Stasis Theory and Research Practices - A Coursebook for Research Writing [1 ed.] 9781533919120

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Stasis Theory and Research Practices A Coursebook for Research Writing First Edition First-Year Rhetoric and Writing Program Department of English University of Colorado Colorado Springs Catherine Grandorff, Matthew Balk, Michelle Brown, Heather Fester, Phillip Heasley, Nathan Price, and Andrea Wenker

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Table of Contents Introduction: Underground Tunnels, Curiosity, and the Research Process . . . . . . v Chapter 1.

Introduction to Stasis Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter 2.

The First Level of Stasis: Conjecture, Category, and Definition . . . .5

Chapter 3.

The Second Level of Stasis: Cause and Consequence. . . . . . . . . 19

Chapter 4.

The Third Level of Stasis: Questions and Claims about Value . . . . 45

Chapter 5.

The Fourth Level of Stasis: Proposal, Policy, and Procedure . . . . 71

Chapter 6.

Asking Smart Research Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

Chapter 7.

Selecting, Evaluating, and Documenting Sources . . . . . . . . . . 101

Chapter 8.

Putting Sources in Conversation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

Chapter 9.

Building a Researched Argument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

iii Stasis Theory and Research Practices

iv Table of Contents

Introduction: Underground Tunnels, C u r i o s i t y, a n d t h e R e s e a r c h P r o c e s s Ann N. Amicucci I bet you’ve had this experience before. You’re lying in bed at night, eyes closed, starting to drift off to sleep. You’re completely relaxed and cozy—and then you hear a noise. Or maybe it’s different for you. Maybe you catch a flash of light out of the corner of your eye or you feel a breeze when you know there aren’t any windows open. In any of these scenarios, you go very quickly from being relaxed to being completely on edge, and questions start running through your mind: What was that? Was that a person? An animal? Am I in danger? Was it just a creak in the walls of the building? Is it nothing to worry about? Was it the weather or something happening outside? Should I do something? All of the questions running through your mind in that moment are what researchers call a heuristic (the “heur” part of that word rhymes with “cure”). A heuristic is a process researchers go through to figure something out—a series of steps we follow to arrive at a conclusion—and this process often takes the form of a series of questions. Take that unusual thing you hear or see or feel in the dark. First, you need to figure out what it is. Once you know what it is, you need to know where it’s coming from and what caused it. Next, you need to know if things are okay and if it’s a reason to be alarmed. You can only decide what to do about it once you know everything about what’s happened. A process takes place in that moment, even if that process feels like a crazy rush of questions while your heart races and you listen or look around the dark room. In research, a heuristic is that very process of learning everything you can about a subject so that you can decide what to do about it. Before you can decide what to research or how to research it, you engage in a process of inquiry—to find out what you want to find out. The catalyst for a research heuristic is curiosity. You’re going to hear your research writing teacher talk a lot about curiosity this semester, and it’s not just because they like cat jokes. Curiosity is a way of thinking that helps you become a stronger writer and researcher (Council 4). When you’re curious about a subject, you want to know everything about it. You want to find legitimate information to help you learn more, and you want to know what the information on your subject means. Depending on your past experiences, the word “research” may cause a number of different reactions for you. My guess is that if you’ve ever researched something you were genuinely curious to learn about, you have a positive reaction to that word. Even if you aren’t curious about something to begin with, you can fake it. Since being curious helps you learn and makes you a stronger writer, you can start asking questions and digging around a subject, and you’ll soon find that a subject you may not have cared about to start with now piques your interest. From now on, when you encounter the word “research,” I want you to think of curiosity. v Stasis Theory and Research Practices

A Story About a College Campus Let me tell you a story. I went to college at a state university in Ohio, and when I was a new student, I heard from several people that there was a series of underground tunnels on campus running below our feet. Winters in Ohio can be brutal, and they’d say that when we students were trekking to class in the snow, the teachers got to walk to class through these cushy, heated tunnels underground. I was pretty sure this whole tunnel thing was just a myth. Then in my sophomore year, a construction project was underway right in front of my dorm. From a distance, we could see large holes cut into the ground, and one of my friends had the idea that if we explored the construction site, we might find the underground tunnels. I laughed but figured it couldn’t hurt to check. Three of us crept onto the construction site at night with one small flashlight among us. On one side of the construction site, we could see all the residence halls with rooms lit up and shadows of people in them. On the other side, the library stood tall and dark, shut down for the night, with the university center also dark next to it. The construction site was completely silent except for an occasional giggle (that was me). We got to one of the holes we’d seen from far away, and it was huge, with a ladder descending into the dark. The tiny flashlight showed us there was a dirt floor at the bottom of the ladder, so we climbed down one by one. And you know where we found ourselves? Inside an honest-to-goodness underground tunnel. We walked in a tight line, the guy with the flashlight in front and the other two of us clinging to the edges of his shirt in the dark. The flashlight was nearly useless, but he swung it around wildly to make sure we weren’t going to run into anything weird. It wasn’t the cushy heated tunnel of campus lore, but it was huge: a good four feet wide and tall enough to stand in. The floor and walls and ceiling were all dirt. We walked in fits and starts, tripping over the ground and each other. We had no idea where it led, no idea what creatures might be down there, and no idea what the consequences would be if we got caught. We walked for about ten minutes, and then we got to a door. I’m not sure what we felt exactly. Relief? Disappointment? The guy in front pushed open the door, and we found we were inside a building. Suddenly the fear of getting caught trespassing became real, and we stayed silent as we worked our way out of the building in the dark. Outside, we saw we’d been in a classroom building, though one none of us had been in before. What was more, we were pretty close to where we’d started: only a five-minute walk from the construction site and our dorm, even though it had taken us a long time to creep across that distance underground. We didn’t say much about the experience to other people—we were afraid of getting in trouble—but one thing did change. Any time we heard other students talking about the myth of underground tunnels, we’d say, yep, those really exist.

vi Introduction: Underground Tunnels, Curiosity, and the Research Process

What You’ll Find in This Book You might have a few questions about my tunnel story. You might wonder if I made it up. (No, that really happened.) You might wonder if I’ve told you the story to encourage you to break into construction sites. (Definitely not. Please don’t. I’m lucky none of us got hurt.) I’ve shared my story about the tunnel to show you that curiosity is foundational to good research. It’s likely you have some questions about the story’s details: what university was it? What were the tunnels used for? How big does an underground space have to be to count as a “tunnel”? Do you have secret passageways at your school that only some people know about? All these are questions of fact and definition, which you’ll learn about in this book. The first five chapters of this book focus on stasis theory, which is a research heuristic: a process of steps to follow to conduct solid research that other people will recognize as credible. You’ll use stasis theory to structure your research process in this class, and stasis theory will also provide a framework for research you do in any academic discipline and in contexts outside of college. At the level of fact and definition, researchers figure out what something is, what category it belongs into, and how to define it. Let’s say you got the facts and definitions related to my tunnel story down. Next, you’d start asking why: Why is the tunnel there? Who built it? How has the tunnel changed the land around it? These are questions of cause and consequence, the second level of stasis theory. At this level, researchers figure out a chain of events, such as what has led to an occurrence and what will happen because of that occurrence. What’s important to know here is that you can’t move on to the cause and consequence level of a stasis heuristic until you’ve answered your questions at the facts and definition level. In fact, you can’t move on to any level of your stasis heuristic until you’ve answered questions at the level that comes before it. Once you’ve defined everything about tunnels and figured out their causes and consequences, you’d want to know: Is having these tunnels below campus a good thing? Asking that would make you think about all the people involved: who are the tunnels good for? In what ways are the tunnels harmful—if not to people, perhaps to animals or organisms living below ground, to the air and soil, or to artifacts left below the ground from previous civilizations? The third level of the stasis heuristic is evaluation. At this level, you’ll investigate whether something is good or bad or ethically right or wrong or somewhere in between. Only after you go through all these levels—answering questions of fact and definition, of cause and consequence, and of evaluation—can you move to the final stage of stasis theory: procedure and policy. At this stage of your research heuristic you’ll finally be able to ask of a subject, what should we do about it? Along the way, as you work through those stasis heuristic levels, you’ll draw on several other research abilities.

vii Stasis Theory and Research Practices

What I’ve described so far in this section are the four levels of stasis theory, which you’ll learn about in the first half of this book. You’ll read four other chapters in the second half of the book, and these chapters are equally important to your research process. In these chapters, you’ll learn how to 1) ask strong research questions, 2) engage with a range of credible, relevant sources of information in an ethical manner, 3) enter a research conversation, which means considering how other researchers’ perspectives connect with each other and adding your perspective to theirs, and 4) write a cohesive research-based argument out of the evidence you’ve gathered. It’s likely that you’ve engaged in similar research steps in previous writing courses, but I encourage you to go into these chapters with an open mind. Recognize that this material is designed to refine and strengthen your existing research practices so you can become an even stronger research writer in college and in contexts outside of your education. This book was written by faculty who teach research writing courses. These faculty authors have narrowed down the abilities you need to do effective research writing in college to eight areas: the four levels of stasis theory and the four chapters on research questions, sources, research conversations, and research-based arguments. Because each chapter has a different author, you’ll find the format and tone of each chapter to be slightly different. We’ve designed the book in this way to expose you to a range of perspectives on research and to engage your attention as a reader. Your teacher may assign you to read this book from start to finish, or they might ask you to read chapters in a different order or read some chapters but not others. Know that you can also read this book recursively by returning to re-read and revisit materials to learn a concept more deeply or consider it through the lens of your ongoing experience as a researcher. Everything this book’s authors have written falls under the umbrella of rhetorical research, which is research that pays attention to the rhetorical context of a topic and aims to make things happen in the world. Yep, the point of research is to make things happen. As you read this book, and as you engage in research for this class, I challenge you to make your research matter. Resist the temptation to just go through the motions of your writing and research assignments. Instead, remind yourself that if you are curious—if you approach research with a desire to discover and learn— you will not only be excited by the process, you will contribute something important to the lives of those who read your work. Going back to the tunnels for a moment, my guess is that if I walked up to you in public and said, “I want you to do a research project on tunnels,” you would likely laugh and walk away. You might think tunnels aren’t your thing—they’re related to civil engineering, and that’s not your major. What’s neat about the tunnel I walked through, though, is that it was right below my feet all the time. It was an existing part of my environment that I didn’t know was there. Once I discovered it, I realized that tunnels connect to many topics and ideas that could lead me to learn a great deal about the world and about myself. The tunnels in this essay are a literal topic I’ve described to help you understand what it means to be curious and ask questions at different stasis levels, but they’re also a metaphor for research. If you’re willing to be curious, if you’re willing to engage deeply with a process of investigation, you’ll find that research can lead you to learn and care about parts of the world you may never have considered before. viii Introduction: Underground Tunnels, Curiosity, and the Research Process

Works Cited Council of Writing Program Administrators, National Council of Writing Program Administrators, and National Writing Project. Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. CWPA, NCTE, and NWP, 2011, http://wpacouncil.org/ files/framework-for-success-postsecondary-writing.pdf. Accessed 12 June 2019.

ix Stasis Theory and Research Practices

x Introduction: Underground Tunnels, Curiosity, and the Research Process

Chapter Introduction to Stasis Theory

1

Catherine Grandorff

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” —Carl Sagan (6)

What Is Stasis Theory? You may have heard the word theory before, though perhaps not preceded by stasis. This compound term stasis theory may seem intimidating in its unfamiliarity, but we can break it down to make it more manageable. First, we’ll review what we mean by theory and subsequently consider the word stasis before diving into a history and overview of stasis theory and the concepts it encompasses. A theory is a collection of ideas that sets out to explain something. Theories are prominent across almost all academic fields. You may have heard of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, for example, or Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Just like the respective fields of biology and physics in these examples, rhetoric also has various theories associated with it. According to rhetorician George A. Kennedy, stasis “literally means ‘stand, standing, stance,’ [it] describes the ‘stance’ of a boxer toward an opponent, and perhaps was transferred from that context to the stand taken by a speaker toward an opponent” (98). For our purposes, we can think of stasis as a rhetorical struggle, tension, or point of disagreement. Stasis theory, then, is a rhetorical theory that sets out to explain how we can work through rhetorical struggles systematically. Rhetorical historians have credited ancient Greek philosophers Aristotle and Hermagoras, and, later, Roman philosophers Quintilian and Cicero with developing a series of questions as a means of working through such rhetorical problems, or the stases (plural). Each level must be addressed before proceeding to the subsequent one. Notice how in Figure 1-1, the pyramid features four blocks representing the four levels of stasis, or types of arguments. Each previous level serves as a foundation for higher levels.

1

4th LEVEL

3rd LEVEL

2nd LEVEL

1st LEVEL

Arguments of proposal, policy, and procedure Arguments of values and evaluations Arguments of causes and consequences Arguments of conjecture, definitions, and categories

©Hayden-McNeil, McNeil, LLC

Figure 1-1. The levels of stasis.

In Rome, this series of questions contributed to the judicial system. For example, in a robbery case, one must first prove that a robbery occurred (a question of existence), and caused harm (a question of cause and effect), which was negative (a question of evaluation), before determining what sentence the accused should serve (a question of policy). While variations exist, Table 1-1 provides a series of questions that reflect the spirit of the stases. Table 1-1. Questions Associated with Each Stasis Level

Level

Common Names Arguments of conjecture, category, definition, fact

Questions of existence, nonexistence; classification of an act, person, or thing

Diversity in higher education means a multiplicity of political, geographic, cultural, intellectual, and philosophical perspectives.

Second level of stasis

Arguments of cause, effect, consequence

Questions of an act/person/thing’s causes, effects, and consequences

When diversity is present in institutions of higher education, the result is a better learning environment for all students.

Questions regarding the quality or morality of the act/thing

Diversity is an important and positive value for institutions of higher education.

Arguments of proposal, Questions pertaining to issues of policy, policy, procedure, procedure, or jurisdiction jurisdiction

All institutions of higher education should foster diversity.

Fourth level of stasis

Chapter 1

Example

First level of stasis

Third level of Arguments of value, stasis evaluation, quality

2

Description

Why Is It Useful to Learn About Stasis Theory? Stasis theory encourages curiosity, a habit of mind that can help foster knowledge in any number of realms. This can be useful in scientific, artistic, philosophic, and even practical contexts. The quote from American astrophysicist Carl Sagan at the beginning of this chapter speaks to the importance of this mental exercise: Through curiosity and seeking answers to questions, we can discover answers that bring us closer to actual and greater understanding, rather than remaining in the dark, or assuming we know a truth when we do not. In academia, the process that stasis theory offers can be especially useful because it provides a clear method for research and writing. When conducting research, we consume ideas that others have forwarded. Stasis theory provides a helpful framework for this task as it encourages us to break down information into the stases and consider that information bit by bit. Taking on an entire topic at once can be overwhelming; stasis theory offers a series of questions to systematically engage an issue step-by-step. When crafting a claim, we act as producers, creating arguments for others to engage. Stasis theory can help writers by acting as a scaffold for building a claim to ensure that it has a solid structure.

