The above picture is a September 2015 cover photo for The Atlantic magazine. The associated cover story “The Coddling of the American Mind” was written by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.
Greg Lukianoff is a constitutional lawyer and the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which defends free speech and academic freedom on campus, and has advocated for students and faculty involved in many of the incidents this article describes; Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist who studies the American culture wars.
Together they formulated this hypothesis,
“The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.
Towards the end of the article, they give the following Lines of Reasoning,
“Teaching students to avoid giving unintentional offense is a worthy goal, especially when the students come from many different cultural backgrounds. But students should also be taught how to live in a world full of potential offenses… Rather than trying to protect students from words and ideas that they will inevitably encounter, colleges should do all they can to equip students to thrive in a world full of words and ideas that they cannot control.”
These two Lines of Reasoning, which are really synonymous as one line of reasoning, come as a result of Deductive Reasoning.
Deductive Reasoning is a logical process where one arrives at a conclusion based upon multiple premises. Rather than trying to predict or form a theory based upon observations, as in Inductive Reasoning, the conclusions they arrive at are based upon premises that are founded in psychology; facts coming from cognitive behavioral therapy.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a self-coaching, if you will, of one’s mental processes. The following are some distorted thinking habits humans can get into, all of which are analyzed and applied in Lukianoff’s and Haidt’s article as negative results of higher educations efforts to diminish freedom of speech on campuses.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a practice taught by almost all mental health doctors to treat illnesses like depression, anxiety, PTSD, and so on; and as such are logical grounds for Lukianoff and Haidt to arrive at their conclusion and therefore makes their argument cogent.
Fallacies
Because of the authors say that “it seems” like the ulitmate aim is to turn campuses into ‘safe spaces’; and that the world is full of things they-- the students- cannot control, the authors could be guilty of Appeals To Emotions such as fear and spite; or guilty of Judgemental Language Fallacy; as well as Faulty Generalizations by inferring that the whole world is full of offensive words and ideas.
How they set up their article/argument, they could be guilty of Informal Fallacies like Circular Reasoning, or Correlation Proves Causation
No comments:
Post a Comment