WikiInfoLit Unit 5 Page 3
How To Know If Something Is Objective
Our students tend to be able to tell fact from opinion, but what they have more difficulty with is opinion masquerading as fact, or unsubstantiated and poorly substantiated fact. The rules of argumentation and rhetoric are no longer taught as part of "a liberal education," but they help our students to articulate the funny gut feelings that they get about information sources that are not strictly objective. We are not stuck teaching these things out of the textboooks that were abandoned decades ago; the skeptics and rationalists movement has taken up the topic and given it a much more casual, concise treatment.
Watch this clip from Michael Schermer's Baloney Detection Kit.
Questions For Reflection
You do not need to post your answers to questions for reflection. However, for your own benefit, I recommend that you write it out as if you were communicating your ideas to someone else. If you do want to post your answers, post them to the WikiInfoLit Google Group under Unit 5, General Discussion
- Michael Schermer talks about the "preponderance of evidence." There can be many ideas, and most of those ideas will explain at least some aspects of the thing in question. For example, the geocentric model of the solar system with epicycles explained many celestial movements. It's just that one idea will explain more than the rest. The heliocentric model with slightly elliptical planetary orbits explains more celestial movements more simply. Can you think of two other examples like that?
- Read an editorial or watch a commercial or political speech and try breaking it down into individual claims. For each claim, ask yourself, "Is this falsifiable? In other words, is it possible to prove it true or false?"
- At some point (maybe many points) in our careers we all encounter a student who believes in what Michael Schermer calls "weird things" (aliens built the pyramids, 9-11 was an inside job, global warming is just propaganda from the solar panel manufacturers, etc.) How might you turn this into a "teachable moment," either for the student or for the rest of the class?
Supplemental Materials:
- Logic and Arguments - Logical Fallacies, by NativeLang.
- The Twelve Cognitive Biases That Prevent You From Being Rational, by io9.
- Research Bias, by Martyn Shuttleworth at Explorable.