Looking Through the Stasis Lens Using stasis theory as a “lens” or a filter, we can engage almost any issue with illuminating questions. Consider your sunglasses: If you are looking at Pikes Peak and you slide on your shades, you are still looking at the same landscape, but the way you see it—such as how you see the colors and the brightness—changes and allows you to see the same thing in a new way. The same is true when we apply a theoretical “lens” like stasis theory. The way that we look at an issue changes, allowing us to see that issue differently. Imagine, for example, that you are interested in learning more about humor as therapy. If you are wearing a stasis lens, you would “see” the various questions associated with each level of stasis. That lens would allow you to see a series of questions that could be connected to the topic, such as: 1. Has humor been used as therapy? When? Where? How has humor been defined in a healthcare or therapeutic context? 2. What effects has humor had on therapy? 3. Have those effects been positive or negative? What programs have been successful or unsuccessful? 4. How should humor be applied in therapy sessions? With the lens of stasis theory in place, you would view topic with both curiosity and the beginning of how to structure that curiosity. Notice how each numbered question above builds on the inquiries that precede it.

3 Introduction to Stasis Theory

Another way to think about a topic like the previous one is as a puzzle: Each question and its subsequent answer(s) help us to understand an issue more completely, just as each puzzle piece allows us to see the picture more wholly. Stasis theory offers a plan for organizing the “puzzle pieces” of information we encounter on a topic and for completing the “puzzle” systematically, section by section, stasis level by stasis level, of whatever topic we might engage. This process helps us to “grasp the world as it truly is” (Sagan 12) rather than guess or assume based on bias or hearsay. As you progress through the next four chapters, consider how each level of stasis might illuminate a part of topic you care about. Curiosity is the fuel; stasis theory is your vehicle. Combined, they will help drive your further development as a thinker, a reader, and a writer.

Works Cited Kennedy, George A. A New History of Classical Rhetoric. Princeton UP, 1994. Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Random House, 1997.

4 Chapter 1

Chapter The First Level of Stasis: Conjecture, Category, and Definition

2

Catherine Grandorff

In The Cosmic Connection, American astrophysicist Carl Sagan famously claims that “[t]he nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff” (190). This statement is one example of a first-level argument. The night before Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, the Civil Rights leader argued in favor of an idea forwarded in earlier years by leaders like Malcolm X. He states in his speech “I Have Been to the Mountain Top”: [W]e are poor people, individually we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively, that means all of us together, collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine. Did you ever think about that? After you leave the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the others, the American Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That’s power right there, if we know how to pool it. (216) King provides several instances of first-level claims that we will consider in this chapter.

What Are Arguments of Conjecture, Category, and Definition? Both of the quotes at the beginning of this chapter offer examples of what arguments can look like at the first level of stasis. Notice how they make rhetorical moves to shape their respective conversations: Sagan makes the claim that humans and their surroundings are the same as cosmic giants; King argues that Black Americans, although poor individually, command significant capital collectively and that there is power in that collective. These are foundational claims that provide answers to questions of existence, category, and definition. Such questions that first-level claims can engage include: 5

% Is something possible? % Did something happen? % What happened? % Is there a problem? % What is the problem/issue? % What kind of a problem/issue is it? % What is the nature of the thing? % To what larger class of things or events does it belong? % How do we define this thing/problem/issue?

4th 4th h LE EVEEL EV E

3rd 3rd d LE EVEEL

2 d 2nd LEVEL LEVE

1st LEVEL

Arguments of proposal, policy, and procedure Arguments of values and evaluations Arguments of causes and consequences Arguments of conjecture, definitions, and categories

©Hayden-McNeil, McNeil, LLC

Figure 2-1. The levels of stasis.

We can break these questions into three primary categories: conjectural claims, categorical claims, and definitional claims.

Why Is It Useful to Learn About Conjectural, Categorical, and Definitional Arguments? First-level arguments push us to consider what we think we know with fresh eyes. Things we take for granted (e.g., how we define war or the “fact” that ancient Rome collapsed) can be questioned and considered anew through arguments of conjecture, category, and definition. Sagan’s quote at the beginning of this chapter offers an example: He argues that the universe is not a bunch of rocks light-years away. Rather, we are connected at a cellular level with the cosmos. What a profoundly different way of thinking about “star stuff”! 6 Chapter 2

This first level of stasis is essential for arguments at all levels of stasis, as it provides the foundation for discussion. It would, for instance, be incredibly difficult to argue that something should be done about prison reform if the definition of that phrase is not clear first. King’s quote pushes his audience to redefine their idea of themselves: from individually powerless to collectively powerful. It’s a crucial step to his proposal claim that they should use that power. Many contentious debates occur because this first level of stasis is not addressed before moving on to later levels. For example, consider the cultural conversation about abortion rights. What constitutes a right? How do we define an abortion—as “a medical termination of a pregnancy,” as a “murder,” or some other way? These questions can also have significant consequences for later levels of stasis, and trouble arises when they are left unfinished before moving on, for instance, to discussions of right and wrong (quality, the third level of stasis) or what should be done (policy, the fourth level of stasis). By fully exploring and establishing the first level of stasis, claims at higher levels of stasis can have a stronger rhetorical foundation.

Identifying Arguments at the First Level of Stasis Arguments that engage the first level of stasis will typically answer the questions like those that appear at the beginning of this chapter. From here, we will break down those questions in order to further examine the ways these kinds of arguments can manifest. The following represent various kinds of first-level arguments.

Arguments of Conjecture Answers to questions about existence or nonexistence help us to establish basics and are therefore sometimes referred to as arguments of conjecture or arguments of fact. Notably, arguments of fact should not be confused with the common use of “fact.” Rather, arguments of fact is a distinct term that denotes someone making a claim about the existence or nature of a thing that they subsequently support and that others might disagree with. It does not mean someone is “just stating a fact,” and thus, you should not necessarily accept such an argument at face value or as an immutable truth. For instance, suggesting the existence of a problem like “a crisis at the U.S./Mexico border” would be an example of an argument of fact.

Understanding Conjectural Arguments % Is something possible? % Did something happen? % What happened? % What is the problem/issue? Journalists are known for asking key questions: “Who? What? When? Where?” The answers to such questions are the concern of conjectural arguments. People often have differing accounts of “What happened?” Conjectural arguments aid in the 7 The First Level of Stasis: Conjecture, Category, and Definition

process of figuring that out. News stories and history books feature arguments for what constitutes the reality of reported events, and different writers of such pieces might interpret events differently and therefore make different arguments. Evidence for such arguments includes supporting details like quotations, interviews, photographs, or videos. Figure 2-2 provides an example of such evidence, with The Daily Show with Jon Stewart correspondent Jessica Williams reporting in front of a pool about a 2015 McKinney, Texas, pool party incident. In this segment, Williams first makes a conjectural claim that an event occurred. Specifically, she argues that a police officer was caught on camera slamming a teenage girl into the ground and then pointing his gun at unarmed teen boys who rushed to her aid. To support this explicit claim, she offers an overview of what happened as well as official statements. She also implicitly claims the situation is absurd. To support this implicit claim, she places herself at the “scene” of the pool, and she features a wardrobe choice of a bulletproof vest under a bikini. This combination speaks to both her conjectural claim about what happened, and the argument about the absurdity of the situation.

Figure 2-2. Still image from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (“Assault”).

Questions of Existence % Is there a problem? % What exists or doesn’t exist? Conjecture also encompasses the question of existence, another potential point of contention or disagreement at the first level of stasis. Some instances center on folkloric figures, like “is the Loch Ness monster real?” The answers to such a question would serve as an example of a conjectural argument.

8 Chapter 2

More serious iterations might engage important cultural topics. A sociologist could argue for the existence of systemic racism, or a Women’s Studies expert might forward a claim that our culture has a problem with sexual assault and harassment. These arguments demonstrate how conjectural questions and different answers can give rise to claims and conversations at this first level of stasis. Evidence for claims of existence varies but usually involves concrete examples. Figure 2-3 offers a diagram that serves as part of an argument for the existence of a “ladder” of racial and gender supremacy. This image provides various examples or “steps” as a means of backing up that claim. Genocide

Ladder of Racial and Gender Supremacy Acts of Violence • Hate crimes

Calls for Violence Discrimination • Racial profiling

Veiled Racism and Sexism •Victim blaming

Minimalization

Indifference

• Denial of existence of race or gender issues

• Apoliticism

• False equivocation

• Not hiring someone due to pregnancy or parent status

•Tokenism

• Inciting harm against a person or group

• Lack of prosecution for perpetrators for crimes like domestic violence or harm towards people of color

• Systemic murder (e.g., the Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsi, Twa, and Hutu people) • State sanctioned murder (e.g., the Wounded Knee Massacre)

• Online or offline threats • Use of charged language or slurs like the n-word

•Bootstrap theory

• Passivity or silence as response to racist or sexist practices or policies

Figure 2-3. Levels of racial and gender supremacy, with descriptions and examples.

Arguments of Category Answers to questions about how we conceptualize a thing are known as categorical arguments. They provide a way of understanding the person, thing, or act, sometimes by putting it into a category or class. For example, in defining a banana, we might in part classify it as a fruit, a category that encompasses several other things as well. Or, to take another example, consider the role of America’s Founding Fathers; while they came to be known as heroes, the British government at the time considered many of them to fall in the category of criminals. The categories to which these men belonged would be a point of stasis, or rhetorical disagreement.

9 The First Level of Stasis: Conjecture, Category, and Definition

Understanding Categorical Arguments % What kind of a problem/issue is it? % To what larger class of things or events does it belong? Categorical arguments concern themselves with answering questions about categorization or classification. On occasion, these may participate in labeling a person, thing, or act. Some examples are provided in Table 2-1. Table 2-1. Chart of Categorical Claims

Claim

Person, Thing, or Act

Category, Categories, or Label(s)

The mass shooting at PULSE, a gay night club in Orlando, FL, in 2016, “could definitely be classified as domestic terrorism” said Sheriff Demings (Grimson et al.).

The mass shooting at PULSE, a gay night club in Orlando, FL, in 2016

An act of domestic terrorism

Textiles like embroidery and crochet are commonly associated with women, and widely considered “craft,” not “fine art” (“A Brief History”).

Textiles like embroidery and crochet

Craft, not fine art

The Heritage Foundation is a conservative thinktank.

The Heritage Foundation

A conservative thinktank

Many argue that “Prince was a musical genius” (Marchese).

Prince

A musical genius

When there is no disagreement regarding the definition of the category, these arguments may feature a relatively straightforward characteristic-match structure. This structure sets up certain features, or characteristics, and then demonstrates how the act or thing in question matches those characteristics. In other words, does the person, thing, or act qualify for inclusion in that category, or not? The answer to such a question would constitute a categorical claim. The last example in Table 2-1 considers if Prince should be placed in the category of “musical genius.” Music critic David Marchese argues in “Everyone Is Saying Prince Was a Musical Genius. Here’s Why” that Prince did belong in this category, because he possesses a number of associated characteristics, including (1) his mastery of diverse songwriting techniques, (2) the wide scope of his industry involvement, (3) his ability to craft catchy tunes, and (4) his advanced skill with a number of instruments. The four reasons listed provide the criteria that the person/thing/act in question must meet for this categorical claim to work. Examples of how he meets each further strengthen Marchese’s original claim.

10 Chapter 2

Table 2-2. Example of Characteristic-Match Argument Structure

Characteristics of a “Musical Genius”

Prince (according to Marchese)

Mastery of diverse songwriting techniques

9

Wide scope of industry involvement

9

Ability to craft catchy tunes

9

Advanced skill with a number of instruments

9

Table 2-2 shows an example of characteristic-match structure. According to the characteristics provided, who else might qualify for the category of “musical genius”? A common pitfall when working with categorical arguments is to pull characteristics from the person or thing, instead of focusing first on the category itself. As you encounter or craft these claims, first determine the characteristics of the category; only after this important step can you determine if someone or something fits or not.

Arguments of Definition When the boundaries of categories in question are unclear, additional information may be required to achieve stasis. Claims like this are known as definitional arguments. These arguments aim to provide clarity on what a key word or phrase means. In response to a monthly question and answer session, David Pilgrim, curator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, replies: Can blacks be racist? The answer, of course, will depend on how you define racism. If you define it as “prejudice against or hatred toward another race,” then the answer is yes. If you define racism as “the belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race,” the answer is yes. And if you define racism as “prejudice and discrimination rooted in race-based loathing,” then the answer is, again, yes. However, if you define racism as “a system of group privilege by those who have a disproportionate share of society’s power, prestige, property, and privilege,” then the answer is no. In the end, it is my opinion that individual blacks can be and sometimes are racists. However, collectively, blacks are neither the primary creators nor beneficiaries of the racism that permeates society today. Notice how Pilgrim first asks a conjectural question about possibility (“Can blacks be racist?”), then takes a step back to address the boundaries of the term “racist” more thoroughly. In doing so, he makes a definitional argument for what constitutes racism. Definitions can be contentious as well, meaning that not everyone will agree on the same way of defining a term, idea, or phrase. While looking it up in the dictionary is one way of crafting a claim for what something means, many other options exist as well, as we will see later in this chapter.

11 The First Level of Stasis: Conjecture, Category, and Definition

Understanding Definitional Arguments % What is it? % How do we define this thing/problem/issue? % What is the nature of the thing? Definitional arguments arise when stakeholders disagree on what is meant by a category. For instance, in Table 2-1, the term “fine art” could be contentious among some audiences. What is fine art? Who gets to decide? The confines of the category may be unclear; in such a scenario, clarification would be necessary before the conversation could move forward. Providing definitional arguments can also help shape what an argument can look like going forward. Take for example Figure 2-4, which features a scene from the popular US television show The Simpsons. After a meltdown at the town nuclear plant, owner C. Montgomery Burns provides an alternative term to define what is happening: “an unrequested fission surplus.” By defining what happened in a different way, Burns can move to change how people think about the incident.

Figure 2-4. Example of an alternate definition from The Simpsons (The Simpsons

1:30–2:00). Note that an entire argument can be definitional. A hypothetical example would be, in the fictional instance above, if Burns were to go on to write an essay or series of tweets defining “an unrequested fission surplus” and arguing that the meltdown fits this definition. However, definitional arguments can also support a larger claim. In such cases, writers have several options about how to integrate definitions. The next section details some of these choices.

