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Responding to New Arguments
I wrote this page for people who are wondering what I mean by the phrase "critically respond."
Some people think that, once you've taken a position, the way to respond to new arguments against that position is to look around for ways to make those arguments look bad. This is bad thinking. In fact, it's dishonest. People who think this way impede progress and are in fact responsible for a great deal of unnecessary suffering. (Including, for instance, pretty much every war ever fought.)
It's a good thing you don't think like that!
You think the right way, which is to re-evaluate and possibly change your own position in the light of new information and arguments.
I want to emphasize that you should not ignore these instructions. In particular, you should not ignore the instruction to rethink your position. Many students seem to interpret "rethink your position" as "mindlessly take your old position and find excuses for ignoring facts that prove that old position false." This is not what I'm telling you to do, and if you do it, you will get zero for this assignment. Your most important cognitive faculty is your ability to change your mind. If you can't change your mind, you can't ever really say that you think about anything.
What To Do:
The first thing you do is mentally abandon your old position. That's right, you forget that you ever thought whatever it was you thought about whatever issue it is! (You don't forget any facts or arguments. Those you remember. All you do is open up your mind again.)
The next thing you do is begin your reasoning process all over again, only this time you include the new argument(s) in the mix with all the arguments and evidence you considered the first time. You in fact act as though you're starting over again, following the odyssey procedure and producing a paper from scratch. Only this time, you start from a much better informed position, and you include at least one new argument in your deliberations.
There's three different ways your deliberations could go.
You could reverse your previous position. That is, you could take on a position that is the opposite of what you had before. In this case, you would write a paper explaining why you support your new position, and why your old position turned out to be bogus.
You could find yourself unsure. That is, you could find yourself unable to decide whether the new argument overwhelms your old arguments. In this case, you would write a paper explaining each argument in turn, and why you cannot make up your mind right now.
You could confirm your old position. In this case, you would write a paper briefly explaining the support for your old position, what the new argument is, and why this new argument turned out to be bogus.
Once you've settled all this, you write a new paper explaining the argument(s) you are critically responding to, and dealing with each individual argument in its own indivividual section. Make sure you give a complete analysis of each individual argument, explaining how it is supposed to work, giving whatever possible objections you can think of to its premises or to its candidate principle. After you have done a cleal, complete and at the end of the paper, saying what your new position is, supporting that new position with arguments, and explaining why the arguments against it are no good. Make sure that the argument you're responding to is explained clearly and completely. Make it look as strong as it could possibly be, even if you're going to say it's nonsense.
Now, if it happens that your "logical" response to the new arguments is not in fact based on a thoughtful reexamination of the logic of the issue, you will have failed the assignment. If it happens that your "logical" responses are not logical at all, but are in fact cavailier dismissals of those arguments, or logical fallacies, or other excuses for not thinking, you will get zero for the assignment.
If your new paper assignment requires you to respond to some specific argument or set of arguments, it's very important that your next stage NOT start out with a statement of your overall position. If you find yourself starting your new paper by saying where you stand on the overall issue, that is a very, very, very, very, very bad sign, as it suggests that you didn't open up your mind, and instead saw the relevant arguments as merely obstacles to be suppressed or swept away. People who think like this always write very bad papers, and you have been explicitly and repeatedly told not to write this way.
The way to srart your new paper is to write a paragraph is to explain which argument(s) you were told to analyze, and mention that you will report the results of your analyses at the end of the paper.
One egregious, and unfortunately common way of failing this assignment is to write a paragraph or two that states the arguments you are supposed to respond to, and then follow this with another paragraph or two that states that these arguments are bogus for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the premises or candidate principles of the arguments in questions. For instance, if you follow a statement of the opposing arguments with nothing more than a rehash of your original reasons for your original position, you will not have refuted those opposing arguments, you will not have critically responded to those arguments, and you will have not done the assignment.
Remember, the name of the game is rethinking old positions. You're not supposed to defend any particular position, just to work out which position happens to be best supported by the information you happen to have right now.
Copyright © 2005 by Martin C. Young