My fellow Brainstormer Gina Barreca’s recent post on the “B student” who thought he was an “A student” reminded me of the story told me by a friend who teaches literature at an Ivy League university. He had a student who came to him complaining about a poor grade on a paper. After spending 45 minutes going over the paper, my friend thought he’d more than adequately explained its multiple problems. At that point, the student looked at him and said, “That’s your opinion.”
The failure to distinguish between argumentation and opinion made reasoning with this student a hopeless proposition. Much of the time, all is well and good without the use of reason. Daily life is built on a platform of habit where we barely listen; the point is to be polite and sociable rather than reason through every little thing that comes along. Most days, we unconsciously offer unsubstantiated (and of course unsolicited) opinions from dawn til dusk. Although mere opinion (i.e., unsubstantiated opinion) does not, in theory, belong in the classroom, it’s impossible to root it out entirely—particularly in the humanities. The best one can do is keep it down to a minimum.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed that when people living in democratic societies survey their fellow man, they automatically feel pretty much the equal of anybody. From this we conclude that it’s pointless to listen to anybody else’s opinion. Why should it be better than our own? In practice, this means that when we listen to experts, or people with more knowledge than we have, we are perfectly willing to argue with them. We consider everything from making judgments about global warming to the quality of the art in Avatar to be judgments that are best left up to us to make individually, without somebody else “telling us what to think.” (Doubtless there are those on the fringe who think that whether water at sea level boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit or not is a judgment, and not a fact, and is also up to them to decide.)
We take pride in democracies in saying that everyone has a right to his or her own opinion. At the same time, we have contempt for opinions. “Opinions are like belly buttons [or, if you prefer, plug in your favorite orifice here]; everyone has one.” From these premises, many conclude that all opinions are equal. Of course, this is merely what people say in theory. Almost all of us are certain that our own opinions are the right ones.
Teachers leading discussions often have to nudge students away from mere opinion to argumentation — to building an argument based on evidence and reason. The first step is to get them to directly challenge other students’ opinions. Many students, not wanting to stand out, or hurt someone else’s feeling, would rather float gently in the open sea of opinions than navigate the perilous waters of rigorous argumentation.
Here’s an example of what I mean. In a recent classroom discussion about Shakespeare’s character Caliban, in The Tempest, a student said, “Everyone longs for freedom.” I asked if this was a universal principle, and the student quickly responded, “Yes — in my opinion.” I then turned to the class to see if they agreed. I asked, “In all times and places? With all people? Under all circumstances?” Several students offered good examples of exceptions to the idea that all people yearn for freedom, yet they couched their examples in the words, “In my opinion.”
In my opinion, our students would think better if we banned the words “in my opinion” from the classroom.
14 Responses to That’s Just Your Opinion
deanette - February 9, 2010 at 11:59 am
I see that first story unfold as if I’m watching it in a movie. It happens it all the time. Thank you!
luther_blissett - February 9, 2010 at 4:17 pm
This is precisely why an intro to logic course is so necessary and why it should be part of a required curriculum.”The sky is blue” and “I think the sky is blue” are two different statements. To prove the first wrong, one has to prove that either the sky isn’t blue or that it is some other color. To prove the second wrong, one has to prove that the speaker does not actually think the sky is blue. The first is a question of truth or falsehood; the second a question of sincerity or insincerity. And it’s basically impossible to prove that someone does or does not really hold a belief or opinion. Even statements of opinion should be couched as statements of fact: “The Velvet Underground are the greatest rock band of the 60s” or “John Donne is a better poet than Billy Collins.” Otherwise, we cannot discuss or argue them. Whenever my students say, “I hate [book x],” I can only reply, “I’m sorry you feel that way.”
wrbilledwards - February 9, 2010 at 5:27 pm
All very well, but why not respond to the student, “True, it is my opinion, but since the University has authorized me to offer, and grade, this course, you need to make some effort to understand my opinions, though you need not share them, and I have been trying to help you do so by explaining and justifying them, which you in this paper have not done for me. You will probably find that announcing your feelings, and refusing to discuss them, will not be very successful anywhere, not just here.”The line between “fact,” “opinion,” and “logic” is not as sharp as this discussion implies: there are such things as informed value judgements, which we accept from others if we are (a) impressed with their depth of experience and thought, and (b) convinced of their impartiality. It is useless to expect others to be impressed with our arguments if we can’t persuade them of both these things. There is no point in being the best chess player in town if nobody wants to play chess with you.
jffoster - February 10, 2010 at 6:38 am
Mr Blissett wtites in 2: “Whenever my students say, “I hate [book x],” I can only reply, “I’m sorry you feel that way.” “What about trying asking the student why he hates it? Or what it is about it that he hates?
