When I was talking with Praew after class this morning I had to agree with her, as I have already agreed with others, that the argumentative essays you have been working on are not easy. What exactly, as Praew is wondering, is a human being?
And I thought that one of Praew's comments helped to explain one reason for the difficulty: experts do not agree and have contradictory definitions. This can help as well as confuse. I think it helps because you might be able to get a nice clear definition from an expert that you are sure is completely wrong. Unfortunately, you are more likely to have to make up your own preferred definition of a controversial term.
In my essay on abortion, I got a nice, clear definition of human being to disagree with from Plato (you've already seen why I think Socrates and Plato are wrong). In a later body paragraph, I've got equally clear definitions from legislation (Thai and other laws), and modern medical experts, all of whose definitions seem to me seriously wrong. I could not find any neatly stated definition of the term human being that I'm really happy with, so I've made up my own, which I then have to support.
Monday 7 February 2011
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Joh is writing about Bush's election, which I've already written about. Joh actually asked a question about using the Thai government as an example in his essay about Bush's election. (Sounds like a good idea to me.) During our short after class chat, one thing that came up that I thought worth noting is that the question does not ask you whether something is good or bad.
ReplyDeleteI did not like Bush or his government, but I do think that his election was democratic. I do generally like Abhisit, but I do not think his government is democratic. Liking or disliking isn't what the question asks us to state, whether something is good or bad, should be done or not, is not what the questions are about.
ANd after talking with Joh, I think I might want to revise my essay on Bush a bit, especially my preferred definition of the word democratic.
I haven't written the essay on Abhisit's government yet, so it doesn't need to be revised, just written.
Peter,
ReplyDeleteWhy do you think Abhisit's government isn't democratic? Can you explain to us? (Just a short one. I just want to know your idea.)
Niche,
ReplyDeleteI disagree with people who say that Abhisit's government is undemocratic because it's illegal. It is certainly legal, but being legal isn't enough to make something democratic. And conversely, being illegal might not necessarily make it undemocratic (I think - I've been thinking a bit more about this since my discussion with Joh this morning and realised that this might be an important issue to cover in an essay). Burma's government, for example, is also legal, as is China'a, but I don't think most people would say that those governments are democratic. And as Burmese and Ivory Coast examples also suggest, it is probably possible for a group or political party to be a democratic election winner who should govern, but also to be illegal.
That hints at what I think is one wrong definition of democratic, and Abhisit's government, good as it might be, fails to meet the definition of what I think the word democracy does mean.
If you present strong arguments for a definition of democracy that would make Abhisit's government democratic, as well as arguably the best available, I will change my mind.
If you don't persuade me to change my mind, you can still get an A grade for your essay - it's the clarity and strength of your ideas and how well you state them that matter, not whether you happen to agree with me or not.
I want to clarify a point I emphasised in my review of Gift's ideas about the possibility of a machine being a person.
ReplyDeleteAlthough we might want our answer to go a certain way, that answer has to follow from the definition. And the definition needs to be logically prior to and independent of the answer. Your answer to the question cannot be a reason or support for preferring one definition over another. Your essay has to show that the definition comes first, and that the answer follows from that definition. This is why, in our discussion a couple of weeks ago, we saw that it was a very good idea to avoid mentioning the topic of the essay in the definition paragraphs.
For example, if we want to decide whether textbooks are generally examples of academic writing or not, we need to define academic writing without assuming in advance that textbooks are or are not examples of academic writing. If we first decide that textbooks are academic writing, and then try to make up a definition to give that answer, it is likely to be a difficult definition to support, and if the definition of academic writing actually says that it "means textbooks", then that definition will be useless because it is not independent of the question we are trying to settle. Legal definitions do this all the time, which is fine for legal purposes, but those definitions are usually not good definitions, being made up specifically to include whatever the law makers want them to - they decide the answers first, and then make up the definition. A legal definition of academic writing might be "any written material that is or could be used in a school or university, including textbooks". For legal purposes relating to copyright law or whatever, this might be fine, but it's a useless definition for trying to answer the question of whether textbooks really are examples of academic writing because it doesn't actually tell us what academic writing means - it merely assumes and repeats the preferred answer in the definition.
And a general question that arises from my review comments on Praew's ideas about what a human being is: How good can a definition of something (a human being, or anything else) be if that definition simply says that X begins at some particular time?
ReplyDeleteFor example, if we define a chicken as the animal that begins at the moment the hen's egg is fertilized, is that a satisfactory definition? An egg is certainly the beginning, the start, of a chicken. But is an egg already a chicken from the moment it is fertilized and begins the process of development that will definitely lead to a chicken later?
Another example: a pile of iron ore, coal, and some plastic, along with a set of detailed construction plans like human DNA, is the beginning of a car, but would be happy defining those piles of starting materials as a car? A few piles of starting material do not seem like a car to me. And I don't think an egg is a chicken.
This seems to me an obvious problem with any definition of something that says it exists at the moment a process begins - such definitions just seem wrong.
I also think that there is a more serious problem with these sorts of definitions. What do you think? Would you be happy with a definition of something, anything, that specifies that it exists at some point, such as the beginning of a process, or the middle or a process or 73% of the way along a process?
(This comment is a critical thinking challenge for you to respond to.)