In this class at least, writing philosophy involves thinking about, making explicit, criticizing and defending arguments. Your work will be judged on how clearly you write, how well you interpret the arguments presented in the text and lectures and how well you expand upon the material provided. I have tried to avoid obvious questions in writing paper topics, as well as questions that would lead you to simply regurgitate something from the lecture or the text. Clarity is at a premium in a paper like this because I can only assess what you actually put on the pages you hand to me. If there is ambiguity to the way you write, I can only assume that you do not understand the implications of what you are saying and look unfavorably upon it. This does not mean you should recoil from saying bold and perhaps controversial things, but that you should think and write carefully when you do so.

One helpful guideline in writing such a paper is a particular conception of the audience for whom you are writing. You should not think of this as a paper written for my (Michael P. Wolf's) personal benefit. Second guessing what my views happen to be and trying to restate them is not necessarily a good policy because I am more interested in how you come to have those views than where you stand in the end. (It is also a poor strategy because my views on many topics in this class are not set in stone, which is in part why I decided to teach them.) Instead, you should think of yourself as writing for a sort of "ideal reader" - someone who reads everything you write with an open mind but a very critical eye. Assume only what you think no one could deny without unreasonable prejudice and challenge anything that you think does not meet such a high standard.

There is no good way to tell you how to make a positive argument. Structure, clarity and true premises are the hallmarks of any good argument, but choosing your premises will require you to decide what would be a good reason to believe some view. What counts as a good reason to believe that a view is true varies from one view to the next. Generally, you can look for such reasons by thinking about what the important concepts behind such views and considering what is necessarily true of them to see if anything interesting follows. It is much easier to say what will count as criticisms of reasons and arguments, so a good rule of thumb is to subject the things you want to claim to those sorts of scrutiny before asserting them.
There are generally two strong ways to criticize an argument. You can either attack it by either (1) showing that at least one of the premises are false, or (2) showing that the logic of the argument is not sound. How you show that a claim is false varies from claim to claim and in many cases, you will have to improvise. (This is part of the thrill of being a rational agent.) If you think that there are obvious reasons to believe that a claim is false, then go ahead and state them, but be sure to state them clearly and consider carefully how someone who believes them would reply.

If you are having trouble thinking of challenges to a claim, here is a hint. Both of these tasks are accomplished by giving what philosophers call counterexamples. That is, examples show that some claim must be false. Suppose I make the claim, "All lions live in Africa." You might mention the lions that live in zoos outside of Africa as counterexamples (any single lion would do, though). If the claim "All lions live in Africa" appeared in an argument, that counterexample would suffice to show that it was false and thereby refute the argument. Showing that the logic of an argument is flawed can be tricky, but if you can provide a counterexample, that would suffice. Suppose you are considering the following argument:
 

     1. All lions are mammals.
     2. All mammals are vertebrates.
     3. Therefore, all vertebrates are lions.

Obviously, this is a terrible argument. If the last premise were "All lions are vertebrates," it would be a very good argument, but sadly it is not. If you know a little something about logic, you can probably say just what is wrong here, but if you cannot, then a counterexample will do. The important thing to remember when challenging the logic of the argument is that the premises must remain true while the conclusion is shown to be false. So, let us assume that all lions are mammals and that all mammals are vertebrates. What we must do is to think of a vertebrate that is not a lion. Well, there are lots of them - just pick one. I am one. So Michael P. Wolf is a vertebrate (I have a spine) and he is not a lion. Therefore, not all vertebrates are lions. Both premises are true, but the conclusion is false, so the logic of the argument must be bad.

A good philosophy should include five elements:

     1. A clear statement of how you will argue.
     2. A clear exposition and a statement of the view (or argument in question).
     3. A round of defense or criticism of the view you espouse.
     4. An opportunity for the other side of the argument to reply.
     5. A final, deciding round of criticism or replies from your view.

I am not saying that you have to separate your paper into five sections, or even that you have to do these five tasks in this order (though it is a very natural order to follow). The view that you espouse and defend over the course of your paper should be the one that you feel most able to defend clearly and succinctly in a short paper like this, which is not necessarily the view that you hold deep in your heart of hearts. Remember, this is an exercise in analysis and argumentation, not a testimonial.

Some people have asked for a sample paper to guide them in writing their first philosophy paper.  After much consideration, I have decided to make one available.  A few warnings should be made in advance.  First, the pdf format is off by just a little bit, so ignore the lines between comments in the margin and the text.  Instead, just read the comments and figure out which parts of the text they refer to - ask me if ambiguities remain.  Second, keep in mind that this is a sample of what a five-page paper would look like and you should make appropriate adjustments for longer papers.  Third, remember that you should not take any text from this paper and include it in one of your own without citation.  This would be plagiarism and a particularly foolhardy form of it since I wrote this paper and will recognize it immediately.  The topic is fairly generic and would not be of much help in my classes, but the warning still stands.  With this in mind, click here for a copy of the paper.