12 Chapter 2

Strategies to Define Numerous methods exist to define a term. Table 2-3 provides a selection of some techniques an author can use to shed light on what a concept means, especially in an effort to support a larger claim. Table 2-3. Strategies for Defining Terms, adapted from Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor (148–57)

Strategy

Description The term in question is:

Example

Additional Information

Synonym

followed by a term, idea, or phrase with a similar, but more familiar meaning.

King argues, “Collectively…all of us together, [Black Americans]…are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine.”

The synonym definition is bolded for emphasis.

Example

clarified through a recognizable example for the audience.

An entrepreneur is someone like Oprah Winfrey, who turned her journalism career into a media empire.

Sometimes further background is helpful, as with the phrase that follows “Oprah Winfrey” in the example.

History

defined by relating to the history of the thing.

The guillotine, with its heavy metal blade, was a popular execution tool during the French Revolution.

These are most useful when defining words that audiences may not understand without historical context.

Etymology

broken into its meaningful parts (such as syllables) so linguistic roots can be traced.

The word republic comes from the Latin words res meaning “things or matters” and publica, meaning pertaining to “the people.” From its roots, it means “Matters of/for the people.”

This strategy provides clarity especially for concepts that may have morphed over the years.

The negative

An antique is not used to eliminate something of a certain competing definitions by stating what the term is not. age or from a certain era.

Figurative language

compared to something unlike itself using creative interpretation.

The United States can be thought of as a salad bowl, with distinct cultural components.

Very similar are contrast definitions, or when the writer clarifies two terms that are similar enough to confuse the reader. For instance, “By frugal, I don’t mean stingy.” These definitions can provide particularly memorable meanings.

13 The First Level of Stasis: Conjecture, Category, and Definition

Strategy

Description The term in question is:

Example The Beatles included John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr.

Additional Information This is also known as an ostensive definition.

List

employed to indicate a limited group.

Operation

limited to a specific context. Who qualifies as a child? A theme park might define the term by a set height, while the Motion Picture Association of America says anyone under 17 qualifies.

This is a popular strategy in the hard sciences but useful in everyday conversations as well.

Denotation

defined using a dictionary entry.

Merriam Webster defines feminism as “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” (“Feminism”).

While often presented as reference texts, dictionaries offer a long series of definitional claims which can be and are challenged and changed.

Comparison, Resemblance, or Contrast

used to establish likeness or distinction.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all claim Abraham as their ancestor.

The less obvious the likeness or difference, the more evidence one will require.

As Table 2-3 suggests, many options exist for defining a term. When you are reading or listening to someone making a definitional claim, pay attention to which strategy or strategies they employ. Is it the best one? Likewise, when you find yourself making such an argument, consider your choices carefully. What strategy would be most effective for your audience and your purpose? Being cognizant of these rhetorical choices will position you to be a savvier listener and a more successful rhetor than if you were to ignore such questions altogether.

14 Chapter 2

Critically Reading Conjectural, Categorical, and Definitional Arguments Healthy skepticism can serve you well at every level of stasis, including this first one. Below are some questions you should pose as you approach arguments engaging the first level of stasis. Answering them will serve as a first step in analysis. Audience

Support

Terms

Counterclaims

Who is the text’s intended audience?

What examples does the text offer?

What terms and definitions does the author present?

How does the text deal with counterclaims?

How do you know?

What is the text’s purpose?

How do you know?

Is the claim conjectural, categorical, or definitional?

How do you know?

How do they support the purpose of the text?

How could they undermine the purpose of the text?

How could you challenge the examples?

What comparisons does the text draw? Are there any issues with the comparisons (e.g., are the things being compared actually comparable, or are they too different)?

Are there different possible definitions for those terms?

How could you strengthen them?

No definitions? What terms does the author assume we agree upon?

Which ones What do they not counterclaims address? does the text anticipate and address directly?

Is this helpful or detrimental to the point being made?

How could you push back against the text’s claim?

Would they be better or worse for this argument? Why?

Figure 2-5. Flowchart to explore texts at the first level of stasis.

15 The First Level of Stasis: Conjecture, Category, and Definition

Writing Conjectural, Categorical, and Definitional Arguments Like any claim, first-level arguments should take their audience into consideration. The questions in Table 2-4 that follows serve as a starting place for you to think about your topic, audience, and rhetorical situation so that you can develop a strong first-level claim. The order is a suggestion; often, the writing process does not follow a straight line, but, rather, loops back before moving forward. Table 2-4. Tips for Research: Considering Topic, Audience, and Rhetorical Situation

Questions

16 Chapter 2

Actions and Suggestions

Example

What subject would benefit from your exploration?

Write as many down as possible, then consider which you would be most interested in diving into further.

The American Revolution

What first-level questions could someone ask about that subject?

For instance, does it exist, or did it happen? What category could it belong to? How would you define it? Start with general inquiries, and work towards getting more specific.

Who were the key players? What did they do before, during, and after the war? How were they viewed before, during, and after?

Once you have a single focused question, how might you answer that question?

This can function as a tentative thesis statement.

Alexander Hamilton was a key player and a complicated figure in the American Revolution.

How can you clarify important terms?

Providing clear definitions is an important part of a first-level argument.

The term “key player” in this context indicates that his actions and contributions had significant impact on the initial formation of the United States.

What kind of evidence would be useful in convincing your audience?

Examples, definitions, and comparisons are all typical strategies. Some of your research will likely counter parts of your tentative thesis statement. You will likely want to revise that draft claim based on your research so that they don’t contradict each other.

One way he contributed during the war was to serve as General George Washington’s chief staff aide. When Washington became President, Hamilton served as the first Secretary of the Treasury for the new United States.

How might you deal with counterclaims?

Consider those arguments that go against your own, or counterexamples. You may need to revise your own stance, or you may not, but addressing these will strengthen your overall argument by showing your audience you have thoroughly considered the subject from multiple perspectives.

While many consider Hamilton and others who helped the American colonists win the American Revolution to be heroes, during the war, the British defined them very differently. According to that perspective, Washington, Hamilton, and other “heroes” were seen as war criminals.

Appendix: Plain Text Questions for Flow Chart 1. How does the text reveal its audience and purpose? a. Who is the intended audience, and how do you know? How does the language the author uses support or contradict who the audience supposedly is? b. What is the point or purpose of this text in relation to that intended audience? What parts of the text reveal that purpose? c. Is the claim conjectural, categorical, or definitional? What parts of the text indicate that, and how? 2. What examples does the text offer? a. How do they or don’t they support the purpose of the text? b. How could they be challenged? Strengthened? c. What comparisons does the text draw? How are similarities or distinctions included? Are there any issues with the comparisons (e.g., are the things being compared actually comparable, or are they too different?) 3. What terms does the author present? a. How does the text define key terms? Are there different definitions that you or someone else might offer? What are they, and why would they be better or worse for this argument? b. If they don’t define them are they working on previously accepted definitions? Why? Would the argument benefit from more explicit definitions? 4. How does the text deal with counterclaims? a. What counterclaims does the text anticipate and address directly? What ones do they not address? What points could be considered weak? How could you push back against the claims of this argument?

17 The First Level of Stasis: Conjecture, Category, and Definition

Works Cited “A Brief History of Women in Art.” Khan Academy, 2019, www.khanacademy. org/humanities/art-history-basics/tools-understanding-art/a/a-brief-history-ofwomen-in-art. Accessed 21 Sept. 2019. “Assault Swim—Progress in Community Policing.” The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, 8 June 2015, http://www.cc.com/video-clips/4duydk/the-daily-show-with-jonstewart-assault-swim---progress-in-community-policing. Accessed 23 Nov. 2019. Grimson, Matthew, et al. “FBI says it probed Orlando shooting suspect Omar Mateen twice.” Domestic Terrorism Leaves Scores Dead and Injured at Orlando Nightclub. CNBC, 13 June 2016, https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/12/domestic-terrorismleaves-scores-dead-injured-at-orlando-nightclub.html. Accessed 17 Sept. 2019. Fahnestock, Jeanne, and Marie Secor. A Rhetoric of Argument: A Text and Reader. McGraw-Hill, 2004. “Feminism.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster. dictionary/feminism. Accessed 21 Sept. 2019.

www.merriam-webster.com/

King, Martin Luther, Jr. “I Have Been to the Mountaintop.” A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson, IPM/ Warner, 2001, pp. 212–23. Marchese, David. “Everyone Is Saying Prince Was a Musical Genius. Here’s Why.” Vulture, 22 April 2016, https://www.vulture.com/2016/04/prince-genius.html. Accessed 21 Sept. 2019. Pilgrim, David. “Can Blacks Be Racist?” Jim Crow Museum—Ferris State University. March 2009. https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2009/ march.htm. Accessed 21 Sept. 2019. Sagan, Carl. The Cosmic Connection. Cambridge UP, 2000. The Simpsons. “Homer Defined Part 02.” 26 Nov. 2018, https://www.yuoutube.com/ watch?v=ojtSRV8QIZ8. Accessed 23 Nov. 2019.

18 Chapter 2

Chapter The Second Level of Stasis: Cause and Consequence

3

Phillip Heasley

Introduction People have long sought to understand and control the world around them, from the earliest farmers planting seeds in hopes of a bountiful crop to the new college student reviewing their notes in order to succeed on a test. A fundamental way of understanding our world is understanding cause and consequence relationships, the idea that one thing causes or contributes to another. Many animals have an intuitive sense of causes and consequences. You may have seen this when you train a pet; the pet gradually learns that a certain action (lying down) leads to a reward (a treat). The more times the pet sees this action, the more the connection between the two events is reinforced. As educated human beings, we can go beyond our intuition. We can know more than just that there is a relationship. We can understand how and why that relationship works, we can evaluate the relationship to see how strong or how reliable it is, we can consider and then accept or discard other potential causes or possible outcomes, and we can investigate how changes in context or other influence factors may change that causal relationship.

Figure 3-1. Cartoon illustration containing an opinion on causal arguments

(“Reason”). 19

What Are Arguments of Cause and Consequence? Arguments of cause and consequence make claims about the causal relationships between two or more things. They often claim that one thing does (or does not!) cause or increase the likelihood of another thing. Persuasive cause and consequence arguments will support that claim with evidence and reasoning. We sometimes call these arguments “causal” (related to cause and consequence).

Mack Curtis/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Imagine you are interested in the relationship between eating sugar and gaining or losing weight. One way to frame that curiosity is to consider it as a cause and effect question. Does eating more or less sugar (the cause) lead to weight gain or weight loss (the consequence)? We could gather many kinds of evidence to explore this question. We could begin with our own experience and consider specific cases of people we know who have changed their sugar eating habits or who have had large changes in their weight. We could also start with the big picture by gathering statistical evidence about sugar in diets and weight changes over time. We could draw on knowledge from biology and learn about what the body does with sugar, how it is processed chemically, and how that could influence weight. We could make a list of other factors that might influence weight loss and or weight gain and then analyze how eating sugar fits among them. In some cases, we may need to assess other causal arguments. For instance, companies that sell sugary foods have claimed for decades that eating fat is the leading cause of weight gain. We can learn about the evidence used to support that claim and make our own assessment of it. And, we could gather published sources that try to ask or answer our own question about sugar and weight change and consider the evidence they provide.

Figure 3-2. Cartoon illustration of a cause and effect sequence (“Fake”).

20 Chapter 3

Why Is It Useful to Learn About Causal Arguments? Learning about causal arguments can help us to make more informed choices and effectively persuade others. Understanding cause and consequence arguments helps us be more critical in our evaluation of arguments we read or hear. Arguments of cause and consequence may seem convincing on the surface but turn out to be untrue with critical examination. Yet, exploring and assessing arguments of cause and consequence is essential in our daily lives. Choosing what medicines to take, what schools to attend, and what phone to buy, all hinge on understanding the causes and consequences affecting those choices. What are the odds the medicine will help, and what are its possible side effects? What effect will choosing a certain school have on your career, your happiness, and the happiness of your friends and family? Which phone is most likely to break? Which will be out of date the soonest? How will the phone payments affect the rest of your budget? As you make choices like these, you will develop your own questions and you will encounter arguments made by other interested parties: your doctor, the company selling the medicine, your parents, your school counselors, a pushy phone salesperson at the mall, or an “impartial” review for a cell phone you read online. Most of these sources are likely to provide evidence that informs your questions. Many of them will try to persuade you with their own cause and consequence arguments. But how do we evaluate these arguments? If the phone salesman gives you different answers than the review you read about how much your phone will be worth in five years, how can you decide which argument is more convincing? Learning about the structure, limitations, and pitfalls common to claims of cause and consequence can help us make better choices and prevent us from being duped or misled by weak or invalid arguments. One central message of this textbook is that the levels of stasis are deeply connected. Arguments at one level of stasis can support or disprove arguments at a different level of stasis. Often, causal arguments support claims of evaluation and policy, which you will learn about in chapters 4 and 5. A common strategy for evaluating something is to argue that it is bad because it leads to bad consequences. For instance, we might evaluate the design of a new traffic intersection by arguing that it will lead to more accidents; because the consequence of the intersection is bad, the design of intersection itself is also bad. We could also argue for or against a policy based on the consequences we expect. For instance, raising or lowering taxes on the rich remains a controversial policy around the world. Some economists and politicians argue that high taxes on the rich is a good policy. Supporters of high taxes claim that when the government spends those tax dollars on infrastructure, education, or social programs, it helps the economy on the whole. However, other economists argue that raising taxes on the rich discourages wealthy citizens from spending or investing their money, and, in the end, this hurts the economy. In this case, our decisions about tax policy rest in part on our ability to understand and support arguments about cause and consequence.

21 The Second Level of Stasis: Cause and Consequence

Identifying Cause and Consequence Arguments Cause and consequence arguments can be difficult to identify. Some arguments contain clear language such as “X causes Y.” However, many arguments use more subtle language to express the nuances of the cause and consequence relationship. In the claims below, consider the ways that the word choice shows the nature of the relationships: 1. Violent video games can be a contributing factor in the case of some school shooters. 2. Before society can become just for all Americans, private for-profit prisons have to be abolished. 3. Only terrible mothers would expose their children to cancer-inducing plastics that contain BPA (bisphenol A). 4. Eliminating required boat inspections at the lake will allow thousands of invasive species into our waterways. 5. The bridge can support a maximum weight of 60,000 pounds, well below the weight of many typical semi-trucks. All of these sentences are making a cause and consequence argument. In some examples, like sentence 1, the writer makes an explicit claim, stating their argument clearly and directly. In other cases, such as sentences 4 and 5, the argument is subtle or may even be an implicit claim (not stated directly). In many cases, the nature of the relationship is hinted at by the language. For instance, in example 1, the phrase “contributing factor” suggests that video games are only one cause among many causes, and the sentence says that it is only true for “some” shooters. So, the writer of the sentence is admitting that, for other shooters, video games may not be an important cause at all. In contrast, in example 2, the writer suggests that we “have to” enact the cause (ending for-profit prisons), before we can have the consequence (a just society). In example 3, the writer is less specific. They argue that plastics with BPA (the cause) are “cancer-inducing,” so the cause (plastics) and the consequence (cancer) are both fairly clear. However, the relationship between the two remains somewhat vague. You may notice that the cause and consequence argument about BPA and cancer is actually only a part of another argument (evaluating mothers who choose to do this). As mentioned in the last section, the cause and consequence argument is working as evidence to support an argument of evaluation. All in single sentence! In examples 4 and 5, the cause and consequence are not stated as directly. In both sentences, the reader must use their own critical thinking to infer the claim. In sentence four, the writer focuses on stopping a practice (inspecting boats). The inferred claim of sentence four is that the inspections (the cause) are currently protecting the lake from invasive species (the consequence). If someone changes the rules, and boat inspections aren’t required, the situation will reverse, and invasive species will increase.

