Writing and philo-writing

Writing is the mind’s portable workbench of ideas, a means of holding your thoughts steady for a moment while you chip and chisel away to create meaning. You can choose to keep your words to yourself for a while or share them with others. You can discard them without anyone knowing they ever existed. And the wonder of it is that the writer’s workbench can accommodate a project of any size from a brief note to a long novel or a life journal.

What's good for the individual is also good for the collective. Writing holds people’s thoughts in place so others can reflect on them and respond.  

In writing, we have at our disposal one of the greatest cognitive tools ever known to humankind. In schools we have a potential haven for dialogue about things that matter and a population of individuals with experiences and abilities that are both common and diverse.

You would expect to see, if not a hotbed for developing inventiveness and judgement, then at least a place where those two essential capacities are encouraged through regular talk and writing. But the ecosystems of schools are often not conducive to reflection and dialogue.
Over the last twenty years, I have been involved in a movement to engage students of all ages in philosophical enquiry with their peers. I’ve been heartened by how willing and able they are to reflect, through talk, on what to believe, do and value.

Yet despite the rewards that philosophical talk alone can bring, I’ve come to the conclusion that philosophical writing (philo-writing) should be used more regularly to support, enhance and communicate philosophical thinking.

When to philo-write
Philo-writing is always in a close relationship with both oral dialogue and private reflection. There are many opportunities to use it. For example:

• To record ideas for future refinement or elaboration.
• As a vehicle for private reflection
• To gather questions or key themes leading to enquiry through oral dialogue.
• As a means of activating prior knowledge and listing ‘what one knows’ prior to oral dialogue, writing or reading.
• As a way of remembering one’s research about a topic under examination.
• As a way of remembering questions or claims to check later through research.
• As a ‘thinking break’ during an oral dialogue to gather and sort ideas.
• As an alternative means of having a dialogue with others.
  
• As a way of gathering thoughts immediately after an oral dialogue.
• As a means of reflecting on an oral dialogue or a sequence of dialogues.
• As a means of responding to reading in preparation for oral dialogue or further writing.
• As a means of preparing one’s ideas for an audience.
• As a means of communicating one’s ideas to multiple audiences.
  

This list suggests a culture of learning and teaching in which teachers and students value dialogue. Writing supports the dialogical process and dialogue supports the writing. Learning in all subject areas could benefit from episodes of philo-writing to support a dialogical culture.

Audience and dialogue
The term ‘writing for an audience,' in the sense that it is used in school literacy lessons, is not the same as writing in a context of dialogical learning and teaching as intended here. Writing for an audience doesn't necessarily assume a response, writing dialogically does. When we ask students to write for an audience, we often mean an imaginary audience who, in reality do not respond. However, when writing is thought of dialogically, there is always an intended response, even if the writing is for oneself.

The most accessible audience for students is other students, their teachers and their families. When students write dialogically, they can engage these audiences.

So, philo-writing can be long or short but it arises from dialogue and leads back into dialogue. That's not to say that we shouldn’t introduce students to the concept of different audiences and appropriate expression for those audiences but that ongoing dialogue through talk, reading and writing should be paramount.

‘Presence’: a significant concept for dialogue

Advocates of dialogue should give due weight to the concept of ‘presence’ – presence, for example, of difference points of view, different interpretations of information, different life experiences and perspectives and different notions of key concepts.

Chaïm Perelman and Lucy Olbrechts-Tyteca (1971) remind us that ‘presence is an essential factor in argumentation and one that is far too much neglected in rationalistic conceptions of rationality’ (p.118). They quote a Chinese folk story to emphasise their point that in all deliberative situations, much depends on what is seen and not seen, heard and not heard: 


‘A king sees an ox on its way to sacrifice. He is moved to pity for it and orders that a sheep be used in its place. He confesses he did so because he could see the ox, but not the sheep.’ (p.116)

How then could a broad range of perspectives be brought to a dialogue? One educational initiative that tackled this problem devised the term ‘rivalling’: the practice of ‘learning to seek alternative explanations and perspectives within and across competing discourses’ (Flower et al, 2000, p.5). Rivalling – or taking a rival hypothesis stance – was described as a practice of enquiry that was used mostly to ‘come to grips with culturally charged open questions’ (Flower et al, 2000, p.60). Linda Flower and her colleagues at Carnegie Melon University ran an ‘intercultural community literacy programme’ that encouraged students to suggest community problems and generate proposals. The process of getting to the proposals required students to seek ‘rival hypotheses’ gleaned from research, interviews with others in the community and self-reflection. Students presented proposals and supporting arguments at public meetings where further dialogue was encouraged. Flower writes: ‘… we attempted to ground our relationships on a shared problem and an agenda for action.’ In this project, she says her team was trying to respond, ‘to a bell hooks question: on what do blacks and whites build a relationship?’ (Flower et al, 2000, p. 25).

