Definitely there are many college professors who will appreciate a well-thought out and coherent attack on their views. I have in my time profited by this. However, not all professors will (I have in my time lost because of this), and nobody appreciates a poorly-thought out and incoherent attack on their views. Given this payoff matrix you would have to be supremely confident in how well-thought out and coherent you were in order to make speaking up have better expected value than smiling and nodding.
It’s easy to say what is basically a glorified “Yes Socrates” and get away with not going into detail. It’s harder to get away with that if you’re contradicting.
Keep in mind that the problem with contemporary academic philosophy is not that it is insufficiently tolerant of dissent. The field practically self-defines as an unresolvable argument and the archetypal intro to philosophy curriculum involves learning and analyzing the debates between philosophers who disagree with each other about the most fundamental issues one can disagree about. Students are usually graded on 1) how well they learned the philosophies they studies and 2) their ability to put forward interesting thoughts of their own on the subjects discussed. The grading spectrum for a paper looks something like: Incoherent (F) → Failed to understand source material (D) → Repeated Source Material without saying anything interesting about it (C) → Makes an interesting, but derivative or tangential point (B) → Makes a central or extremely insightful point (A). Whether or not the student flatters the professor’s own views is at worst good for half a letter grade in my experience.
Now the situation may be worse in other subjects and that may well affect the strategies the students are using—but this says more about the situation in high school (where these students learned to write like this) than it does about college. Indeed, in my experience students often do poorly on their first philosophy paper precisely because they’ve failed to recognize the need to change strategies.
Also, the grading for blog comments is very likely to be only a participation grade and the students are likely to know this.
Keep in mind that the problem with contemporary academic philosophy is not that it is insufficiently tolerant of dissent. The field practically self-defines as an unresolvable argument
I agree with this. Academic philosophy may represent an example of a field not being dogmatic enough, which is a relatively rare failure mode.
Exactly. It is also seems like a relatively new failure mode- all the examples that come to mind are in the last 60 years. The anti-dogmatism meme seems to be very well adapted to the recent changes in the cultural environment.
In the academy, it’s not enough to be sensible: there is an expectation that you should have convincing reasons for your view and be aware of objections. If a student is trying to end up near where the instructor is, the instructor will notice if the student got there by a route the instructor thought about but rejected for being overly simplistic or worse.
I’ve also noticed this in my daily life. I wince when somebody I agree with at a high level gets horribly tripped up in the details. I assume it’s because I want to believe that people who agree with me do so for good reasons.
Definitely there are many college professors who will appreciate a well-thought out and coherent attack on their views. I have in my time profited by this. However, not all professors will (I have in my time lost because of this), and nobody appreciates a poorly-thought out and incoherent attack on their views. Given this payoff matrix you would have to be supremely confident in how well-thought out and coherent you were in order to make speaking up have better expected value than smiling and nodding.
Very few professors appreciate poorly-thought out and incoherent defenses of their views.
It’s easy to say what is basically a glorified “Yes Socrates” and get away with not going into detail. It’s harder to get away with that if you’re contradicting.
Keep in mind that the problem with contemporary academic philosophy is not that it is insufficiently tolerant of dissent. The field practically self-defines as an unresolvable argument and the archetypal intro to philosophy curriculum involves learning and analyzing the debates between philosophers who disagree with each other about the most fundamental issues one can disagree about. Students are usually graded on 1) how well they learned the philosophies they studies and 2) their ability to put forward interesting thoughts of their own on the subjects discussed. The grading spectrum for a paper looks something like: Incoherent (F) → Failed to understand source material (D) → Repeated Source Material without saying anything interesting about it (C) → Makes an interesting, but derivative or tangential point (B) → Makes a central or extremely insightful point (A). Whether or not the student flatters the professor’s own views is at worst good for half a letter grade in my experience.
Now the situation may be worse in other subjects and that may well affect the strategies the students are using—but this says more about the situation in high school (where these students learned to write like this) than it does about college. Indeed, in my experience students often do poorly on their first philosophy paper precisely because they’ve failed to recognize the need to change strategies.
Also, the grading for blog comments is very likely to be only a participation grade and the students are likely to know this.
I agree with this. Academic philosophy may represent an example of a field not being dogmatic enough, which is a relatively rare failure mode.
Exactly. It is also seems like a relatively new failure mode- all the examples that come to mind are in the last 60 years. The anti-dogmatism meme seems to be very well adapted to the recent changes in the cultural environment.
In the academy, it’s not enough to be sensible: there is an expectation that you should have convincing reasons for your view and be aware of objections. If a student is trying to end up near where the instructor is, the instructor will notice if the student got there by a route the instructor thought about but rejected for being overly simplistic or worse.
I’ve also noticed this in my daily life. I wince when somebody I agree with at a high level gets horribly tripped up in the details. I assume it’s because I want to believe that people who agree with me do so for good reasons.
This is pretty much the whole point, isn’t it?
(And this is ignoring the other obvious factor, which is how much you care about what professors appreciate.)