Argument

One of the things I do in my psychology seminar is I assign papers to students and then I extract out propositions from the papers. And they're propositions that are debatable. Well, what you want to do as an educator is you don't want to put forward a specific point of view. Not when what you're trying to do is to discuss a contentious issue! What you want to do is teach people how to take an argument apart and formulate a response. And to do that it's actually extraordinarily useful to arbitrarily assign positions to people. It's like, I don't care what you think, you're "pro" on this topic, generate an argument." And what that does is it vastly widens people's conceptualizations of the argumentative space. Because most really contentious issues gun control, abortion, those sorts of things there is a lot to be said on both sides. They wouldn't be contentious issues otherwise. They're issues that don't go away. Well, why? Well because they're so complex. They don't lend themselves to easy unitary solutions. One of the things you want to learn if you're educated is that on any complex subject there's a lot to be said. And that you're going to come at that with your particular ideological bias, let's say, your temperamental bias. Maybe even you might even come at it with things you've actually thought about, although that's pretty damn rare. But you need to learn just exactly how localized your viewpoint is.