susan dobra
phil 002

Half-hour Draft #1: Analysis of "Ask Auntie Establishment" Letter

When I was reading some of the news stories on Alternet, one of my favorite sources of news, I was surprised to come upon a feature called "Ask Auntie Establishment." I liked the joke ("anti-establishment" was what the newspapers used to call hippies and political radicals back in the day), and so I thought I'd read it to see what "Auntie" had to say. The first letter was from a woman who I could really relate to. She said she gets her news online and from the magazine The Nation, implying that Fox, CNN and the other "usual" new sources were dissatisfying to her. Her problem, however, was in answering to people who questioned why she trusted the news sources she found online and why she felt her information from those sources was any better than the mainstream news shows. The reason I could relate is that, after trying to figure out what was going on in Iraq over the past year, I came to the conclusion that watching the mainstream news didn't give me the whole story--in fact, it deceived me often enough to really be a source of concern. As a result, I took to getting my news online more and more often. When I shared that with my philosophy class, they wanted to know why I trusted online more than the TV news. It was a good question. We all know that anybody can put anything online. So why did I trust it? Because I was familiar with the sites I would go to. Alternet, Indymedia, and some of the other sites were ones that I knew to be valid sources. But even those sometimes overexaggerated things. So my new strategy was to go to a number of different news sources for the very important information. I'd go to the National Review, a right-wing news magazine, then to Alternet, a left-wing news source, and then to MSN online that was a kind of mainstream news source. Not only was it fascinating, but it also made me realize how differently the same events could be seen. From this, I gleaned my own ideas about what was really going on.

Auntie suggests the same thing in her answer. She advises going to multiple news sources, and using "critical thinking." Well, I could get behind that. But was her argument a cogent one? In other words, was it a good argument? It felt right to me, but I decided to put it to the test, the same way I teach in my Logic and Critical Thinking class. What I decided to do was apply the steps to first analyze and then evaluate the argument. So this is how I got started: First, I had to identify the main point--what is called the "conclusion" in logic and critical thinking. The main point of Auntie's letter, I decided, was this: You need to go to the original sources and/or resort to your own critical thinking in order to find the news you can trust. That's because Auntie Establishment says, " Progressive sources can contain just as much hyperbole and misinformation as conservative ones" and that to counteract that " you can go straight to the source." She also says, " For those times when original sources are unavailable or insufficient, it's helpful to resort to your own critical thinking."  So I put this all together into what I think is the main point or conclusion. 

The next question to ask is, how does she support this main point? What reasons does she give for saying it?  We call these "premises" in logic and critical thinking. The main premise, as far as I could tell, was in the last line of the letter: " Almost all news is biased; You need to go to the original sources and/or resort to your own critical thinking in order to find the news you can trust. Since this contains two separate statements (called "claims" in l&cr), I chose the one that best supports the main point (by asking "why" and then looking for whatever completes the answer with "because") Why do  you need to go to the original sources and/or resort to your own critical thinking in order to find the news you can trust? Because "it's a question of being willing to ask probing questions and hunt for information from more than one source." So that's the main premise.

My next task is to put the whole argument into the form of a syllogism, which is the "argument in a nutshell" in the form used in logic. A syllogism consists of three claims: two premises and a conclusion. What I have so far is one premise and a conclusion. So I need to find the second premise. How do I do that? Well, one way is to put the conclusion and main premise into a form called the "enthymeme," which is [A] --> [B] because [A] --> [C]. In an enthymeme, the  [A] --> [B] is the conclusion, and the [A] --> [C] is the main premise. If I do the enthymeme right, the missing premise (which is actually the underlying assumption of the argument) will be "All things that --> C --> B."  The "A" term has to be the same in both claims, and so I'll have to rephrase my conclusion and premise to make them both start with the same term (this is so that I don't end up with more than 3 terms, since a syllogism has to have 3 terms only). 

This is how I did it:
        A                    -->            B
[Finding the most accurate, unbiased news] requires [going to the original sources and/or resorting to "your own critical thinking"]
            A                    -->        C
because [finding the most accurate, unbiased news] is ["a question of being willing to ask probing questions and hunt for information from more than one source."]

I think that is pretty much the equivalent of what I said the conclusion and premise of Auntie Establishments argument is. Now, I can reconstruct the underlying assumption to be used as the missing premise: "All things that ----> C ---> B," which becomes " All things that are ["a question of being willing to ask probing questions and hunt for information from more than one source."] require [going to the original sources and/or resorting to "your own critical thinking."]

Now that I have two premise and a conclusion, I can construct my syllogism.  In logic, the conclusion always goes at the bottom of the syllogism (after a "therefore") and the premises go on top. So here is my syllogism:


All things that are ["a question of being willing to ask probing questions and hunt for information from more than one source."] require [going to the original sources and/or resorting to "your own critical thinking"]

[Finding the most accurate, unbiased news] is ["a question of being willing to ask probing questions and hunt for information from more than one source."]

Therefore, [finding the most accurate, unbiased news] requires [going to the original sources and/or resorting to "your own critical thinking"]

That's Auntie Establishment's argument in a nutshell, and that's the end of my analysis!