KATRINA DIXON

University should not be a place where we simply learn to parrot back other people’s flawed ideas. Unfortunately, a lack of intellectual integrity ensures that this is often the case.

We’ve all written essays that made us want to vomit simply because they were what the instructor wanted to hear. What I don’t understand is why a mediocre essay that a professor agrees with should get a better mark than an excellent one that they dislike.

A universal part of the student experience is dealing with people we deem to be stubborn or closed-minded. Read comment sections anywhere on the Internet and you’ll understand. By and large, you will find people scoffing at the apparent stupidity of others. Only in very rare instances do you find people conceding that a position different from their own may contain some merit. This special breed of people demonstrate intellectual integrity.

University is meant to be a place of higher learning that develops the leaders of tomorrow. Frankly, I would like the leaders of tomorrow — and today for that matter — to be able to think critically and exercise intellectual integrity. However, that is not what we are being taught to do at the University of Saskatchewan, nor is it what’s being modeled for us by our instructors.

Philosophy 140: Critical Thinking at the U of S briefly introduces an intellectual code of conduct. The course content and readings include the most basic of guidelines, such as “don’t use fallacious arguments.” Simple things like appeals to emotion or irrelevant authorities often run rampant in debate, as do attacks against people rather than against their arguments.

The best studying I ever did was simply reading online comment sections on blog posts in my spare time and identifying fallacies in each one. Very few comments were fallacy free and many long-winded ones contained multiple argumentative errors. To give people the benefit of the doubt, I would imagine these fallacies are unintentional.

Many people probably don’t actually know how to construct a valid argument — likely because our professors do a terrible job of teaching students those skills. All too often it seems that fallacious arguments are being used because there is no other way to avoid conceding that someone else may, in fact, hold a stronger position.

This isn’t seen only in comments sections either. It happens in original posts online, classrooms, politics, the media and our everyday conversations. I propose that we would all greatly benefit from a greater push towards intellectual integrity.

Students, for example, are being done a disservice when they believe that their grades will suffer if they think for themselves and develop their own ideas. We should be marked for the quality of our work, not for the degree to which we agree with our instructors on paper. We would benefit greatly if our instructors valued intellectual integrity as much as its academic counterpart.

This isn’t necessarily easy for instructors. It would take a lot of humility to be able to say that a student has valid reasons for thinking differently than the supposed expert. However, imagine how it would affect our student experience to be able to take any position in written assignments — as long as we can validly and adequately support them — without fear of being penalized for having the “wrong” idea.

Returning to the Philosophy 140 code of conduct, someone with intellectual integrity shouldn’t be focused on being right. They should be interested in expressing the truth or the strongest position. The goals of this mission should be to provide opportunity for clarification or amendments and to reconstruct arguments in their strongest form, rather than their weakest.

Is this painstaking? Sometimes. Is this difficult? It can be. Does this require the open mindedness and humility necessary to concede that you may not always hold the strongest position? Absolutely. Nonetheless, everything from our comments sections to our greater world would be far less hostile if we all practiced these guidelines.

Genuine dialogue and progress are not created by two sides standing strong and immovable. They’re formed by people willingly looking at both positions in order to accurately find their merits and flaws. This honesty in thought may be the single most important characteristic in changing our world. Then again, I’d be happy to discuss the contrary.

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Image: Jeremy Britz