aims and ideals of education. Therefore, a fundamental concern of educators qua educators involves the nature of those aims and ideals. What are they? And why are these, and not some other things, our ultimate educational aims-that is, how are our educational aims and ideals themselves justified? These questions are among the most basic questions addressed by the philosophy of education. So, as a next step, we can say that educators qua educators ought be concerned with philosophical questions concerning education, especially those concerning the nature and justification of basic educational aims and ideals. So what are our fundamental educational aims and ideals? While philosophers of education have, throughout the history of the subject, addressed this question, they have not done so in a single voice. Many putative ideals have been advanced: creativity, good citizenship, various conceptions of good

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character, self-confidence, self-esteem, positive self-image, obedience to (usually select) others, obedience to the moral law, caring for and about others, reverence for and devotion to God, various kinds of knowledge, aesthetic sensitivity, and many others. Fortunately for us all, this is not the time to review and assess the strengths and weaknesses of these assorted proposed educational ideals. To do so would require that we stray far from our subject here: that is, argumentation. Instead, I want to focus on one particular educational ideal, which, I will argue, is both a fundamental educational ideal and is closely related to argumentationthat of rationality. The idea that education should be fundamentally concerned with the fostering of rationality is one with a long and distinguished pedigree in the history of Western philosophy of education. In various tenns and with various emphases and twists, it has been advocated by the vast majority of philosophers of education in the Western intellectual tradition, including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and others in the Ancient period; Anselm, Aquinas, Scotus, and other important Medieval philosophers; Locke, Hume, Kant, Rousseau, Mill, and others in the Modern and Enlightenment periods; and, in this century, by, among many others, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, R. S. Peters, and Israel Scheffler. 1 While I certainly don't place myself in the company of those towering philosophical figures, I have also defended the claim that the fostering of students' rationality is a fundamental educational aim, and I have tried in various places to articulate and justify the ideaU I shall next say a bit more about this ideal and its justification, in order to make clear its fundamental connection to argumentation. To say that rationality is a fundamental aim or ideal of education is to say that educational activities ought to be conceived, designed, and carried out in such a way that they will conduce, ceteris paribus, to the maximal development of students' rationality. In what does this rationality consist? Briefly, in two independent features: in skills and abilities of reason assessment; and in a complex of attitudes, dispositions, habits of mind, and character traits that can collectively be labelled the critical spirit. The first of these involves the ability of students to evaluate the epistemic force of reasons which can be offered in support of candidate beliefs, claims, and judgments-to be able to distinguish between reasons which genuinely do and genuinely do not support those candidates, and, in the cases in which they do, to detennine the strength of that support. A person is rational only insofar as she can, among other things, systematically and appropriately evaluate such reasons. When we say that rationality is a fundamental educational ideal, we are claiming that education ought to strive to foster in students the skills and abilities which will enable them competently to assess reasons. The second feature-the critical spirit-involves the character of the student. The student who has it not only is able to assess reasons well; she is disposed to do so, and to be moved to confonn her beliefs, judgments and actions to the results of such assessments. She has, as Professor Binkley so admirably

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put it, a "love of reason" (Binkley 1980, p. 83), and her entire life is shaped by this view of reason and its value. When we say that rationality is a fundamental educational ideal, we are claiming that education oUght to strive to foster in students the complex of attitudes, dispositions, habits of mind and character traits constitutive of the critical spirit. 3 The obvious next question to ask is: why should we regard rationality, so understood, as a fundamental educational ideal? Why are we justified in regarding it as such an ideal? While there are a variety of considerations which I think argue in favor of so regarding it, the fundamental one is moral: we are morally obliged to treat students in such a way as to foster the development of their rationality, because only in treating them in that way do we honor the Kantian injunction to treat them with respect as persons. 4 (This invocation of Kant's "Enlightenment" view of the importance of the individual and her autonomy has come under serious criticism of late, and we will consider it further below.) The final preliminary, before we resume our consideration of argumentation, is to draw your attention to the normative character of the conception of rationality just sketched. Rationality, conceived as an educational ideal, is in at least two respects normative. First, obviously, it places a strong positive value on rationality; the defender of the ideal ranks it more highly than at least a lot of alternative educational ideals. But more relevant for the present discussion, it is normative in its approach to what we might call the substance of education, and indeed of thinking more generally: the defender of the ideal puts forward the claim that it is important for students to reason well, and takes as fundamental the educational task of helping students to maximize (ceteris paribus) their ability to do so. Students who reason poorly would not measure up well against the ideal. It is this aspect of the ideal's normativity that allows us to forge a link between it and argumentation. Arid so we are, at last, ready to consider the connection between education and argumentation afforded by the ideal of rationality.

2. Education and Argumention Argumentation-whatever else it may be-is aimed at the rational resolution of questions, issues and disputes. When we engage in argumentation, we do not seek simply to resolve disagreements or outstanding questions in any old way-if we did, then instances of brainwashing, getting one's interlocutor to ingest appropriate chemicals, and issuing threats of force would count as episodes of argumentation, since these are ways of resolving questions and disputes. These ways of forging resolutions are rightly rejected as instances of argumentation precisely because the resolutions so forged are not rational ones: that is, such procedures for forging resolutions afford no confidence that the resolutions so reached are in any way rationally superior or preferable to other possible resolutions. Argumentation, that is, is concerned with/dependent upon the goodness, the normative status or epistemic forcefulness, of candidate reasons for belief, judgment, and action.s

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When argumentation is conceived in this way, then the theory of argumentation is relatedly conceived as exploring such questions as: under what conditions are episodes of argumentation successful? That is, under what conditions are achieved resolutions of disputes rational? By what criteria is such rationality determined? So understood, argumentation and its theory are fundamentally concerned with rationality, and with the normative evaluation of argument. As such, argumentation and argumentation theory (and informal logic) are of direct interest to educators. For as we have seen, educators-at least, those who embrace the ideal of rationality-