A Ham Sandwich is Better than Nothing: Talking Logic with Chih-hao, the Philosopher (#10)
This week I received back peer reviewer comments on an essay I submitted last August. I could rant at length about the vulnerabilities to the academic publishing machine, especially as we enter a period of constriction in Higher Ed. The publishing machine is one of the challenges I’m exploring in the Teaching Climate Change study. For one, the time lag. For two, nobody reads them (this article suggests that only ten people might read my essay). For three, I just did a rough calculation of the time I’ve invested in the 34 page essay I submitted, including the research itself, which came out to 275 hours, which is about 8 hours per page, which is 34 working days.
This is one reason I enjoy academic blogging. Yes, I might be just another nutcase writing a blog on Medium, but folks within my network at least can follow and contribute to a timely conversation appropriate to this topic at this chaotic time. But what I really wanted to lead with here was one of the peer review comments that really got my goat.
“The subject of your research is deeply important and I’m glad to see the effort you put into this work….However, this paper still needs some work.” Okay, well nobody likes that, as I would know, being an English professor. But then, after making some semi-constructive suggestions the reviewer advises that I need to “unpack” several broad statements such as my assertion that:
“It seems a reasonable goal to expect college graduates to understand climate change.”
The reviewer claims empathy with my thought, but says, “It’s hard to justify that claim objectively and with evidence. If I’m a theoretical physicist or a Greek Literature scholar, do I need to understand climate change? Should colleges be responsible for this or should students be taught these concepts in lower grades and expected to already know them once they get to college?”
Let’s just remember, here, that we are talking about catastrophic planetary disruption that will influence every facet of the future of today’s 21.9 million college students. If it’s even remotely possibly true that we have just ten years (now more like eight) to accomplish a massive paradigm shift of practically every industry, in every country, then I really don’t think that we have time to keep unpacking our baggage…It seems that the train has left the station while we were busy nitpicking over the learning outcomes for general education.
My colleague, Chih-hao (a pseudonym) is a new tenure-track philosophy instructor at Community College of the Pacific (also a pseudonym). I knew his predecessor, who retired in 2016 after some 30 years of teaching Inductive and Deductive Logic, Intro to Philosophy, and Environmental Philosophy. Chih-hao is the younger, cooler next generation of faculty. His rollicking belly-laugh is my favorite thing about him. After college in his native Taiwan, he served two years in Taiwan’s military before coming to Hawai’i to earn an MA in Asian Studies and Philosophy and then a Ph.D in Philosophy. He decided to specialize in Logic because very few people are good at it, so he knew it would give him an edge in the job market. According to his graduate adviser, he is one of the best logic teachers ever.
I asked Chih-hao if he thought preparation for climate change should be part of a college education.
“Well, when I was in college, in the 1990s, there were plenty of predictions that the earth will become hotter and hotter and as the temperature rises the storms will be more and more powerful. Agriculture may fail, is basically the projection. The projections are not very good. It points to a certain direction, but there are plenty of people who say it is not conclusive, so we really don’t have to change. It is a nice example for making a decision under uncertainty.”
For this reason, Chih-hao embeds climate change into his Deductive Logic courses. He gave me this example of decision theory:
“Suppose tomorrow the change of rain is 70%. Should I take an umbrella with me or not? I think I will. Even though it’s not 100% doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be prepared. It is a prime example in decision theory and sometimes when things become certain it is just too late.”
In his Deductive Logic course he teaches about food, climate change, money, freedom, and our own human narratives and how they relate to the environment. He also teaches inductive logic, moral consideration, probability theory, and statistics.
“We learn the formal reasoning patterns like If A then B. If we have ‘not B’ then we have ‘not A’. It looks like mathematics; however, logic was born from a perspective in human communication. There is no necessity to have logic unless people have a need to communicate with each other in a sophisticated way, so I try to contextualize logic in human communication.”
I looked up some research on deductive logic and climate change. Yes, I found some peer reviewed academic publications on this subject, including a fine theoretical piece by Cook, Ellerton, and Kincaid (2018) entitled, “Deconstructing climate misinformation to identify reasoning errors.” Hey, wouldn’t it be great if every college student knew how to do that? (Oh wait, let me put that article in my baggage to unpack later.)
Cook, Ellerton, and Kincaid handily break down statements about climate change and show us how mind-tricks like cherry picking, conspiracy theory, false dichotomy, magnified minority, and misrepresentation work. It’s awesome stuff, this logic!
I especially enjoyed Cook, Ellerton, and Kinkaid’s example of equivocation:
P1: Nothing is better than eternal happiness (true).
P2: A ham sandwich is better than nothing (true).
C: A ham sandwich is better than eternal happiness (entailed from 1 and 2).
Feeling better after thinking about eternal happiness and a couple of Chih-hao’s belly laughs, I resolved to be patient, and to take my peer review comments as an important opportunity to hone and clarify my argument. Chih-hao reminded me that:
“Even though we still have to go through all the tough stuff, I remind my students that Logic is deeply rooted in our desire to communicate with each other in an effective way.”
So, to my blind peer reviewers, yes indeed I do think that all college students (especially theoretical physicists and Greek classical scholars) should understand and prepare for climate change. Let me try out some Logic here:
P1: College is meant to prepare you for the future. (true)
P2: The future will include planetary disruptions due to climate change (true).
C: all college students should understand climate change.
Am I equivocating?
Did you need me to unpack that for you?