22 Chapter 3

In the final example, the writer never comes out and states the argument explicitly, but the message they intend is still fairly clear: If a truck weighing over 60,000 pounds drives over the bridge, the bridge may collapse. In the case of example 5, the sentence is framed as a statement of definition or conjecture. The writer places some faith in their reader and trusts that they will make the logical leap to the argument of cause and consequence without needing to be told directly. We could call this an implicit claim, one that is implied or hinted at but not stated directly. Implicit arguments are found in many forms of communication. They are quite common in academic writing, where readers are assumed to be intelligent and knowledgeable about the subject matter, and where concise writing is valued. These kinds of implicit arguments can often be hard for writers who are trying to report on something they read or heard. A writer may spend time looking for the perfect sentence that states the argument most clearly, but in many cases they will never find such a sentence because the argument is only made implicitly.

Critically Reading Causal Arguments Though cause and consequence arguments may appear simple on the surface, after some analysis they can be surprisingly complex. A vital first step in reading arguments of claim and consequence is to clearly identify the claim made by the author and any evidence the author provides. Once you have identified the claim and evidence, you can analyze it carefully. When we read or build these arguments, we can analyze this relationship in many ways: % The emphasis and direction of the relationship % The causal mechanisms that connect cause to consequence % The strength of the relationship % The reliability of the relationship % How the relationship changes in different contexts % What influencing or mitigating factors affect the relationship

Direction and Emphasis of Causal Arguments Time only moves in one direction (forward), so in our daily lives the cause must always precede the consequence. However, in exploring a cause and consequence relationship, the writer can begin by thinking about the consequence first. Take a moment and consider any famous historical event. That event is likely both a consequence of earlier events and a cause of later events. As a writer, we must ask ourselves which is interesting to us in this moment and context. Do we want to understand the American Civil War as a consequence of disagreements over slavery, or are we interested in whether the Civil War was the cause of increased poverty in the American South? In this sense, we must choose a direction for our argument, looking forward to the consequence or backward to the cause.

23 The Second Level of Stasis: Cause and Consequence

Many times, cause and consequence arguments are built in such a way, by working backward or forward from a subject of interest. We are interested in a particular thing (a rise in home prices, the failure of a local business), and we must choose whether to look forward or backward. Similarly, effective rhetors make it clear which of the elements (cause or consequence) are more important or interesting to them. An educator might begin with an interest in why not all students graduate from high school. They could then proceed from their subject of interest and argue that graduation rates will increase if we begin school later in the day. The educator begins with their subject of interest and moves forward to its consequences. Alternately, a sociologist might be interested in reasons why children live in poverty. The sociologist could then look for potential causes of children’s living conditions and argue that high divorce rates lead to more children in poverty as single parents struggle to provide for their children. The sociologist begins with their subject of interest and moves backward to its causes. In both cases, the writer has a primary focus and then argues about the causes or consequences of that focus. As a reader, it is important that you can identify when one element (cause or consequence) is more important to the writer and which it is.

Causal Mechanisms An important piece of any cause and consequence argument are the causal mechanisms that connect the cause to the consequence. You can think of the causal mechanisms as why or how the cause leads to the consequence. In some cases, explaining the causal mechanism is the primary focus of the argument. In other cases, explaining a causal mechanism can be strong evidence to support a cause and consequence argument. Sometimes, the causal mechanism is easily observable or widely accepted. At other times, the causal mechanism is shrouded in mystery or hotly contested by experts. For instance, most people agree that there is an economic “achievement gap” in American schools: Children from low income families and communities under-perform in school compared to middle class or rich students (Yeh 21). Researchers have been observing this relationship for a long time, so we know a lot about it. We know that this gap exists, and we can prove with some certainty that the economic difference is the cause. However, theories abound as to the exact mechanism: Why does being raised in a low-income family lead to children under-performing in school? Some experts focus on parents. Do they have time to read to their children? Do they encourage curiosity? Do they have the education themselves to help their children learn? Other experts focus on the physical and emotional well-being of the children. Do they get enough to eat? Do they feel safe in their home? Other experts focus on schools. Do schools in low income areas have the same quality of teachers? Do they have enough money for up-to-date books and materials? Many experts think that all of these mechanisms are important and that they interact with one another in complex ways.

24 Chapter 3

Figure 3-3. “Simple Alarm Clock,” a comic illustration of a causal sequence

(“Simple”). Often, a close examination of the causal mechanism reveals that contained within are multiple arguments of cause and consequence, as you can see with the alarm clock in Figure 3-3. In many cases, the causal mechanism is in fact a “chain” of cause and effect arguments. Low performance on spelling tests is caused by having a smaller vocabulary. Having a smaller vocabulary can be caused by parents spending less time reading to their child. Parents may spend less time reading to children because they are busy working multiple jobs. They may have to work multiple jobs because they are living in poverty. We may phrase our thesis as “poverty causes lower scores on reading tests,” but each link in that chain is, in reality, its own smaller cause and consequence argument. Philosophers have developed names for these causes based on where they occur in the chain. The cause closest to the consequence in the chain is called the proximal cause. In the case of student performance on a spelling test, a small vocabulary would be the proximal cause for poor scores on the test. The cause that is furthest away from the consequence in the chain is called the ultimate cause. In this case, poverty is the ultimate cause for poor test scores. The causes between the proximal and ultimate cause are called intermediate causes. Figure 3-4 shows a flow chart for our hypothetical causal mechanism between poverty and spelling tests. In Figure 3-3, the causal mechanism has even more steps, but the same terms can be applied. The bird (A) is the ultimate cause. Steps B through M are all intermediate causes. Certainly, ice water (P) is a proximal cause, but we might even say there are two proximal causes since both the ice water (P) and the cannon ball (N) seem likely to achieve the desired consequence (waking the sleeping person). 25 The Second Level of Stasis: Cause and Consequence

ULTIMATE CAUSE

Student is from a poor home.

INTERMEDIATE CAUSE

Student’s parents must work extra jobs.

INTERMEDIATE CAUSE

Parents have less time to read to student.

PROXIMAL CAUSE

Student has smaller vocabulary.

CONSEQUENCE

Student gets lower score on spelling test.

Figure 3-4. Flowchart showing causal chain of events.

In Figure 3-5, the causal mechanism has even more steps, but the same terms can be applied. The mouse entering the door (A) is the ultimate cause. Steps B through G are all intermediate causes while launching the rocket (H) is the proximal cause of our final consequence, flying the mouse to the moon.

Figure 3-5. Comic illustration of a causal sequence (“How”).

26 Chapter 3

Evaluating and Comparing Causes and Consequence Relationships As we saw in the example of the educational achievement gap, experts often believe there is more than one cause for a consequence. When there is more than one cause, it is only natural for us to ask, which of these causes is the most important? Even though we are certain that poverty is the ultimate cause, we still want to know more about the intermediate steps. Educators probably cannot fix poverty. But educators can create programs and lessons to help students in poverty catch up with richer students. So where should educators focus? On child well-being? On parents? On schools? Understanding the cause and consequence relationships allows us to evaluate these choices and consider policies and proposals to help these children, as you will learn to do in chapters 4 and 5. When we seek to compare or evaluate possible causes, we often focus on the relationship between cause and consequence and ask several key questions: % How reliable is the relationship between cause and consequence? % How strong is the relationship between cause and consequence? % Does the relationship exist in different contexts? % Are there other factors that mitigate or influence this relationship?

Strength of the Cause and Consequence Relationship We can begin by asking how strong the relationship is. In the case of the educational achievement gap, how much better do rich students perform on spelling tests on average? Does it matter how poor or how rich they are? Do the richest students have the greatest advantage? If we investigate the influence of being wealthy on spelling test performance, does wealth have more or less impact on test performance than other factors like a teacher’s experience or a student’s sex? You may notice at this point that the notion of definitions and categories described in chapter 2 becomes extremely important. What is the dividing line between rich and poor or between poor and middle class? How are we measuring student success: with standardized tests? With graduation rates? Questions of definition such as these directly influence the answers we find to questions of cause and effect.

27 The Second Level of Stasis: Cause and Consequence

Reliability of the Cause and Consequence Relationship We can also ask how reliable the relationship is between the cause and consequence. If a student from a wealthy family takes 100 tests, how often will he do better on the test than a student from a poor family? 100 times? 80 times? We know that students from rich families have an advantage on the whole, but how does this translate to individual students? If we compare 100 poor students to 100 rich students, how many times will the rich student score better on a third-grade math test? One important term for talking about reliability is probability. Probability focuses on numbers as in the case of the 100 pairs of students. If the rich student performs better 90 out of 100 times, we can say it is probable that a rich student will perform higher than a poor student on a third-grade math test. As we noted before, word choice becomes quite important when describing a relationship. Yet, what a particular term means is often open to interpretation. Authors can also qualify their argument (limit or specify it) with words like should, might, usually, etc. Consider the list of propositions below. Assuming you trust that the author is being honest with you, which of these risks would you be most likely to take? Discuss your answers with other students to see how your interpretation of the words used may differ. 1. Pot belly pigs can usually be house-trained within a few months. 2. Borrowers who take small business loans over $10,000 are twice as likely to have a profitable business in two years than those who borrow less, even when accounting for loan payments. 3. For most students, decreasing their hours of paid work off campus increases their GPA and improves their odds of graduating in five years. 4. In all likelihood, eating dessert more than once a week will lead to diabetes. 5. Shaving your head can sometimes get you a date. 6. Working at an ice cream parlor often leads to getting free ice cream. 7. The absence of a regular exercise routine is a leading cause of heart attacks.

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Necessary, Sufficient, and Contributing Causes Another way to talk about the strength and reliability of a cause is to classify it as a necessary cause, a sufficient cause, or a contributing cause. These concepts can also be called necessary, sufficient, and contributing conditions.

Necessary Causes When a cause is a necessary cause, it is “necessary” for the cause to occur in order for the consequence to occur. That is, X must happen in order for Y to happen; Y only happens after X happens. For instance, there must be light for a plant to grow. Plants only grow when there is light. So, light is a necessary cause for the consequence of plants growing. However, a necessary cause does not always ensure the consequence will happen. For plants to grow, they also need nutrients from the soil and carbon dioxide. Nevertheless, sunlight is necessary for their growth. In terms of probability, when the necessary cause does not happen, the chance of the consequence happening is 0%. When the consequence happens, the probability that the necessary cause happened prior to the consequence is 100%.

Sufficient Causes For a sufficient cause, the consequence always follows the cause, but the consequence could also be caused by something else. If X happens, Y happens. But Y can happen without X. For instance, if I hit my head hard enough (cause), I will get a headache (consequence). Any time I hit my head that hard, I will get a headache. However, there are many other reasons that I might get a headache. I can get a headache without hitting my head. Therefore, hitting my head is a sufficient cause of a headache but not a necessary cause. In terms of probability, if the sufficient cause happens, the chance of the consequence happening is 100%. However, if the consequence occurred, the probability that the sufficient cause preceded it is unknown because any number of other things may have caused the consequence.

Contributing Causes Often, a number of causes can “add up” and increase the probability of the consequence. For instance, if you choose not to study and also choose to stay up late and eat junk food, the probability of your failing a test the next day increases. If a student not only studies hard but also has a teacher with more experience, their probability of a higher test score will increase. When a cause increases the probability of a consequence, we call it a contributing cause. That is, it contributes to the probability of the consequence. Table 3-1 shows some examples of necessary and sufficient causes. As you can see, sometimes a cause can be both sufficient and necessary (as with the example of the ice cube in Table 3-1).

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Table 3-1. Examples of Cause Types

Necessary Cause

Sufficient Cause

The car has some The other cars all kind of power source. wreck before finishing the race.

Contributing Cause The car has the most aerodynamic design.

Consequence A car wins a race.

The person is 18 years old.

The person watches or The person submits a legal ballot at a polling reads the news. center.

A person votes legally in a U.S. election.

The student showed up for the test.

The student answered every question correctly.

The student studied hard.

A student passes a test.

The temperature is above 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

The temperature is above 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

The sun is shining.

An ice cube melts.

Context of the Cause and Consequence Relationship An important question for any cause and consequence argument is, In what contexts is this relationship true? Context is a broad term that many students struggle with. A simple way might be to think of context as “time and place.” Considering context also includes comparing the past, present, and future. Perhaps in the year 1800 having more children raised a family’s economic quality of living because it meant more people who could earn wages or work on the family farm. However, in our own time, that may not be true. Perhaps having more children today means the economic quality of life goes down because each child uses more of the family’s resources but does not contribute to these resources by working. The change in context from one time to another changes the nature of the cause and effect relationship. Considering the context also means considering the physical location. Many people have studied the economic achievement gap in multiple states and even in countries outside the U.S. The education system in Finland is widely respected, and Finnish students often outperform U.S. students on standardized tests. So, do these same gaps between rich and poor students exist in Finland? It turns out that, based on standardized tests, they do. Although students in Finland generally score higher than U.S. students, the gap between rich and poor students is about the same in Finland as it is in the U.S. (Carnoy and Rothstein). In this case, we can say that the cause and consequence relationship is still true in other contexts, or at least in the context of Finland. Considering the context might also mean thinking of physical aspects of the location like altitude, distance to the nearest hospital, or even cultural aspects such as the languages, religions, and beliefs of local people. The idea of context is quite broad, and many things could be included beyond simply time and place. For instance, imagine a married couple you know got in an argument. The context for their argument includes the time and place, but it might also 30 Chapter 3

include things like their personal history, their relationship with in-laws, whether or not they have children, or what they had for breakfast. The context for a scientific observation might include the time of day and physical location, but it might also include the temperature, the amount of light, or the current windspeed at the time of the observation.

