Goodbye to Yesterday...

Your grades are now posted. Enjoy the rest of your summer, Mt. Laurel class!
So long, Willingboro!

I'll leave you with a little rant on a favorite topic of mine: intellectual honesty. A simple goal of this class was to get us all to recognize what counts as good evidence and what counts as bad evidence for a claim. I think we got pretty good at that. But it's not clear that we wound up caring about the difference once we figured it out.

Getting us to care was the real goal of this class. We should care about good evidence. We should care about it because it's what gets us closer to being correct. When we judge an argument to be overall good, THE POWER OF LOGIC COMPELS US to believe the conclusion. If we like an arg, but still stubbornly disagree with its conclusion, we are just being irrational.

This means we should be open-minded. We should be willing to let new evidence change our current beliefs. We should be open to the possibility that we might be wrong. This is how Todd Glass puts it:


Here are the first two paragraphs of a great article I read in the Fall on this:

Last week, I jokingly asked a health club acquaintance whether he would change his mind about his choice for president if presented with sufficient facts that contradicted his present beliefs. He responded with utter confidence. "Absolutely not," he said. "No new facts will change my mind because I know that these facts are correct."

I was floored. In his brief rebuttal, he blindly demonstrated overconfidence in his own ideas and the inability to consider how new facts might alter a presently cherished opinion. Worse, he seemed unaware of how irrational his response might appear to others. It's clear, I thought, that carefully constructed arguments and presentation of irrefutable evidence will not change this man's mind.

Ironically, having extreme confidence in oneself is often a sign of ignorance. In many cases, such stubborn certainty is unwarranted.