Excellent examples. Sad example.

Let's start with the good news, which is your excellent discussion this morning that followed from the excerpt from Chieko's introduction to her essay on abortion, which you will be able to read in a day or two.

The excerpt is:

According to “Rep. Todd Akin: The Statement and the Reaction”, U.S. Rep. Todd Akin tells in an interview that “it seems to be, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, it’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.” What do you think about his statement? Why can such a man with wrong knowledge involve himself in abortion argument?

And the main questions were:

1. Is Rep. Akin entitled to his opinion? 
2. Is his opinion correct? 
3. Is his opinion reasonable? 
4. Is his opinion just and moral sound? 
5. Or is it completely stupid, being worthy only of contempt and ridicule? 
6. What does it mean to say that someone is “entitled to their opinion”?
   • What doesn’t it mean?
   • Why are these questions important to us? 

The question that took us the longest to answer satisfactorily was 3. And as Air helped us to see, the problem causing disagreement were the very different ideas people had concerning the meaning of the word reasonable. We had fairly easily agreed (only took about 5 minutes) that reasonable meant "having good reasons", but the problem then was to give some substance that very vague adjective "good".

A couple of examples quickly helped us to see that Air's group's first suggestion, that good reasons must be logical, was right. 

But although necessary, is being logical also a sufficient condition for a reason to be good, to be reasonable?   It's the solution to this problem that I want to focus on, since it provides another excellent example of the value of well-chosen examples to clarify and support an idea which is complex and abstract, as the idea of reasonableness is. 

Anne gave us a useful start when she suggested the idea of asking her mother for some money, and the need to give reasons for such a request. With a little creative thinking, and our purpose in mind, we came up with four different examples of reasons that Anne might give for a request for money. These were, in order, if I remember correctly, and slightly revised:  

1. I'm going register for the next term at AUA, which will improve my English. 
2. I want to buy an iPad, which will help me to study more effectively. 
3. I dreamt the winning numbers for the Australian lottery, so need to fly to Sydney to buy a ticket. 
4. The world will end on December 21, in ten days time, as we know from the ancient Mayan prediction that is now well-known on the Internet, and I need the money to buy a ticket on a spaceship from a man I met in a pub last night. 

When we then looked at these in order, we able to assign percentages for a rough measure of how reasonable each each is. There were:

1. = 90%  or more 
2. = 50%  or perhaps a bit more (we're trusting Anne on this)
3. = 0% or so. Perhaps a little more than zero. 
4. = less than 0% = -90% or so. 

With this array of data agreed on, we could look to see what was going on in this example. What were we doing when we assigned these percentages as a measure of how reasonable an idea was? 

Again, another example, this time what vets such as Mo do when they decide to use or not use a new drug (this example took a bit of revising to get it exactly right) helped to clarify the ideas that were floating around, and enabled us to conclude that the important extra thing in addition to being logical is that reasonable also means "having relevant evidence". The evidence can be experience (Anne's mum's experience tells her that when asked for some money to register at AUA, it's not a lie and leads to something useful), reliable reports from sources, and so on. 

This finally led us to a definition of reasonable as meaning "being logical and having (enough) relevant evidence". This definition makes sense of our responses to all of the examples, and sounds right. And with this definition in place, we can answer question 3. about Rep. Akin's opinion that  "a legitimate rape" does not normally lead to a pregnancy: it is not at all reasonable. 

And then we were ready to look at questions 1. and 6., for which we decided, again after some argument about the meaning of  entitled to an opinion,  that yes, he is certainly entitled to his opinion, but that without good reasons (reasonable reasons) to support it, he cannot expect anyone to take it seriously, or refrain from laughing at it. He certainly cannot expect anyone to accept it unless he provides support to show that it is reasonable. And since the facts are against him, he will fail. 

This matters for students in an academic English course, especially writing course, because in an academic setting, you are only entitled to have taken seriously an opinion for which you can give reasonable support. 

And as our example about a geocentric universe showed, being wrong does not mean that a belief is unreasonable. Aristotle believed the Earth to be at the centre of the universe, which was perfectly reasonable around 330 BC, and does not reduce our great admiration of and respect for Aristotle. The same belief, which some still hold in 2012, is perfectly idiotic and not remotely reasonable. Sadly, it appears that about 18% of Americans do believe the idiotic (Crabtree, 1999). And the reason for this unreasonable belief is typically religious, for example, in the case of Roman Catholic apologist Robert Sungenis, the supporting "evidence" is the Bible, verses such as "Joshua 10:12-14: 'And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, while the nation took vengeance on its foe' " (Moran, 2011, ¶ 9). Since this supporting evidence has a reasonableness rating of about  99% below zero (-99%), it cannot help much to support anything. 

Even more sad is the fact that 46% of Americans believe, on religious, usually Biblical, grounds "in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years" (Newport, 2012, ¶ 1). In the case of Republican voters, it's a whopping 58% who are so seriously unreasonable. I'm not sure that sad is the right word. Perhaps alarming is the more appropriate adjective. All of these people are entitled to their weird and wholly unreasonable opinions, but they are not entitled to have anyone else take them seriously or not laugh at such absurdly unreasonable opinions. Thankfully, American scientists do laugh at such nonsense, and American judges refuse to take it seriously when believers try to get their ideas taught in schools as science rather than fantasy. 

__________

Reference

Crabtree, S. (1999, July 6). New Poll Gauges Americans' General Knowledge Levels: Four-fifths know earth revolves around sun. Gallup.  Retrieved December 11, 2012 from http://www.gallup.com/poll/3742/new-poll-gauges-americans-general-knowledge-levels.aspx

Moran, A. (2011, August 29) Conservative Catholics say Galileo was wrong, geocentric is right. Digital Journal. Retrieved December 11, 2012 from http://digitaljournal.com/article/310901

Newport, F. (2012, June 1). In U.S., 46% Hold Creationist View of Human Origins. Gallup Politics. Retrieved December 11, 2012 from http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/Hold-Creationist-View-Human-Origins.aspx