Influencing or Mitigating Factors A final step in evaluating or comparing a cause and consequence relationship is to consider other factors that might change the relationship. For instance, how does the factor of stay-at-home parents affect the cause and consequence relationship between poverty and education? Families may have lower incomes because one parent chooses to stay at home and focuses on raising the children. Do children who are poor but have a stay-at-home parent perform noticeably better than poor children without a stay-at-home parent? Does this help to close the achievement gap? When a factor weakens the relationship between cause and consequence, we call it a mitigating factor. For instance, if a child came from a poor community, but both her parents were highly educated, we would say that her parents’ education likely mitigates the influence of being poor. On the one hand, mitigating factors always decrease the strength or reliability of the relationship between cause and consequence. On the other hand, influencing factors could make the relationship stronger, weaker, more reliable, or less reliable. Considering these influencing or mitigating factors is an essential step in thinking through any cause and consequence argument.

Understanding Causal Arguments Causality and Logical Fallacies Because cause and consequence is such a powerful way of understanding and controlling our environment, philosophers and scientists have been studying causality for thousands of years. Philosophers study “logical fallacies”—errors of logic or deliberate attempts to trick an audience using false logic. Several logical fallacies apply specifically to cause and effect. Because these logical fallacies were often studied in the works of Roman philosophers, we still use the Latin names for these fallacies. It is important to remember that logical fallacies are generally considered bad; intelligent rhetors try to avoid them whenever possible. One of the most well-known logical fallacies focuses on mistaking cause and consequence for the order of events: Post hoc. Ergo, propter hoc. After that. Therefore, because of that. You may have heard this put a different way, as in the saying “correlation is not causation.” This logical fallacy, often shortened to just “post hoc,” happens when we believe one thing causes another, but in reality the two things only occur one after the other. That is, X does not cause Y. X only occurs before Y. 31 The Second Level of Stasis: Cause and Consequence

Consider this example. One day in September, Juan begins his day with a bowl of cereal. Later that day, he takes a test and does very well. On another day the next month, Juan again eats cereal and again does well on his test. In December, Juan is running late for school and eats a muffin instead. That day he does very poorly on his test. Based on these observations, Juan might conclude that the cereal is the cause of his good grades. However, he hasn’t proven that. He only knows that the two things seem to correlate (they often happen together). There are several reasons why two things might correlate, and a cause and consequence relationship is only one of those reasons. Perhaps, on the days when Juan ate cereal, he also got plenty of sleep. The extra sleep allowed him time to make cereal, and it also ensured he was well-rested and mentally sharp for his exam. Perhaps both the cereal and the good grades are consequences, and the true cause is the additional hours of sleep. It is also possible that the correlation between the Juan’s cereal and his test was simply due to chance. Juan based his assumption about cause and consequence on only three observations. Perhaps if he repeated this observation ten times, he would find there was no relationship at all. If there were no relationship between the two things, we could say Juan is guilty of a “post hoc” error, but we might also say that he has committed a “hasty generalization.” In a mistake of hasty generalization, we base our argument on too few examples. We have been too “hasty” (so fast we are not careful). We have leapt to a conclusion before examining enough evidence to be sure. When building and evaluating cause and consequence arguments, a sophisticated rhetor is on the lookout for both of these fallacies in their own logic and the logic of others.

Scientific Method and Experimental Design One way to avoid these errors in logic is to employ the scientific method. Scientists from astrophysicists to zoologists and social scientists from educators to psychologists employ scientific methods and experimental design in order to prove cause and consequence arguments. Studying scientific method and experimental design is important for many reasons. Many college students will use these ideas in their own work in fields ranging from criminal justice to mechanical engineering. However, every college student will need to investigate, evaluate, and support cause and effect arguments. You have probably already heard of the scientific method in other courses. The scientific method focuses on using observable data as evidence to test hypotheses. In the case of cause and consequence, the hypothesis is often that X does or does not cause Y. Particularly in the case of science, it is important that we prove this relationship with as much certainty as possible and that we do everything possible to ensure we are not mistaking causation for correlation (committing a post hoc error).

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Three Criteria for Causation When proving cause and consequence relationships, scientists and logicians both focus on three primary criteria: Time: also called “temporal precedence” Correlation: sometimes called “covariance” Elimination of Other Explanations: often through “controlling” for them Proving the first two criteria (time and correlation) is often fairly simple, but proving the third can be extremely challenging. The first criterion, “time,” simply states that the cause must occur before the consequence. X must happen before Y if X is the cause of Y. The second criterion, correlation, is a bit more complex. Earlier we used correlation to mean that when one thing happens, another also happens. For instance, when Juan eats cereal, Juan also gets good test scores. We could phrase this as “When X is present, Y is present.” To help prove two things correlate, the opposite should also be true; “When X is gone, Y is gone.” or “When X is gone, Y is more likely to be gone.” In some cases, we are more interested in the amount or degree to which something changes rather than its presence or absence. For instance, imagine Juan’s test is scored 0 to 100 rather than pass/fail. Now we have a proportion instead of a yes or no answer. We can also measure Juan’s sleep in number of hours. In this case, the correlation would sound something like this: When Juan gets more sleep, his test score goes up, but as Juan’s hours of sleep go down, his test score also goes down. Proving the first two criteria (time and correlation) is often fairly straightforward and can be done by simply observing a situation. In the case of Juan’s test, his theory passed on the criterion of time. His cereal was eaten before the test. He based his theory on only three observations, which might not be enough for a scientist to give him a “pass” on the criterion of correlation. They would likely want hundreds or thousands of observations and statistical analysis as well. With only three observations, these outcomes could simply be random chance. However, all three of his observations supported the correlation. His scores were high when cereal was present and low when cereal was absent. However, proving the final criterion (eliminating other causes) is usually the hardest both for scientists and for rhetors. On the third criterion, Juan has a lot of work to do in order to convince us of his claim. He must prove to us that it is the cereal and not something else that is leading to the high scores. We already talked about the possibility of sleep as one other alternate explanation. I’m sure you can think of many other explanations. So how can we do this? How can we eliminate or disprove these other possible causes?

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Experimental Design Scientists often eliminate other possible causes through experimental design. Many scientists agree that the best way to eliminate other causes is to create a “true experiment” in which there are two groups (a test group and a control group). You may have already seen or read about this type of experiment in a science lab or a social science class like General Psychology. The test group has the cause we are interested in, and the control group does not. The cause could be a characteristic of the group like group members’ sex or height, or the test group could get a “treatment.” In the cause of Juan and his test, the test group would get cereal (the treatment) while the control group would get waffles or some other tasty breakfast treat. The goal is to make the two groups as similar as possible in all the ways that matter (other than the cause we are testing). In the case of Juan and his cereal, we could come up with a list of things that might matter: sleep, intelligence, study hours, age, etc. The more similar we make these two groups, the more certain we can be that the cereal was the cause of the high test scores. Scientific experiments of this kind are often described in articles and published in academic journals, and their results make excellent evidence for exploring or supporting an argument of cause and consequence. Unfortunately, experimental designs are difficult to arrange in science and often impossible to arrange for rhetors trying to support an argument. Even without using an experiment, we can use logic and reason to try and eliminate other explanations. One good way to do this is to explain the causal mechanism of the cause you are supporting. If we can see a clear mechanism for one cause (like sleep), but we cannot identify a mechanism for another (like cereal), we are more likely to believe the cause that “makes sense” and has a clear mechanism. Another useful tactic here is to consider as many possible explanations as you can and then argue against each of them. If Juan wants to prove that the cereal is the true case, he should try to come up with reasons why sleep cannot be the cause. For instance, he could report to us that he got the same amount of sleep each time. Or, he could show examples of when he got very little sleep and still did well on a test.

Handling Uncertainty It would be wonderful to be 100% certain of every cause and consequence relationship and to have infinite time and money set aside to prove the argument. However, that is never the case. In many situations we must simply rely on logic and common sense. An editorial in the scientific journal Nature Methods explains it this way: One knows, without doing an experiment, that the street is wet on a rainy day because the rain has fallen. To be sure, this form of causal reasoning requires prior knowledge. One has seen the co-occurrence of rain and the wet street many times and been taught that rain causes wetness. And although such relationships are, in the strict sense, merely very good correlations, human beings routinely, and necessarily, use them to assign cause and effect (“Cause”). Every writer must decide for themselves how much evidence and investigation is needed to understand or prove the cause and consequence argument by considering their audience, their purpose, and the complexity of the topic.

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How to Begin Writing a Causal Argument When writing a cause and consequence argument (or any kind or argument), it is useful to begin by considering your audience and their needs and expectations. One rarely needs to prove an argument that the audience already agrees with. We could build an argument to prove that rain causes a street to be wet or that rich students have an advantage in U.S. schools. But why? Why take the time to build an argument if nearly everyone in our audience already believes this to be true? Another important element when considering a cause and consequence argument is how much we already know about the relationship. Imagine that every car more than four years old suddenly stopped running. No one suspected this event. Therefore, at the moment of it happening, we had no theories about the possible causes of the event. Gradually, there would be competing causes and theories proposed, but, at first, arguments would be simple—arguing only that a cause is possible, likely, or perhaps even certain. The complexity of the argument is limited by our limited knowledge of the topic, and simple arguments about possible causes are useful and likely to be interesting to the audience. Limited information can also influence arguments about unknown consequences. Imagine that the president of a college campus wants to implement an immediate ban on the sale of plastic pens on campus. The president likely has an intended consequence (reducing plastic waste). However, no one has ever tried such a ban before; we have no firsthand knowledge of the consequences anywhere, much less on that specific campus. It is quite likely the ban will have unintended consequences, consequences that were not part of our desired goal. To decide whether you support the ban, you would have to make educated guesses about the possible consequences or research similar bans in similar contexts. In both these cases, the arguments are limited by how much is known about the topic. People may have guesses, but in both cases, people probably have not had the time or resources to study the questions carefully. When we know little about the situation, simple arguments about cause and consequence are needed and useful for an audience. However, as more information is gathered about a situation, more complex arguments are often required. As with most arguments, it is often better to find a cause and consequence argument that people disagree about or one that we simply know very little about. We call these types of claims arguable claims with which someone could and probably will disagree before you prove it to be true. In Table 3-2, you can find situations where you might find a truly arguable claim of cause and consequence. When choosing a specific claim, consider both what is believed and what is known. When a lot is known about a subject, your argument needs to be more complex to make the subject interesting. If most people already believe your claim is true, there is little point in supporting it further.

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Table 3-2. Examples of Causal Inquiry Types

Type of Inquiry

Example

What is a potential cause of a consequence we don’t understand well?

Is exposure to lead paint a contributing cause of autism?

What is the consequence of a cause we don’t understand well (perhaps an unintended consequence)?

When humans inevitably migrate to avoid climate disasters, will this lead to the development of new religious practices?

Is one cause more important than others?

Among many factors that make Tom Brady a great football player, how important is his ability to stay calm under pressure?

Is one consequence more likely than others?

Continued hunting of sharks may have many impacts on coral reef environments, but what is the most likely outcome? Could it be the overall collapse of the local ecosystem as smaller animals overeat the available food sources?

Might a widely believed cause turn out to not be true?

Although many people blame video games for violent behaviors, does the evidence support this relationship?

Might a widely believed consequence turn Many experts predict that automation will steal jobs, out to not be true? but will relying on machines actually free humans to find more rewarding work?

Evidence When planning a cause and consequence argument, it is important to consider what kinds of evidence will be needed to sufficiently prove your claim. Most undergraduate students do not have the time or resources to prepare a scientific experiment with controlled conditions and hundreds of observations. Yet, in some cases, that kind of hands-on research is necessary to understand a cause and consequence relationship. For instance, imagine we wanted to investigate the first question in Table 3-2 about whether lead paint exposure contributes to the development of autism. Our most important audience for this study would be biological and medical scientists. Proving such a claim to that audience would take hours and hours of experiments and a sizeable investment of money. Such a project would be an unreasonable undertaking for a paper in an undergraduate class. Although some undergraduate students collaborate with faculty to take on projects like this, the projects can take years to complete. So how can we investigate a cause and consequence relationship without the resources or time for an experiment or hundreds of observations? A good first step is to begin by reading the current research and scholarship on this subject through academic journals, books, and other sources, as you’ll read about in chapter 7. We may find that these kinds of experiments have already been conducted, and we can use their findings as evidence to support our claim. Another useful step would be to research other causes that have been proposed for autism. We could spend part of our essay discussing those other possible causes and evaluating them compared to the cause that interests us (lead paint). Many people 36 Chapter 3

believe autism is caused by vaccines, and there are many scientific studies disproving this claim. We could research arguments against vaccines as a cause of autism and spend a bit of our paper reviewing them for our reader and then comparing these to the arguments linking autism to lead paint.