11891865 - February 10, 2010 at 6:56 am
Why not try recognizing that your student is stuck in one of the intermediate stages of the Perry scale? The good news is that your students have moved beyond dualism–something is right or it’s wrong. The bad news is that your students don’t yet recognize commitment within multiplicity–that there are many possible answers to many sorts of questions and many possible views, but that some are better (that is, more defensible) than others and that their job as thinkers is to provide support for their positions. Students stuck in those intermediate stages don’t recognize the necessity of argument–they don’t get the “problem” problem–so everything is reduced to opinion. Many of them won’t emerge from these stages until after they leave college; they particularly won’t get there if we don’t help them move along, which doesn’t mean bowing to the belligerent expression of their opinions.Leah Shopkow
mbelvadi - February 10, 2010 at 7:01 am
Thank you, Laurie. In my first ever attempt at college teaching, I was dumbfounded when a student confronted me in a grading context similar to yours with the challenge “that’s just your opinion, this is mine”. It seemed to me to be such an utterly outrageous thing to say to an instructor, so completely inappropriate to the educational context, that I had no idea how to respond. I’d like to hear more about how others handle this kind of challenge from students.
batchro - February 10, 2010 at 10:06 am
From a broader perspective, we have to recognize that critical thinking is not valued in most areas of society. Political parties want people to vote based on “gut” reactions to a small number of issues, leaders latched on to the soundbite, rather than nuanced conversation, and students are indoctrinated by family, friends, etc., who probably are not critical thinkers.A study done at a large, Southern university revealed that first-year students rated at about a 1 on Bloom’s scale. Unfortunately, upon graduating, they only increased to about a 2.5, which means in a college career, they went from memorization to basic explanation/discussion. My response to this dire situation is to actually discuss critical thinking and Bloom’s Taxonomy in the early stages of class so that students learn the lingo and understand that by asking certain questions of themselves they can engage in higher order thinking. I recognized the need for doing this after a year or so of thinking I could just ask higher order questions and they would tacitly “get it.” I was wrong and adjusted. In my best classes, students would be able to ask one another higher order questions in class discussion by the latter part of the semester. They might not all become critics of their own thinking, but at least they heard the terminology and knew it was an option.
11223255 - February 10, 2010 at 10:21 am
Thank you Leah for your comment about intellectual development. The potential for real learning for students increase when this type of reaction is recognized as a possible opportunity for growth rather than a social ill to be fought. King and Kitchener have developed a more recent scheme of stages of intellectual development based on interviews they have conducted with students.(King, P. M., & Kitchener, K. S. (1994). Developing reflective judgment. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass)King and Kitchener found that the ability to engage in (or come close to) reflective thinking does increase with age. On average, across studies, first-year students tend to be at the end of pre-reflective thinking:”Many of the college freshmen articulated the belief that absolute truth is only temporarily inaccessible, that knowing is limited to one’s personal impressions about the topic (uninformed by the evidence), and that most if not all problems are well structured (defined with a high degree of certainty and completeness).”By senior year, things change significantly:”The reasoning prevalent among the senior samples is clearly more adequate and defensible that the reasoning it replaced. [It] comes with the acknowledgment that uncertainty is not just a temporary condition of knowing. It is at this stage, too, that students begin to use evidence systematically to support their judgment, a development of no small consequence….students are abandoning ‘ignorant certainty’ (characteristic of earlier stage reasoning) in favor of ‘intelligent confusion.’” However, there are important gaps here as well. “[At this] stage college students are at a loss when asked to defend their answers to ill-structured problems, for … a major characteristic [of this stage is] the assumption that, because there are many possible answers to every question and no absolutely certain way to adjudicate between competing answers, knowledge claims are simply idiosyncratic to the individual. In other words, an answer to an ill-structured problem is seen as merely an opinion. Further, many college students are not demonstrating an ability to articulate the role of evidence in making interpretations or to defensibly critique their own judgments or explanations… [later stages].”Of course there will be variation among first-year students or seniors. And it is important to note that we tend to underestimate the ability of first-year students, and overestimate the ability to seniors. Perhaps more important is the question of implications. King and Kitchener point out that the goals of curricula and courses are often designed to get students to levels well above where the average senior ends. While I’m not sure that this is a bad thing (having high goals can be very useful), it is problematic if there is no recognition of the jump students will need to make and the scaffolding they will need to get there:”‘Teachers who attempt to teach about this process…without attending to students’ underlying epistemic assumptions will probably be very frustrated, and their students will probably be dissatisfied as well.’ Educators who understand their students’ epistemic assumptions will be able to make more informed decisions when choosing assignments or activities to help students learn about, practice, and improve their reflective thinking skills.”So the question is where are the students in your course, how far can you push them, and what types of assignments, readings, papers, exams, etc. will help them progress in their reflective thinking? Matt Kaplan, University of Michigan
epbwalsh - February 10, 2010 at 10:59 am
We call them the self-esteem babies of the 1980s. Perry’s scale makes all sorts of sense – and then there is courtesy. Once in a freshman-level class there was a little back and forth between me and a few students about motivations they assigned to certain historical actors, which I made problematic for them with facts of the matter. After a few exchanges I said something like, ‘Bottom line – trust that your university professor with a PhD in this field is better informed on the details than you are likely to be’. One student responded with ‘That’s bull@#$%!’ I invited him to leave the classroom for the day, he didn’t, I moved on to another topic, and as soon as I got the class doing something in groups he came forward to apologize. Not sure what the moral of the story is but I do know it is better they learn the limits of a healthy self-esteem now than when they are functioning independently in the worl.d
isugeezer - February 10, 2010 at 12:55 pm
I use Ernest Gellner’s “Confrontations of Reason” (reason vs. tradition, authority, experience, emotion, and piecemeal trial-and-error procedures)* to get students to interrogate the basis for their belief in a specific “truth.” This asks them to think about WHY they believe, rather than WHAT they believe, which–”in my opinion”–is a slightly more subtle way to make a chink in the armor. *Reason and Culture, 1992
dank48 - February 10, 2010 at 12:56 pm
This is a problem and it’s getting worse. Whatever the cause, it’s not just college students or younger. The difference between the true “everyone has the right to their own opinion” and the ridiculous “everyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s” seems to be lost on many, many people. This seems to me to be at least partly a matter of our having replaced (earned) self-respect with (automatic) self-esteem. One thing is that the verb “know” is used as if it meant “really really really believe” rather than (more or less) “believe on the basis of what seems good, nonprivate evidence.” Having used the example “I know I love my wife, and I believe she loves me” as an example of the distinction, I was told in no uncertain terms that I absolutely do know my wife loves me, by a person who knows neither my wife nor me, outside the context of the discussion. Richard Armour once defined “hubris” as “a fancy Greek word for cocksureness,” and there’s plenty of it out there. Ignorance grows its own shell.
charliemarlow - February 10, 2010 at 5:44 pm
I like luther’s idea – logic classes. Logic can show the egalitarian idea for what is.
gtkarn - February 11, 2010 at 1:40 am
Bingo, as any teacher of writing or rhetoric would acknowledge. Here’s an item worth mentioning: I have found that students will often use the word “opinionated” to name anyone who voices an opinion, regardless of the degree of support of a claim. Thus, an opinion by a blathering talk radio ditz (choose a name here) is “just” the same as an elaborate supreme court “opinion,” or the equal of any other discourse that makes an effort at something more than mere declamation or pronouncement. Similarly, so many people these days speak of people being “argumentative,” thus consigning everyone with any sort of an argument, to those who are merely contentious.This limited vocabulary disses all efforts at argument; it’s the proverbial night in which all cows have been darkened. And yes, it is fruitless to argue over these matters once your listener shows an incapacity to distinguish a discourse that has earned the right not to be classified as argumentative or opinionated.Finally, I will note, as many have, that those teachers in higher education most responsible for helping students understand argument are the ones most likely to be underpaid and underemployed. Space does not permit me more than an expression of opinion on this matter, but I suspect support is readily available, ironically, from the writing of many who have lamented this dissing of their specialty.Interested readers may refewr to Mark Twain’s essay “Corn Pone Opinions.” If he’s right, there’s little hope for those of us still dreaming of a world where the effort at cultivating the deliberative arts is a worthy pursuit.
marka - February 22, 2010 at 8:12 pm
In my opinion – Best blog responses yet – respectful, to the point, with many citations to other sources. Bravo