So these are some of the keys to writing a paper. Write clearly. Assert only what you are ready to argue for thoroughly. Challenge claims. Offer counterexamples if they are available. These are only the most rudimentary moves in making an argument, and your work will get more complicated and subtle. There is also the danger of falling into more subtle mistakes and fallacies. Some of the more common ones in my experience are described in the other handout, which may help you avoid some of them.

Much of what I have said here may seem obvious, but there is a subtlety to the process that is easy to miss.  With this in mind, you may want to visit some other sites that address this topic to get another perspective:

How to Write a Philosophy Paper by Peter Horban
TIPS ON WRITING A PHILOSOPHY PAPER
Philosophy Paper Writing Guidelines
"How to Write a Philosophy Paper"
WRITING A PHILOSOPHY PAPER

(All of these links were live as of September, 2001.  Links die, of course, so if you try one of these and it does not work, please let me know.  If you know of others, or if you find one of these particularly helpful, let me know about that, too.

Affirming the Consequent

Suppose I make a conditional claim like "If it rains steadily at game time, then a baseball game will be cancelled" and we understand that this applies to all games. (Assume, for the moment that there are no domed or indoor stadiums to contend with.) Now, suppose you say to me, "Last night’s game was cancelled." If I say, "Oh, it must have rained last night," have I made a good inference?

The answer, of course, is no. Though the game's being cancelled follows from it raining, game's being cancelled does not imply that there was any rain at all. The game may have been cancelled because the lights would not come on, or because there was a player's strike, or because there was an earthquake (as there was during the 1989 World Series) or for countless other reasons that do not involve rain. Be careful to take note of which things imply which things in an argument, for sloppiness here can lead to just this sort of fallacy. I've seen people offer arguments that went something like this: "If we have free will, then determinism is false/Quantum physics tell us that determinism is false/Therefore, we have free will."

You should note that there is a form of argumentation, known in Latin as modus tollens, that does work something like this, but involves showing that the right half of the conditional statement is false. Consider again the conditional claim, "If it rains steadily at game time, then a baseball game will be cancelled." Now suppose it is true that last night's game was not cancelled. It follows that it did not rain steadily last night. But be careful to remember that this works only if you are showing that the consequent of the conditional statement is false.

The "Argument from Hope" (or The "That Would Suck" Fallacy)

This is a fallacy that I often see in cases where students are discussing a topic in which they have an opinion prior to class discussions and writing papers, and are very hesitant to retreat from it because they see that view as very important to how they conceive of themselves. For instance, papers about freewill are always full of this fallacy. Its rather sarcastic name comes from the form of the argument that people often make against some claim that we will call P:

     1. If P were true, that would horrible/upsetting/imply that things are worse than they seem.
     2. Therefore, P is false.

This may seem preposterous when we write it out this way, but I have read countless papers that say things like, "Freewill is essential to being a complete person, for we could not be morally responsible without it, and life would be chaotic and meaningless if that were true. So, therefore, since we have freewill..." Of course, very unpleasant consequences may follow from some claim, but that does not make that claim false. It may just make the world a less inviting place than we imagined, and perhaps obliges us to figure out how to preserve what we originally found so important. But the fact that our conclusions conflict with what we would most want, deep in our heart of hearts, does not change our obligation to accept those conclusions. Philosophy is not about what we want, deep in our heart of hearts.

You should note that there are steps in some sorts of philosophical reflection that do involve revulsion to the consequences of an argument. This is often the case in ethics. For instance, one common objection to a utilitarian moral theory is that it would permit institutions like slavery and racism to continue if those social practices end up creating more benefit than harm in the final estimation. Yet we cannot accept such a conclusion, for we all feel a sense that slavery and racism are morally repugnant regardless of what consequences they bring. However, what we should not conclude here is that our repulsion to slavery is the grounds for rejecting any theory that abides it. Our repulsion must point to something else - perhaps an intuition that we all have certain rights or a fundamental dignity to be respected - and this must serve as our argument against those theories.