Writing and Supporting Cause and Consequence Claims As this chapter has suggested, proving cause and consequence relationships can be difficult and sometimes requires more time and resources than a student has in a single semester. A good first step in writing a paper making cause and consequence claims is to consider whether this is really a good topic for our paper in the first place. Perhaps we want to shift, narrow, or broaden our topic a bit. We could begin by trying to qualify our argument—limiting it by adding conditions or exceptions. For instance, we could say that lead paint is a “possible” cause. To prove it is possible, we may not need the level of detailed observation needed to prove it is certain. We might also argue that one cause is more likely than another. Again, we may not be able to prove the cause is true with scientific levels of certainty, only that it is more reasonable to accept that cause than another. Another important step in choosing your topic is ensuring that others have studied and written about this issue. If other writers have not discussed the topic and you are not able to gather your own evidence by observing or measuring the world around you, you may struggle to find ways to effectively support your argument. One useful strategy for an undergraduate student when writing about cause and consequence is to pay special attention to the causal mechanism. Even if we cannot conduct an experiment or find published experiments to read and discuss, we can still explain why and how a cause might lead to a consequence. A careful logical argument explaining the mechanisms and any intermediate causes can be extremely persuasive even without supporting experimental evidence. A good narrative (a story) can help to make the causal mechanisms clear and easy to understand. A compelling personal example can also be extremely effective in helping a reader to understand a causal mechanism and, thus, supporting your cause and consequence claim. While a good story or personal example can help to convince the reader, it is unlikely to prove the point completely unless it is paired with other evidence. Just like you, educated readers are on the lookout for logical errors like hasty generalizations, such as mistaking one story for a trend. A savvy rhetor often employs all of these strategies and types of evidence when supporting a cause and effect argument. Statistical evidence or experimental results are often most convincing when paired with a detailed discussion of just one example. Support you provide for your own cause is often strengthened by pointing out the weaknesses or absence of evidence for competing causes. When planning your own cause and consequence inquiry it is essential to carefully analyze the relationship between cause and consequence. Try using the ideas from this chapter to explore different aspects of the relationship. What follows is a graphic organizer you can use to guide your analysis. 37 The Second Level of Stasis: Cause and Consequence

Cause

Consequence

Causal Mechanism—Chain of Causes Ultimate Cause: Intermediate Causes: (list as many as needed)

Proximal Cause: Consequence:

Evaluation of the Cause and Consequence Relationship Strength:

Reliability:

Context:

Mitigating Factors:

Proving the Cause and Consequence Argument Time: Does the cause occur before the consequence? (Yes/No) Correlation: Does the consequence occur when the cause occurs? (Always, Usually, Rarely) Eliminate other Causes: See below Possible Causes

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Evidence and Reasoning Against This Cause

Field Example Megan McArdle on the Coming Burst of the College Bubble Megan McArdle Why are we spending so much money on college? And why are we so unhappy about it? We all seem to agree that a college education is wonderful, and yet strangely we worry when we see families investing so much in this supposedly essential good. Maybe it’s time to ask a question that seems almost sacrilegious: is all this investment in college education really worth it? The answer, I fear, is that it’s not. For an increasing number of kids, the extra time and money spent pursuing a college diploma will leave them worse off than they were before they set foot on campus. For my entire adult life, an education has been the most important thing for middleclass households. My parents spent more educating my sister and me than they spent on their house, and they’re not the only ones… and, of course, for an increasing number of families, most of the cost of their house is actually the cost of living in a good school district. Questioning the value of a college education seems a bit like questioning the value of happiness, or fun. Donald Marron, a private-equity investor whose portfolio companies have included a student-loan firm and an educational-technology startup, says, “If you’re in a position to be able to pay for education, it’s a bargain.” Those who can afford a degree from an elite institution are still in an enviable position. “You’ve got that with you for your whole life,” Marron pointed out. “It’s a real imprimatur that’s with you, as well as access to all these relationships.” That’s true. I have certainly benefited greatly from the education my parents sacrificed to give me. On the other hand, that kind of education has gotten a whole lot more expensive since I was in school, and jobs seem to be getting scarcer, not more plentiful. These days an increasing number of commentators are nervously noting the uncomfortable similarities to the housing bubble, which started with parents telling their children that “renting is throwing your money away,” and ended in mass foreclosures. An education can’t be repossessed, of course, but neither can the debt that financed it be shed, not even, in most cases, in bankruptcy. And it’s hard to ignore the similarities: the rapid run-up in prices, at rates much higher than inflation; the increasingly frenetic recruitment of new buyers, borrowing increasingly hefty sums; the sense that you are somehow saving for the future while enjoying an enhanced lifestyle right now, and of course, the mountain of debt.

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The price of a McDonald’s hamburger has risen from 85 cents in 1995 to about a dollar today. The average price of all goods and services has risen about 50 percent. But the price of a college education has nearly doubled in that time. Is the education that today’s students are getting twice as good? Are new workers twice as smart? Have they become somehow massively more expensive to educate? Perhaps a bit. Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economics professor who heads the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, notes that while we may have replaced millions of filing clerks and payroll assistants with computers, it still takes one professor to teach a class. But he also notes that “we’ve been slow to adopt new technology because we don’t want to. We like getting up in front of 25 people. It’s more fun, but it’s also damnably expensive.” Vedder adds, “I look at the data, and I see college costs rising faster than inflation up to the mid-1980s by 1 percent a year. Now I see them rising 3 to 4 percent a year over inflation. What has happened? The federal government has started dropping money out of airplanes.” Aid has increased, subsidized loans have become available, and “the universities have gotten the money.” Economist Bryan Caplan, who is writing a book about education, agrees: “It’s a giant waste of resources that will continue as long as the subsidies continue.” Promotional literature for colleges and student loans often speaks of debt as an “investment in yourself.” But an investment is supposed to generate income to pay off the loans. More than half of all recent graduates are unemployed or in jobs that do not require a degree, and the amount of student-loan debt carried by households has more than quintupled since 1999. These graduates were told that a diploma was all they needed to succeed, but it won’t even get them out of the spare bedroom at Mom and Dad’s. For many, the most tangible result of their four years is the loan payments, which now average hundreds of dollars a month on loan balances in the tens of thousands. A lot of ink has been spilled over the terrifying plight of students with $100,000 in loans and a job that will not cover their $900-a-month payment. Usually these stories treat this massive debt as an unfortunate side effect of spiraling college costs. But in another view, the spiraling college costs are themselves an unfortunate side effect of all that debt. When my parents went to college, it was an entirely reasonable proposition to “work your way through” a four-year, full-time college program, especially at a state school, where tuition was often purely nominal. By the time I matriculated, in 1990, that was already a stretch. But now it’s virtually impossible to conceive of high-school students making enough with summer jobs and part-time jobs during the school year to put themselves through a four-year school. Nor are their financially shaky parents necessarily in a position to pick up the tab, which is why somewhere between one half and two thirds of undergrads now come out of school with debt. In a normal market, prices would be constrained by the disposable income available to pay them. But we’ve bypassed those constraints by making subsidized student loans widely available. No, not only making them available: telling college students that those loans are “good debt” that will enable them to make much more money later.

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It’s true about the money—sort of. College graduates now make 80 percent more than people who have only a high-school diploma, and though there are no precise estimates, the wage premium for an elite school seems to be even higher. But that’s not true of every student. It’s very easy to spend four years majoring in English literature and beer pong and come out no more employable than you were before you went in. Conversely, chemical engineers straight out of school can easily make triple or quadruple the wages of an entry-level high-school graduate. James Heckman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, has examined how the returns on education break down for individuals with different backgrounds and levels of ability. “Even with these high prices, you’re still finding a high return for individuals who are bright and motivated,” he says. On the other hand, “if you’re not college ready, then the answer is no, it’s not worth it.” Experts tend to agree that for the average student, college is still worth it today, but they also agree that the rapid increase in price is eating up more and more of the potential return. For borderline students, tuition hikes can push those returns into negative territory. Effectively, we’ve treated the average wage premium as if it were a guarantee—and then we’ve encouraged college students to borrow against it. The result will be no surprise to anyone who has made the mistake of setting his or her teenager loose in a shopping mall with a credit card and no spending limit. Eighteen-year-olds demand amenities—high-speed Internet, well-upholstered classrooms, world-class fitness facilities—and in order to stay competitive, college administrators happily provide them. Then they raise the tuition for which the 18-year-olds are obediently borrowing the money. “We have an academic arms race going on,” says Vedder. “Salaries have done pretty well. Look at the president of Yale. Compare his salary now with his salary in 2000.” In 2000, Richard Levin earned $561,709. By 2009, it was $1.63 million. “A typical university today has as many administrators as faculty.” Vedder also notes the decrease in teaching loads by tenured faculty, and the vast increase in nonacademic amenities like plush dorms and intercollegiate athletics. “Every campus has its climbing wall,” he notes drily. “You cannot have a campus without a climbing wall.” Just as homeowners took out equity loans to buy themselves spa bathrooms and chef’s kitchens and told themselves that they were really building value with every borrowed dollar, today’s college students can buy themselves a four-year vacation in an increasingly well-upholstered resort, and everyone congratulates them for investing in themselves. Unsurprisingly those 18-year-olds often don’t look quite so hard at the education they’re getting. In Academically Adrift, their recent study of undergraduate learning, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa find that at least a third of students gain no measurable skills during their four years in college. For the remainder who do, the gains are usually minimal. For many students, college is less about providing an education than a credential—a certificate testifying that they are smart enough to get into college, conformist enough to go, and compliant enough to stay there for four years.

41 The Second Level of Stasis: Cause and Consequence

When I was a senior, one of my professors asked wonderingly, “Why is it that you guys spend so much time trying to get as little as possible for your money?” The answer, Caplan says, is that they’re mostly there for a credential, not learning. “Why does cheating work?” he points out. If you were really just in college to learn skills, it would be totally counterproductive. “If you don’t learn the material, then you will have less human capital and the market will punish you—there’s no reason for us to do it.” But since they think the credential matters more than the education, they look for ways to get the credential as painlessly as possible. There has, of course, always been a fair amount of credentialism in education. Ten years ago, when I entered business school at the University of Chicago, the careerservices person who came to talk to our class said frankly, “We could put you on a cruise ship for the next two years and it wouldn’t matter.” But how much, exactly, does credentialism matter? For years there’s been a fierce debate among economists over how much of the value of a degree is credentials and how much the education. Heckman thinks the credentialism argument—what economists call “signaling”—is “way overstated.” His work does show that a lot depends on outside factors like cognitive ability and early childhood health. But he says flatly that “no one thinks that schooling has no effect on ability.” That debate matters a lot, because while the value of an education can be very high, the value of a credential is strictly limited. If students are gaining real, valuable skills in school, then putting more students into college will increase the productive capacity of firms and the economy—a net gain for everyone. Credentials, meanwhile, are a zero-sum game. They don’t create value; they just reallocate it, in the same way that rising home values serve to ration slots in good public schools. If employers have mostly been using college degrees to weed out the inept and the unmotivated, then getting more people into college simply means more competition for a limited number of well-paying jobs. And in the current environment, that means a lot of people borrowing money for jobs they won’t get. But we keep buying because after two decades prudent Americans who want a little financial security don’t have much left. Lifetime employment, and the pensions that went with it, have now joined outhouses, hitching posts, and rotary-dial telephones as something that wide-eyed children may hear about from their grandparents but will never see for themselves. The fabulous stock-market returns that promised an alternative form of protection proved even less durable. At least we have the house, weary Americans told each other, and the luckier ones still do, as they are reminded every time their shaking hand writes out another check for a mortgage that’s worth more than the home that secures it. What’s left is…investing in ourselves. Even if we’re not such a good bet. Between 1992 and 2008, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded rose almost 50 percent, from around 1.1 million to more than 1.6 million. According to Vedder, 60 percent of those additional students ended up in jobs that have not historically required a degree—waitress, electrician, secretary, mail carrier. That’s one reason the past few decades have witnessed such an explosion in graduate and professional degrees, as kids who previously would have stopped at college look for ways to stand out in the job market.

42 Chapter 3

It is in that market that students may first, finally, have begun to revolt. For decades, when former English majors wondered how to get out of their dead-end jobs, the answer was “go to law school”—an effect that was particularly pronounced in economic downturns. In 2010 in the Los Angeles Times, Mark Greenbaum warned prospective lawyers that “the number of new positions is likely to be fewer than 30,000 per year. That is far fewer than what’s needed to accommodate the 45,000 juris doctors graduating from U.S. law schools each year.” That was the year that LSAT taking peaked, with 170,000 prospective lawyers signing up for the test. But then students apparently started heeding Greenbaum’s warning. Two years later that figure dropped to just 130,000, lower than it had been in more than a decade. Law-school applications also dropped, from 88,000 to 67,000. That’s a heartening sign for those of us who believe that we’ve been graduating too many unemployable lawyers. But as we saw with the housing and dotcom booms, what comes after a bubble is not usually a return to a nice, sustainable equilibrium; it’s chaos. Of course, the first thing to do when you’re in a hole is stop digging. But that still leaves you in a pretty big hole. Everyone seems to agree that the government, and parents, should be rethinking how we invest in higher education—and that employers need to rethink the increasing use of college degrees as crude screening tools for jobs that don’t really require college skills. “Employers seeing a surplus of college graduates and looking to fill jobs are just tacking on that requirement,” says Vedder. “De facto, a college degree becomes a job requirement for becoming a bartender.” We have started to see some change on the finance side. A law passed in 2007 allows many students to cap their loan payment at 10 percent of their income and forgives any balance after 25 years. But of course, that doesn’t control the cost of education; it just shifts it to taxpayers. It also encourages graduates to choose lower-paying careers, which diminishes the financial return to education still further. “You’re subsidizing people to become priests and poets and so forth,” says Heckman. “You may think that’s a good thing, or you may not.” Either way it will be expensive for the government. What might be a lot cheaper is putting more kids to work: not necessarily as burger flippers but as part of an educational effort. Caplan notes that work also builds valuable skills—probably more valuable for kids who don’t naturally love sitting in a classroom. Heckman agrees wholeheartedly: “People are different, and those abilities can be shaped. That’s what we’ve learned, and public policy should recognize that.” Heckman would like to see more apprenticeship-style programs, where kids can learn in the workplace—learn not just specific job skills, but the kind of “soft skills,” like getting to work on time and getting along with a team, that are crucial for career success. “It’s about having mentors and having workplace-based education,” he says. “Time and again I’ve seen examples of this kind of program working.” Ah, but how do we get there from here? With better public policy, hopefully, but also by making better individual decisions. “Historically markets have been able to handle these things,” says Vedder, “and I think eventually markets will handle this one. If it doesn’t improve soon, people are going to wake up and ask, ‘Why am I going to college?’?” 43 The Second Level of Stasis: Cause and Consequence

Questions 1. Megan McArdle offers several reasons for the increased cost of college debt over the past 40 years. Take one of her causes and create a detailed description of the causal mechanism. Identify the both ultimate and proximal cause. 2. McArdle draws an analogy between the economic crash after the 2008 housing bubble burst and a possible economic crash due to a “college bubble.” McArdle gives lots of evidence that college costs have increased, but what evidence does she give that this will lead to an economic collapse? Are you convinced by her argument that college debt will lead to an economic crash? Why or why not? 3. McArdle gives two specific causes for the increase in college tuition a) excessive spending by universities and b) the increase in subsidized loans available from the federal government. Imagine you are looking at the increase in tuition at just one college (perhaps your own) over the past ten years. You want to understand the influence of the two causes. Compare and evaluate these two causes using the criteria presented in the chapter. Which do you think is the strongest cause? Which is the most reliable cause? How is each cause affected by local context for this college? What mitigating or influencing factors might impact tuition at this college?

Works Cited Carnoy, Martin, and Richard Rothstein. “International Tests Show Achievement Gaps in All Countries, with Big Gains for U.S. Disadvantaged Students.” Economic Policy Institute, Jan. 2013, www.epi.org/blog/international-tests-achievementgaps-gains-american-students/. Accessed 21 Sept. 2019. “Cause and Effect.” Nature Methods, vol. 7, 2010, https://www.nature.com/articles/ nmeth0410-243. Accessed 21 Sept. 2019. “Fake News Generator.” Istockphoto. www.istockphoto.com/vector/color-rubegoldberg-style-fake-news-generator=gm822240896-133137435 Accessed 28 Oct. 2019. “How to Get Rid of a Mouse.” RubeGoldberg.com, https://www.rubegoldberg.com/ artwork/how-to-get-rid-of-a-mouse-2/. Accessed 23 Nov. 2019. McArdle, Megan. “Megan McArdle on the Coming Burst of the College Bubble.” Newsweek, 9 Sept. 2012, www.newsweek.com/megan-mcardle-coming-burstcollege-bubble-64671. Accessed 21 Sept. 2019. “Reason Cartoon #7548.” Andertoons, 2018, https://andertoons.com/reason/ cartoon/7584/cause-and-effect-is-fine-but-im-more-of-a-just-because-guy. Accessed 21 Sept. 2019. “Simple Alarm Clock.” RubeGoldberg.com, https://www.rubegoldberg.com/artwork/ simple-alarm-clock/. Accessed 23 Nov. 2019. Yeh, Stuart S. Solving the Achievement Gap: Overcoming the Structure of School Inequality. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 44 Chapter 3

Chapter The Third Level of Stasis: Questions and Claims about Value

4

Andrea Wenker

Take a close look at the image in Figure 4-1. How might we judge it? Is it a good image? Is it beautiful? Meaningful? Boring? If we wanted to judge its merits, to come to a shared conclusion about its value, how would we go about doing that? The first thing we might do, of course, is determine what it is that we’re judging and how it came to be. Is it a photograph or a painting? What is it? Who made it, and why was it made? These are questions of conjecture, definition, and cause. Once we have answered those questions, we will be better able to determine how we might evaluate the image.

