Justin, I am not an unconditional supporter of conditional argument. In this context, you are playing with fire unless you have exhaustively criticized the premise and not jumped ahead.
>Um. I am not sure what to say here. In a part I didn't quote, you say you
>wonder how I could have read what you said asa call for passionate
>unreasoned polemic, and here you implicitly criticize me for debating Levin,
>which is what I was asked to do, and what I thought I should do.
No Justin, I fault you for the grounds on which you made a case against Levin. He thinks it possible to make a case for "heritable" differences between the "races" in "intelligence". Against this mis use of concepts you should have made a scientific case, not a passionate unreasoned polemic.
> As I see it,
>the problem with your strategy is that it concedes that the argument is
>valid, that if the premises are coherent and true, if Blacks are genetically
>dumb, then they can be consigned to the rubbish heap of society, or at least
>that there is no point in affirmative action. It seems to me that this point
>ought not be conceded, because the argument is invalid.
But if this point is conceded, our mutual humanity is conceded. Now I understand that by conditional argument you are not in fact conceding the premise. But if you skipped too quickly to the conditional argument without careful, meticulous criticism of the premise, you may have implied to your audience that the kind of anti meritocracy argument you were making was the stronger basis of criticism against Levin. And this seems to me exactly what happened. It seems to me that you have profoundly misunderstood the basis of the critical reaction to your comments which you have simply dismissed as 'politically correct' anti intellecutalism and stupid inability to understand conditional argument. I think you are quite probably at fault as well.
However, a mere denunciation of Levin and his
>ways strikes me, in the context of an academic debate, as inappropriate.
This is ridiculous Justin. There should be careful reasoned criticism of Levin's use of concepts puts in quotes above. I have never said otherwise.
I think that the ability to bracket the sense of insult or outrage
>to one's political sensibilities and see how an argument goes is an important
>part of an education.
Justin, since you think Levin is assaulting mere political sensibilities, instead of someone's humanity, it's easy to see why students were disgruntled by your apparent insensitivity. This seems to be nothing more than another political debate to you. I don't think it helps the education of anyone to wonder whether racialized minorities are deeply different in cognitive and moral capacities. This is not my idea of what goes into an education, which is not to say that people should not be exposed to the argument, only that the best, most exhaustive criticism of the premise must be available at that point.
Yours, Rakesh