The ‘rivalling’ project demonstrates the feasibility and potential benefits of associations between philosophical reflection, community engagement, historical and sociological research and rhetorically competent exposition. Perhaps such associations suggest one way forward for philosophical dialogue with young people and in communities. There are some parallels with the idea of citizens’ assemblies but with reduced participation and scope.

The dark side of Plato’s cave

 Symbols can outlast the arguments they serve to illustrate.

The allegory of the cave presented by Plato in The Republic (514a-520a) is embedded in western culture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave). Works of fiction such as ‘The Matrix’ have built on Plato’s vision of a community of cave dwellers constrained by the orthodox, yet false, beliefs they have acquired by watching shadows on their cave walls and mistaking them for reality. One of their number escapes his shackles and glimpses an authentic reality outside the cave but his wisdoms are dismissed by the cave-entombed majority.

Plato likens the rejection of the enlightened escapee by the cave people to the likely rejection of a philosophical truth seeker in society. Plato’s truth seeker is capable of self-correction – not just once in response to a great revelation but as an ongoing labour. He is aware of his own ignorance and fallibility.

Nowadays, a host of zealous truth claimers and conspiracy theorists pronounce to the world as if they are the ones who have escaped a cave of ignorance. They look back at those who remain in the cave with pity and disdain, for surely they are brainwashed by mainstream media and prevailing expert opinion on matters such as climate change or Covid-19.

The humility of the genuine truth seeker is not the modus operandi of the self-aggrandising truth claimer. The virtue of modesty, the painstaking work of acquiring expertise and the patience to sift though evidence before before pronouncing, do not serve them well. And yet they appear to thrive.

This is the dark side of Plato’s allegory as it plays out in modern times.

Philosophical enquiry and rhetorical invention

 It is surprising that the arts of philosophical enquiry and rhetorical argument have not been conjoined by advocates of philosophy in schools. It is surely important for people to reflect on a question carefully, pay attention to different standpoints, assess reasons and admit fallibility. However, they are disempowered if they cannot defend their beliefs or promote their considered commitments effectively.

 Philosophers frequently define their practice against rhetoric. The one involves rigorous truth seeking, the other is no more than manipulation by clever use of language and persuasive techniques. This is a lazy, if convenient, generalisation. Rhetorical competence is an important life skill. Rhetorical invention in the moment often reveals new insights that contribute to further inquiry.

 

 Cicero in ‘The Orator’ complains about philosophers claiming the great topics of politics and ethics as their own preserve.

“All the academies and schools of philosophy will, I do believe, raise the cry that all these matters are their exclusive province, and in no way whatever the concern of the orator. But when I have allowed that they may debate these subjects in their holes and corners, to pass an idle hour, it is to the orator none the less that I shall entrust and assign the task of developing with complete charm and cogency the same themes which they discuss in a sort of thin and bloodless style.” (p.43).

Philosophy in schools doesn’t always have to be carried out with people sat in a circle taking turns to speak and listen, with little time to embellish their arguments or find the right words to express the meanings they want to convey. Teachers could help their students recognise and use rhetorical techniques. They could also allow for episodes of argumentative performance by students and adopt those performances as starting points for further enquiry. Often, when people respond to the challenge of rhetorical invention, their efforts can refresh and re-energise a dialogue that has reached a point of stasis. Minority viewpoints can be articulated without interuption. Philospophical enquiry and rhetorical invention can be friends.

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 * Cicero translated Sutton, E. W.  (1948), Cicero on the Orator Books 1–2, Harvard University Press.

Accusation in a mirror

Recently, I came across an article that I think is interesting and useful. It highlights a rhetorical device called "accusation in a mirror" (AiM). The article is mainly about genocide and the author notes that, very often, the preferred method of preparing for, and then igniting, a genocide is to claim that members of the target group are going to do what, in fact, you want your followers to do. “They plan to kill us!” is understood as a call for “them” to be massacred (hence the mirror metaphor). The author writes: “Before one's enemies accuse one truthfully, one accuses them falsely of the same misdeed." He makes a good case that this kind of rhetoric can be a dependable predictor of violence: “AiM has six interrelated functions: to shock, to silence, to threaten, to insulate, to legitimize, and, finally, to motivate or incite.”

When I think about it, the AiM is often used for a range of purposes. For example, Donald Trump seeks to propagate fake news so first he accuses his critics of producing fake news. When he intends to steal an election, he accuses the other side of stealing an election.

Elites seek to enhance their freedom, power and influence so they accuse people who stand in their way of constituting an elite. People want to produce a chilling effect on criticism of themselves so they accuse their critics of trying to silence them.

In education
In relation to education and critical thinking, I think the AiM is a phenomenon that teachers should draw students’ attention to. Teachers could, for example, suggest that for every sweeping accusation in civic discourse, students should not only check the veracity of the claim but also attend to the possibility of a mirror image in the behaviour of the accuser.

Sources
FREE ARTICLE: Kenneth L. Marcus, Accusation in a Mirror. https://lawecommons.luc.edu/luclj/vol43/iss2/5/