Figure 4-1. Voyager 1’s Pale Blue Dot (Voyager).

Known as Pale Blue Dot (Voyager), the image in Figure 4-1 is a photograph of planet Earth taken by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers. In the photograph, Earth’s apparent size is less than a pixel; the planet appears as a tiny, bluish-white dot within the reddish band—a tiny dot against the vastness of space, among bands of sunlight reflected by the camera. At the request of astronomer and author Carl Sagan, Voyager 1, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System, was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and take one last photograph of Earth. 45

Sagan had to make a case for the operation—he had to argue for the value of the photograph. Turning the probe toward the sun might have damaged its instruments, and capturing this image of the earth would not provide any new data to inform scientific discovery. But Sagan argued that the image would have great cultural value that outweighed the very small risk to the instruments, and he made his case persuasively. Pale Blue Dot is now a well-known and deeply cherished image. In his book of the same name, Sagan advances a claim about its value, writing, “There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known” (9). In his arguments for taking the picture in the first place, and in this passage inviting readers to contemplate the image and its implications, Sagan makes evaluative claims. That is, he states the value of the image in terms of its good effects.

What Are Arguments about Value? The previous example demonstrates that evaluative arguments are very similar in structure to definitional arguments; however, instead of supporting assertions about the nature of things, as we do when we define or categorize a subject, evaluative arguments support claims about the qualities of things. This difference is key to recognizing, understanding, and creating convincing evaluations. Definitional arguments establish whether something fits into a category (is Pale Blue Dot art, science, neither, or both?). Evaluative claims answer questions about whether something is a good or bad example of its category (is it a good photograph?) or make an ethical judgment about something (was it right to take the picture at the risk of damaging Voyager 1’s instruments?). Questions addressed by the third level of stasis include: % What is the quality or value of a thing, action, event, or entity? % Is it ethical? Or is the entity behaving ethically? % How good or bad is it? % Will it bring about good or bad consequences?

Why Is It Useful to Learn about Value Arguments? It might seem at first that value claims are simply expressions of personal opinion or that arguments about quality indicate bias and are thus inherently irrational or even pointless. Evaluative arguments do express opinions, but, as with all arguments, they can be built upon sound or unsound foundations or supported well or poorly by evidence or shared assumptions. It follows, then, that determining a shared sense of the value of something bears as much potential for rational thinking as any other level of stasis. Evaluation arguments involve careful articulation and application of standards of judgment and thoughtful weighing of a subject’s qualities against those standards, so they help us to understand our own judgments better—and to be better 46 Chapter 4

judges—regarding issues from the trivial to the profound that we encounter in every aspect of our lives. Understanding how to recognize and construct sound evaluations is not just a matter of being able to sway others to our opinions but of being better judges of when doing so serves the greatest good.

Identifying Value Arguments We can view evaluative arguments as fitting in one of two types: 1) assessments of the qualities of a subject or 2) ethical or moral judgments. It is also helpful to pay attention to the strategies a rhetor uses to structure evaluative arguments. The previous two chapters describe strategies for definitional and causal arguments. Strategies for evaluative arguments amount to judicious combinations of those used in definitional and causal arguments, so knowing how to identify arguments at the first two levels of stasis helps in identifying those of the third. This section will explore the ways that rhetors engage their audiences in evaluations.

Arguments Evaluating the Qualities of a Subject Sound evaluations depend upon standards of judgment, or evaluative criteria that can be agreed upon by the rhetor and the audience. That is, both the rhetor and the audience must agree upon a list of qualities a thing must have, and to what degree it must have these qualities, in order to be judged in a certain way. For example, professors will often give students descriptions of the qualities a paper must demonstrate in order to earn an “A” grade. Such lists (often called rubrics) are evaluative criteria. They help professors to be consistent in applying standards as they grade students’ work, and they help professors and students see eye to eye—both in terms of the goals of the work and in judging its quality. Insofar as students are willing and able to apply those standards as they write, evaluative criteria are also helpful in guiding the writing process. Students can compare the features of their papers to each criterion described in the rubric and decide to what extent they think their paper meets each standard. They can compare their paper, quality-by-quality, to an ideal standard, decide to what degree it meets that standard, and thus make a determination about its merit as a member of the category of an academic paper. In this way, this type of evaluation closely resembles definitional arguments. In his book In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan presents an extended definitional argument in which he asserts that highly processed foods should not be called food at all. He calls them, rather, “edible foodlike substances” (11). He uses a characteristic-match structure (as we learned in the chapter on definition, the first level of stasis) to support his definition of food and to offer his readers something like a rubric to help them determine which edible substances deserve that label. But what if we agree that the highly processed, corn-based chips coated in neonorange powder in front of us are food? We might yet disagree about whether they are a delicious food, a nutritious food, or a sustainably produced food. In this case, “delicious,” “nutritious,” and “sustainable” are qualities of the food that we judge in evaluative arguments. In order to reach agreement about whether the snack is a good food, we could include these or other qualities as standards of judgment and apply them using a criteria-match structure, just as a professor does when grading a paper according to a rubric. 47 The Third Level of Stasis: Questions and Claims about Value

Of course, “delicious” is a personal assessment of a snack, and there may be little value in arguing about it; however, “nutritious” and “sustainable” are more objectively measurable, and these standards point to real issues that need resolution and action. Before we get to action (questions of policy and procedure), we must look to the effects of the snack’s production on the relevant natural and social environments or to the health effects of those who eat it. In both cases, causal arguments play a key role. If we can show that producing or eating the snack causes desirable or undesirable consequences, we might convince an audience that it is a good or a bad food. In this way, evaluative arguments employ strategies used in causal arguments to support conclusions about the value or quality of an entity or a thing.

Explicit and Implicit Evaluations It is important to remember, though, that judgments that we make or encounter in our everyday lives, and especially those presented in formal arguments like scholarly writing, will often not be presented in such simple, polarized terms. Scholarship exploring causal links between salty snack foods and heart disease is unlikely to present explicit claims that such foods are bad or that it is wrong to eat them. That is, the authors will not say outright that the food is bad. They might, however, conclude that the evidence is strong (a subtle value claim) that eating such foods in certain quantities causes heart disease (a causal claim). To support such conclusions, the article might demonstrate that the food has given qualities that are consistent with substances that cause heart disease, such as high salt content. Such an argument would employ criteria-matching to compare qualities and causal arguments to demonstrate causal links and bad effects. Likewise, the authors will probably not follow such a demonstration with an explicit evaluation of heart disease, but rather operate on the assumption that their readers will share a key presupposition of value: that heart disease is a bad thing. In this way, value arguments are often quite subtle or even implicit. A claim that a snack is high in salt is evaluative because it compares the amount of salt in the snack to an ideal standard for healthful salt consumption. Readers who presuppose that heart disease is bad, and who are convinced by the argument about the qualities of the snack and the effects of eating them, would reasonably infer, based on this presupposition and upon the evidence presented, that eating the snack in certain quantities is a bad thing. Figure 4-2 demonstrates a simplified visual representation of this chain of reasoning.

Explicit Reasons (given by rhetor) Chips are high in sodium and high sodium foods promote heart disease

AND

Implicit Presupposition (shared by audience) Heart disease is bad

SO

Value Claim (implied by rhetor or inferred by audience) Eating a lot of chips is bad for one’s health

Figure 4-2. Example chain of reasoning in an implicit value claim.

48 Chapter 4

Weighting Criteria Once shared criteria are established, there is yet another step that a rhetor must take before these criteria can be used effectively to evaluate a subject. The criteria must be weighted. That is, the rhetor must decide how much weight each criterion should carry in the evaluation, and, in order to move forward with an evaluative argument, the intended audience will need to agree upon this weighting. This might be done more or less objectively, depending in part on how well a feature can be quantified. Let us return to the example of evaluating a student’s paper. Language is, by nature, symbolic, and thus it is subjective, so it is not possible to measure each aspect of a paper with complete objectivity, as we could weigh an ingredient in a snack. We can, however, decide which features are most important given the context of an assignment and a desired learning outcome. Among other things, your research writing course focuses on critical thinking and using stasis theory as a heuristic for reading, writing, and research. With that in mind, your professor will probably assign more weight to concerns about the quality of your reasoning or the effectiveness of your use of stasis as a tool than to considerations of grammar and punctuation in your writing. Careful attention to the weighting of criteria is important because people are more likely to disagree about how to weight criteria than they are to disagree about the values themselves. Many professors have had the experience of a student upset about a low grade on a paper they both felt was very well written but failed to respond to the assignment prompt. A student might evaluate the paper as a “B” essay based primarily upon smart ideas, sound reasoning, logical organization, and perfect grammar and punctuation. The teacher might agree with the student about the paper’s demonstration of all these qualities and that these are all good qualities in a paper. Nevertheless, the teacher in this case might award a “D” or even an “F” because the student wrote a personal response to speech when the assignment called for an analysis of persuasive strategies presented by the speaker. Figure 4-3 provides a visual representation of this disagreement. The size of the boxes represents the relative weights that the professor and student might assign to each category. The boxes labeled “Fulfilled Assignment” represent the criterion that the paper did not meet, and the remaining boxes represent the criteria that the paper met. The image demonstrates how different weighting of criteria can lead to disagreement about a paper’s overall merit. In this case, the disagreement is not about what qualities make a good paper, or even what qualities the paper in question demonstrated; it is a disagreement about how much weight each criterion should carry. We see this kind of disagreement in larger debates that often seem intractable. Part of the reason for impasses on issues such as gun control, immigration policy, and national security is that we fail to notice precisely where we agree and disagree, and often we assume that because others disagree with us, they must not share the same values related to the issue. Disagreements such as these share a common set of competing values: in this case, freedom and security. We may assume that the disagreement is about whether someone values freedom or security, but the reality is usually that both sides value both things. Because it is not possible to have perfect freedom and perfect security at the same time, questions of national security, for

49 The Third Level of Stasis: Questions and Claims about Value

instance, always come to compromise between these competing values as they apply in each case. We fail to persuade when we wrongly assume a conflict of opposing values where the conflict actually resides in different weighting of shared values. Professor’s Weighting of Criteria

Student’s Weighting of Criteria

Fullfilled Assignment

Fullfilled Assignment Smart Ideas

Smart Ideas

Sound Reasoning

Sound Reasoning

Logical Organization

Logical Organization Perfect Grammar and Punctuation Perfect Grammar and Punctuation

Figure 4-3. Example of how the weight given to criteria for a written assignment dif-

fers between a professor and student.

Arguments Making Ethical or Moral Judgments To say that value arguments help us determine whether a thing or entity is “good” or “bad” is a simplification that serves a purpose, but only to a point. Close examination of value arguments reveals great potential for nuance, and answers to value questions usually fall somewhere on a spectrum. In order to engage responsibly in conversations regarding evaluations, we must take care not to get swept up in oversimplifications and polarized views.

50 Chapter 4

Important nuances reveal themselves even in seemingly trivial examples (like the value of a snack chip) and personal examples (like the relative merit of any given paper). They become increasingly complex and important when we attempt to evaluate difficult issues with deep or broad significance. We often encounter this kind of evaluation in arguments that make a moral or ethical judgment. When we judge the practice of slavery to be wrong, we rest our judgment upon shared moral or ethical principles, or presuppositions of value. In this case, we share beliefs about human rights that slavery, by definition, violates. We value freedom, and we deem it to be a right. We therefore deem slavery to be unethical or immoral because it denies others’ basic freedoms. (We can see in this judgment the importance of first agreeing upon the definition and effects of slavery in order to judge its ethical quality.) Slavery works as a ready example of an ethical or moral issue because our belief in its wrongness has become a commonplace. That is, in our culture and many others, the relevant values are now widely agreed-upon, so convincing an audience of the wrongness of slavery is often neither difficult nor even necessary. Most readily believe it is wrong. Indeed, because many people so deeply disapprove of and even regret the history of slavery in the United States, it might even seem a non-issue— after all, it has been decided and implemented in policy in our national and state Constitutions (though definitional debates regarding what constitutes slavery yet continue to influence policy). Be this as it may, we do yet need to resolve issues in the evaluative level of stasis related to that history. What happens, for instance, when we need to make decisions about the quality of working conditions that do not meet the legal definition of slavery, but are nevertheless deeply exploitive or abusive? What if we need to discuss how well those conditions are monitored or how well labor laws are enforced? Very often in such cases, ethical judgments are more challenging, but we need to be able to agree upon them in order to alter or maintain our circumstances in productive ways.

Selecting and Supporting Criteria with Audience in Mind In such cases, we would need to observe what is happening (conjecture and definition), why it is happening (cause), and what effects it is having (consequences). Once we know these things, we are ready to come to terms on their moral or ethical implications. How would we go about establishing our standards of judgment? Our selection of ethical considerations as standards of judgment should surely be sincere, but they also need to be selected—and sometimes supported—with audience in mind. For a U.S. audience, we might draw values from our founding documents, which articulate a shared set of ethical standards defining a national identity. The Declaration of Independence famously supplies us with three such values: “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” (“Declaration”). We could also rely on our agreements with international bodies, such as the Charter of the United Nations, which the United States has obligated itself to uphold. For a religious audience, moral precepts that define a given faith could provide the necessary criteria.

51 The Third Level of Stasis: Questions and Claims about Value

The point is twofold. First, when we make ethical or moral judgments in an argument, we must establish and rely on ethical or moral principles as evaluative criteria, rather than simply looking at qualities, as we might in determining the deliciousness of a snack or the merit of a paper. In such cases, we rely heavily on causal arguments, demonstrating effects that uphold or violate a given value. Second, in order to establish shared standards of judgment for this kind of argument, we must consider our audience in terms of the values that serve as a point of identification with a group. We can appeal to Americans by invoking values expressed by our Constitution, to members of religious groups by invoking values expressed in holy texts. When rhetors can find the places where the values of multiple groups overlap, a powerful argument can be made. This is in part because it allows rhetors to reach a wider audience but also because some individuals will identify with multiple groups, and thus the argument might appeal to their values in multiple capacities.

