On Tue, 4 Sep 2001, Martin Owen wrote:
> Perhaps Bruce and I are too deeply rooted in UK academia where quality of
> argument is embedded in our marking schemes. I recall a Monty Python
> sketch where you could pay for a good argument. All John Cleese got from
> Terry Jones was a series of "No, you aren't" or "No you didn't". Cleese
> then makes the point that a "Contradiction is not an argument"... and of
> course Jones replies "Yes it is".
A regular dose of Monty Python can be most salutary. :) Thanks, Martin.
> The point being that saying Skinner is a fool is not an argument( and
> would recieve low grades), and it would be a stupid thing for someone who
> has read Beyond Freedom and Dignity to suppose. However I can agree with
> Bruce, that you do not have to have read the whole cannon to feel that you
> can find flaws in a behaviourist viewpoint.
I'm truly relieved to hear that! There are too many "canons" out there
relevant to my thinking/research, I'm overwhelmed.
Still, I would have been glad to have been asked to read Skinner,
supposedly the fullest account of behaviorism, alongside Chomsky. YOu
don't have to read the whole canon, but reading the best example of a
viewpoint might not be a bad idea. I feel a fool for not having properly
sampled.
In many ways the adversarial
> tradition requires you to take your opponent more seriously and address
> detail in ways that looking for consenus does not allow.
<<sharp breath intake>> When I was teaching small group interaction
skills, choosing sides/ leaders was always preferable to the work of
consensus-building. I would not argue for consensus as the only way to
accomplish things, but it is certainly at least as hard as producing and
weighing arguments, requiring as it does a PROCESS that takes longer and
more sacrifice on everyone's part (there being no spectators in the
consensus-building process -- no one yet has thought of making public
consensus-building shows the way public debate lends itself to the
spectacular). Consensus-building done right is more muscular (not like
boxing, like plowing) and *humbling* (DARN hard, that) and requires the
respect of listening in detail and respectfully to others for what can be
valued and taken from their story, not for what can be dismissed or
refuted. Jumping to premature consensus is namby-pamby, you're absolutely
right there -- it's the conclusion without the process. You wouldn't,
surely, want to accept a conclusion in a debate that hadn't been debated;
nor in consensus-building would practitioners want to accept a "consensu"
without the building process.
Perhaps true wisdom lies in being able to do both debate and
consensus-building, and to recognize when one or the other is more
appropriate, or to see them as complementary parts in a whole. For
example, someone may "win" a debate, but if there is no uptake (i.e. it
was "all academic" :) ), then little will come of that win. To the
extent that spectators are to become participants, there will likely be
some discussion of what to do, and that might make relevant a move to
consensus-building.
I guess I still find arguments for particular modes of proceeding to miss
the point of Tannen's piece -- which to me was warning against reducing
ourselves to having a single mode of dealing with everything, however well
it works some of the time. The danger is that we will become SOOO good at
that one method that we don't recognize the damage it does (to US not
least) applied in the wrong situations.
> I am quite happy with the fact that the Durban conference on racism is
> breaking up rather than looking for a cosy consensus (it didn't work in
> Kyoto). There will be other opportunities to talk. But different strokes
> for different folks.
Now I get adversarial, Martin. Consensus is coz/sy? The decisions that
come out of consensus-building are not meant to be once-and-for-all things
-- they are working arrangements. It's precisely that working-arrangement
nature of consensus that allows us to work together, all the while
criticizing the grounds for that working together. When consensus fails
in testing, it's simply doing its job right. Breaking up, on the other
hand, means not working together any more. We can all be angry at each
other in peace.
I teach my students that conceptually and practically consensus is not
compromise: compromise is an everyone-loses situation, everyone sacrifices
for a mediocre solution, whereas consensus-seeking requires that everyone
may lose something but the sense of loss is compensated for by a sense
that the outcome is better than your own first position would have allowed
for. For example, -- and apologies to our non-American members, this is
just the example I use in my American classroom; I'll try to give enough
info to make it comprehensible, acknowledging gross oversimplification --
when the founding fathers of the US were hammering out its Constitution,
they faced a variety of problems. The problem of slavery was dealt with
in what is most appropriately known as the Great Compromise -- OK, states
that have slavery can have it, states that don't, can't. Didn't take much
work at the time, but less than a hundred years later it was a more
complex problem to deal with and it had to be done with war. The problem
of representation in the legislature, on the other hand, was resulted in
creating a bicameral legislature that drew from the proposals of each side
of the debate (the small states vs the large states). No one ended up
losing anything significant, and they created a solution that neither
could have foreseen from the beginning -- and that system is still in
place today. Not perfect, but we aren't near going to war over it, and no
one argues that they are victimised by it.
Am I utterly misunderstanding consensus (or what this conversation is
about? :) ) Is there anyone out there who practices consensus-building
(or used to and has discarded it for principled reasons)?
--Alena
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Oct 10 2001 - 15:49:08 PDT