The Argumentative TOK Student

I've literally taught hundreds of students and maintained civil, even friendly, relationships with each of them. But once in a while you get these argumentative types, who are argumentative in the sense that they like picking intellectual fights while armed with the mental equivalent of an overcooked and rather slimy spinach leaf. This is the sense in which I shall use the word 'argumentative' for the purpose of this post.

I love the cut-and-thrust of discussion with students who are prepared to work from first principles most, followed by that of discussion with students who have done their readings and at least can work their way through someone else's thinking. But the worst kinds are those who are arguing on the spur of the moment without basing the argument either on principle or on reported fact.

My advice to all students is to develop the habit of curious and critical reading. Whether you get your brain food from the Internet or in print (or like some people, print stuff off the Internet), at least do yourselves the favour of reading stuff like John Brockman's the Edge, Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, and Michael Shermer's Skeptic magazine.

It's not my intention to champion the scientific paradigm over all other means of consolidating knowledge, but this is the most easily misused of all paradigms, because it treads a very narrow path and hence can be easily led astray. Therefore it must be used with the most care in order to avoid error. It is interesting to see what kinds of problems the avoidance of error (and the obsession with error) can produce. You learn to get rid of complexity the same way a very short-sighted person attempts to appreciate a tapestry — by making critical commentary on the stitchwork.

This contrasts with the humanities, where the detection of error is often a process involving much more ambiguity and a penumbral effect that casts non-verifiable doubt over many things. You can attempt all you want to avoid error or reduce error, but you know for sure that there will be errors. Information is seldom anywhere near complete, and the problems are seldom easily reducible. In the quantitative pseudohumanities (like econometrics, to name one egregious example), you work with numerical entities that quickly degenerate into farcical representations of reality.

The humanities are 'openers', whereas the sciences are 'closers', to borrow nomenclature from Roger Zelazny. The humanities open up cans of worms which seem to produce more worms; the sciences attempt to can everything (the 'everything can' idea, perhaps). The problem with the argumentative student is that he is going for a change of state — to open the closed and close the open — without thinking about whether this is an appropriate approach or not.

It's a bit like attempting to have a scientific discussion with some debaters. The debater's instinct is to probe with claims, counterclaims, and points of information. But most of them forget that negation is an asymmetric operation; to deny something requires a different kind of proof, as opposed to stating that something is true. And there is also the fact that the issues debated may have gone on for decades without resolution, simply because none of the positions have adequate support except for the fact that they might fit all the known data.

My own instincts tell me that I'd rather debate literature with a scientist than science with a literatus (or literato, if you prefer the Italian). Fortunately, I am blessed to have friends and students who are at home in both cultures. Even better, they are happy not to confine debates and discussions with the artifice of interdisciplinary boundaries.