Critically Reading Value Arguments As always when reading rhetorically, we must consider the rhetor’s purpose in advancing an argument, the intended audience, and the constraints and opportunities afforded to the rhetor by the situation surrounding the text. The following are some essential considerations specific to critically reading a value argument. The order of these questions is a suggestion—and an excellent place to start—but what is most important is thorough consideration of the elements of an evaluation and attention to the interplay among them. Answering questions about the rhetor’s chosen criteria, for example, might lead to important clues about the rhetor’s intended audience that you had not previously noticed. It might feel a little messy at first as you follow each lead in the following list, but, with practice, you will develop fluency in this kind of reading and questioning of texts, and the recursive nature of the process will feel more natural.

Questions to Ask When Reading Value Arguments 1. What is the subject of the evaluation? A rhetor might evaluate natural or constructed objects, people or legal entities, actions, naturally occurring or humancaused events, or abstractions. 2. Who is the intended audience? Is this audience named by the rhetor, or does the publication venue offer clues? What ethical or moral precepts does the rhetor assume and what authorities does the rhetor rely upon to supply or support such precepts? 3. What specific criteria, explicit or implicit, does the rhetor use as standards of judgment? Consider the source of criteria and how they are weighted. 4. Does the rhetor make any case for the weighting of criteria that is used?

52 Chapter 4

5. How does the rhetor support the evaluation? Rhetors might use a criteria-match strategy, rely on cause and consequence arguments, or both. Look for comparisons to an ideal standard or demonstrations of good or bad consequences. 6. What is the rhetor’s judgment of the subject? Attend to adjectives that the rhetor uses to describe the subject. 7. Consider the quality of the reasoning. Do the standards of judgment seem reasonable to assume, or are they well-supported, for the intended audience? Are comparisons fair and reasonable? Is evidence adequate? Does the rhetor avoid sweeping or polarized judgments that fail to account for complexities or nuances?

Writing Evaluative Arguments The pre-drafting steps that follow are designed to help you to consider and construct an evaluative argument. Spend a few minutes freewriting in response to each prompt in order to collect your thoughts. Play around with some different ways of ordering your arguments before you draft. 1. Consider and decide who your audience will be. Think about who can be persuaded of your evaluation and why you would want to persuade them. 2. Select and describe the subject of your evaluation. 3. Consider and determine fitting criteria you will use to evaluate your subject. 4. Decide how you will weight your criteria—that is, decide what relative value each criterion should carry. 5. Determine whether you will need to provide support for your selection of criteria or weighting of criteria. If so, what kinds of sources would be perceived by your intended audience as authoritative on the subject? What consequences associated with your subject might you appeal to? 6. Sketch an informal outline of your paper. Consider the relative effectiveness for your intended audience of asserting your judgment from the beginning or of reserving your judgment until the end, when you have laid out your arguments. Which criteria, if any, will be explicit, and which implicit? Must a case be made for certain criteria, or weighting of criteria, before others can be addressed?

53 The Third Level of Stasis: Questions and Claims about Value

Field Example The Climate Mitigation Gap: Education and Government Recommendations Miss the Most Effective Individual Actions Seth Wynes and Kimberly A. Nicholas

In the following article from Environmental Research Letters (2017) Wynes and Nicholas identify the four most effective actions that individuals can take in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. They judge education and government documents as failing to emphasize these practices and focus instead on low-impact practices. Their conclusion finds a shift in focus to be important in creating a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions sufficient to mitigate climate change.

Abstract Current anthropogenic climate change is the result of greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere, which records the aggregation of billions of individual decisions. Here we consider a broad range of individual lifestyle choices and calculate their potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in developed countries, based on 148 scenarios from 39 sources. We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less). Though adolescents poised to establish lifelong patterns are an important target group for promoting high-impact actions, we find that ten high school science textbooks from Canada largely fail to mention these actions (they account for 4% of their recommended actions), instead focusing on incremental changes with much smaller potential emissions reductions. Government resources on climate change from the EU, USA, Canada, and Australia also focus recommendations on lower-impact actions. We conclude that there are opportunities to improve existing educational and communication structures to promote the most effective emission-reduction strategies and close this mitigation gap.

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1. Introduction While 195 nations have agreed to limit the global average temperature increase to ‘well below 2 °C’ under the December 2015 Paris Agreement (UNFCCC 2015), most current pathways to stay under the 2 °C limit assume the future use of unproven technologies to achieve negative emissions (Fuss et al 2014). This has prompted calls (Anderson 2015) for near-term, profound emissions cuts that may require changes in lifestyle choices from the high-carbon individuals estimated to produce nearly 50% of emissions (Gore 2015). National policies and major energy transformations often take decades to change locked-in infrastructure and institutions, but behavioural shifts have the potential to be more rapid and widespread (i.e. reduced reliance on cars can begin immediately, whereas improved power plant efficiency occurs on a decadal time frame (Pacala and Socolow 2004)). It is especially important that adolescents are prepared for this shift. They still have the freedom to make large behavioural choices that will structure the rest of their lives, and must grow up accustomed to a lifestyle that approaches the 2.1 tonnes per person annual emissions budget necessary by 2050 to meet the 2 °C climate target (Girod et al 2014). Furthermore, adolescents can act as a catalyst to change their household’s behaviour (Maddox et al 2011). While the cumulative emissions impact of any behaviour depends both on the magnitude of the action and its behavioural plasticity (the proportion of the public likely to adopt a given action assuming the most effective intervention (Dietz et al 2009)), the first step to understanding cumulative impact is to know the effectiveness of the action for a single person. Here we investigate a comprehensive suite of lifestyle choices to identify those with the greatest potential to reduce individual greenhouse gas emissions. We compare our findings with recommendations from high school science textbooks and government resources. Previous studies have already evaluated some of the most effective actions for reducing energy consumption (Attari et al 2010, Gardner and Stern, 2008) and mitigating climate change through personal actions (Girod et al 2014), though individuals have a poor understanding of which actions are more effective than others (Attari et al 2010). Our research builds on these studies by including additional actions that have greater emissions reduction potential but have not been previously evaluated. Our methodology makes each action comparable for individuals making the decision to undertake them, and our analysis of official educational and government materials shows the extent to which public institutions currently recognize the importance of and encourage these behaviours.

2. Methods 2.1. High-Impact Actions To identify our high-impact actions, we analyzed the literature to compile a candidate list of actions for emissions analysis. To choose data sources, we first used peerreviewed literature with a life-cycle approach where available (to analyze the impact of diet and personal vehicles), followed by government reports, grey literature or carbon calculators (green energy, aviation). We analyzed studies from all countries we could find, but in the main text only report results from developed nations (the 55 The Third Level of Stasis: Questions and Claims about Value

full range of studies are available in the online supplementary materials available at stacks.iop.org/ERL/12/074024/mmedia). The choice to focus on developed regions was motivated by the higher emission and consumption levels in those regions, which demand steeper emissions cuts in order to attain the same, low per capita emissions target that will avoid dangerous planetary warming (Girod et al 2013). For calculations, all actions were framed in such a way that they would take the maximum possible effect. For instance, recycling is framed as recycling comprehensively for a year, a plant-based diet is framed as avoiding all meat, and purchasing renewable energy is framed as purchasing all possible household energy from renewable sources for a year, even though it would be possible to perform these actions as half-measures. Since the unit of analysis was the individual, we wanted country-specific data to inform the most relevant individual choices possible. Therefore, household and vehicular actions were divided by the average household or vehicle occupancy of the country where the study was performed to yield results measured in tonnes of CO2-equivalent per year (tCO2e per year) per individual. The types of greenhouse gases included in these calculations varied with the methodologies of the different studies or sources. We also made calculations using country or region-specific data, such as average annual kilometers travelled per vehicle in a region (except where study parameters explicitly stated alternative values), to generate final values that are representative for each study area (see supplementary materials 1). For the action ‘have one fewer child,’ we relied on a study which quantified future emissions of descendants based on historical rates, based on heredity (Murtaugh and Schlax 2009). In this approach, half of a child’s emissions are assigned to each parent, as well as one quarter of that child’s offspring (the grandchildren) and so forth. This is consistent with our use of research employing the fullest possible life cycle approach in order to capture the magnitude of emissions decisions. In the case of aviation, some carbon calculators made use of a radiative forcing index, which accounts for the additional warming effects of gases other than CO2 produced during air travel. Though this results in higher estimates than if the index had not been used, the life cycle studies which we also included for aviation (and which did not use radiative forcing) provided similar final values. See supplementary materials 2 for calculations. In practice, the emissions benefits of undertaking high-impact actions may be reduced by substitution effects (where avoidance of emissions from one action is replaced by emissions from another action) and rebound effects (where reduced consumption in one area leads to increased consumption elsewhere). For instance, the emissions saved from living car-free may be lower than we calculated if public transit replaces car travel instead of biking or walking (living car free represents all the emissions associated with the life cycle of owning a car in our methodology). But even if the number of kilometers travelled remains constant, a switch from driving a sedan to taking public transit has been shown to reduce emissions by 26%–76% (Chester et al 2013). Since data that included rebound effects were only available for some actions, we excluded rebound effects to maintain comparability between actions.

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2.2. Textbook Analysis Textbooks are a useful indicator of the content that students are receiving in classrooms; they are based on government-mandated curriculum documents and serve as a resource for both students and teachers. This may be especially true for subjects such as climate change where a teacher is more likely to be uncomfortable with the material (Kim and Fortner 2006, Chambers 2011). Ten textbooks used in seven of Canada’s ten provinces were therefore analyzed (see supplementary materials 3). To determine which science textbooks are in use in each province we relied on the experience of the first author as a secondary school science teacher in Canada, and also contacted curriculum writers and educators from provinces where textbook usage could not be easily determined. The provinces covered by our analysis represent more than 80% of Canada’s student population (we were unable to obtain the textbooks used by the provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, and Nova Scotia). Only the textbook chapters directly addressing climate change were analyzed. Statements from the textbooks were identified as suggested actions when they included direct recommendations (e.g. ‘eat less meat’), or were directed at the reader using pronouns such as ‘you’ or ‘we’. Statements using ‘individuals’ and ‘consumers’ often explained sources of emissions without suggesting how to reduce those emissions, and were therefore not counted. Due to the large number of unique recommendations found in textbooks, we grouped similar specific recommendations into various categories. For example, suggestions such as ‘use cloth shopping bags’ and ‘purchase a reusable water bottle’ would both be listed under the category ‘reuse’. Where possible, these categories are the same in the analysis of textbooks and government documents. For each textbook, we recorded the frequency of each type of suggestion. In our coding system, a single sentence referring to a specific topic was given the same value as a paragraph devoted to a single topic. If a paragraph on a broad topic (e.g. household heating) included many specific suggestions (turn down thermostat, purchase a more efficient heater), then each specific suggestion was counted towards the total.

2.3. Government Documents To analyze broad societal mitigation recommendations, we chose three developed regions with high per-capita emissions and government documents available in English: Australia (average per-capita emissions of 16.3 tCO2 per year), Canada (13.5 tCO2 per year), and the United States (16.4 tCO2 per year), as well as a lower-emission case, the European Union (6.7 tCO2 per year) (World Bank 2016). We identified the most authoritative and relevant set of recommendations from that region indicating how their citizens can help mitigate climate change, contacting government representatives for clarification where multiple possible documents were found. The frequency of individual recommendations was recorded using the same methods as described in the analysis of science textbooks.

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3. Results From analyzing 148 scenarios of the climate impact of individual behaviours in ten individual countries (with some studies additionally considering the whole EU region), drawn from 39 sources, we have identified a dozen actions, including four recommended actions that are of substantial magnitude throughout the developed world (see supplementary materials 4): having one fewer child, living car free, avoiding air travel, and eating a plant-based diet (figure 1). Each of these actions was high-impact (reduces an individual’s greenhouse gas emissions by at least 0.8 tCO2e per year, about 5% of current annual emissions in the US or Australia) regardless of study parameters. They are also ‘best in class’—most fully achieving emissions reductions within a given domain (e.g. car travel), and with the potential to contribute to systemic change (for example, living car-free reduces the need to build more roads and parking spaces, and supports higher-density urban design, which more efficient cars do not). We originally hypothesized that two additional actions, not owning a dog and purchasing green energy, would also fit our criteria for recommended high-impact actions, but found both to be of questionable merit. Only two studies with conflicting results could be found for dog ownership (Eady et al 2011, Rushforth and Moreau 2013), so we have not included it in figure 1 (see supplementary materials 2). For green energy, researchers have described problems with double-counting in several European countries (Hast et al 2015), as seen in the near-zero emission reductions for Great Britain in figure 1. Still, in regions with carbon-based energy grids such as Australia and North America, green energy has the potential to greatly reduce emissions associated with home energy use, which is why we retained this action in figure 1. Previous studies that compare the effectiveness of various actions tend to focus on moderate-impact actions (saving between 0.2 and 0.8 tCO2e year) or even low-impact actions (saving < 0.2 tCO2e). Compare for instance two actions cited as among the most effective ways to reduce household energy usage (hang drying clothing (0.21 tCO2e) and washing clothing in cold water (0.25 tCO2e) (Attari et al 2010)) with any of the high-impact actions shown in green (figure 1). Our recommended high-impact actions are more effective than many more commonly discussed options (e.g. eating a plant-based diet saves eight times more emissions than upgrading light bulbs). More significantly, a US family who chooses to have one fewer child would provide the same level of emissions reductions as 684 teenagers who choose to adopt comprehensive recycling for the rest of their lives.

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To illustrate the implications of our findings, consider that per capita emissions must reach 2.1 tCO2e by 2050, if warming of the planet is to be kept below 2 °C (Girod et al 2013). Using values from figure 1, we estimate that an individual who eats meat and takes one roundtrip, transatlantic flight per year emits 2.4 tCO2e through these actions, exhausting their personal carbon budget, without accounting for any other emissions. It would help meet climate goals if such an individual chose to shift her or his behaviour, as technological advances may be unable to sufficiently reduce emissions from these two actions even by 2050 (Girod et al 2013). These two sectors are an agreed area of focus for reduced demand, as aviation is likely to be the last of all transport modes to mainstream low-carbon standards (Kivits et al 2010) and studies show we cannot expect to stay under a 2 °C limit without at least some shifts in diet (Hedenus et al 2014).

Emissions savings (tCO2e per year)

120 100 80 60 40 20 4

KEY

USA

High-Impact (>0.8 tCO2e)

Moderate-Impact (0.2-0.8 tCO2e)

Low-Impact (