The "50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong" Fallacy

Elvis Presley once released an album with the dubious title 50 Million Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong, commemorating the sale of 50 million records over the course of his career. Putting aside all questions of musical taste, and ignoring the fact that 50 million records sold does not entail that there are 50 million Elvis fans (one person might have bought all 50 million records), the implication behind this title rests on some faulty logic. 50 million Elvis fans might be incorrigible, meaning they can't be wrong about what they like, and they may even be right in their opinion about who makes the best music (I withhold judgment on such a claim). However, they are not right about anything just because there are 50 million of them. It is entirely possible, no matter how many people hold a particular belief and how much conviction they feel, that they are just dead wrong about what it claims. History is replete with examples of this. For millennia, almost every single person who lived, from the most brilliant astronomers to the most doltish people, believed that the Earth was stationary and that everything else in the universe revolved around it. For millennia, almost everyone believed that gravity would cause objects of different weights to fall towards the Earth at different rates. In both cases, they were just unequivocally wrong.

Now how does this work its way into a paper? People tend to come to it in one of two ways. First, some people simply come to the point where they need to provide an argument, and cite a commonly held belief instead, thinking that the consensus of public opinion establishes the fact. This cannot be the case when it is that claim which is at stake in the first place. Noting the fact that most people believe in some kind of God is not an argument or a reason to believe that those people have a true belief. Maybe they do and maybe they don't, but the mere fact that most people have that belief is not in itself evidence for the truth of it. Second, in some cases there is some controversial premise that would be very hard to prove, but which happens to be widely accepted. Philosophical reasoning often involves challenging that which seems obvious to us in an effort to better understand matters. Consider the following argument:
 
 
 

	1. A person survives only as long as their mental life continues (i.e. their mind survives).
	2. If the mind were identical with some part of the body (e.g. the brain), then a person would not survive their physical death.
	3. If the mind were identical with some sort of non-physical soul substance, then a person would survive their physical death.
	4. Therefore, a person survives their physical death only if they have some sort of non-physical soul.
	5. Most people believe that human beings have a non-physical soul.
	6. Therefore, people survive their physical death into some sort of afterlife.

The questionable premise here is (5). Let us assume that the reasoning that got us to the intermediate conclusion (4) is good, and that (5) is true. Even if it is, why should we consider it important to this argument? As we saw with the historical examples above, the fact that many people believe that P does not show that P is true, regardless of whether P is true or not. If you want to entitle yourself to the claim that human beings have souls, you will have to give some evidence or some argument that shows this, rather than assuming that everyone has it right. Establishing what is true is part of what is at stake in a philosophical argument, and so you cannot take that for granted.

Now, the tricky part of the 50 Million Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong Fallacy is that it is possible to overcompensate for it and fall into bad habits as well. There are occasions when it is right to appeal to what most people think is right. In fact, just which questions are interesting to us as philosophers is something that we take a consensus on, and some questions will be tossed aside because they no longer interest us. What you must remember is that a social consensus alone does not establish facts about anything but the social consensus itself. If you want to entitle yourself to claims about what exists and what is true independent of any social consensus, as most interesting facts would be, then you have an obligation to provide something more.
 

The "Just Like the Angels" Fallacy

A professor of mine was once discussing a medieval theology text with me. The topic was, how would an immaterial, non-physical being like an angel be able to cause things to happen in the physical world? If you believe in guardian angels and think that they intervene occasionally on your behalf, say to save you from an oncoming bus, then you have to explain how they pushed you clear or slowed the bus down. But non-physical things don't seem to have those capacities. I asked my professor what answer the theologian gave. My professor said the author rehearsed a few standard strategies and objections. Finally, he admitted he didn't know how it was done, but that we shouldn't worry because it obviously happens the same way that things happen when we affect physical things like our bodies with our non-physical souls. I had feared that that would be the answer.

What's wrong with this answer? It's not quite the same as the 50 Million Elvis Fans Fallacy, because the author is not appealing to what people think about angels, etc. What has happened here is that the author has run up against a brick wall in giving an answer - no strategy he can think of shows any possibility of solving the problem. So, the author quickly shuffles the problem off and makes everything important rest on something else. The problem is that what he is appealing to is just as controversial as what she is trying to defend or explain here. Just as philosophers have wondered how non-physical beings like angels could affect physical things, they have also wondered how non-physical things like souls could affect physical things.

The point of mentioning this example is not to nudge anyone towards atheism, but to see that sliding your explanatory obligations around in a philosophical account is not really doing any work at all. If I ask you how a non-physical soul could affect something physical and you said, "Just like the angels do it!" then that wouldn't be an answer at all unless we already knew something more about the angels. You can't argue for something or explain something by appealing to something that is just as controversial, or unclear, or unexplained as that which you set out to argue for or explain. Doing philosophy requires that you give reasons for the claims that you make, and that those reasons be plausible to someone else who's considering your argument. You might think of giving an argument as a process of laying out premises and conclusions for an ideal reader, someone who has had experiences similar to yours and considers what you have to say with an open mind and a skeptical eye.

The "Ignorance Entails Everything" Fallacy

This is a fallacy that I often see when talking about the philosophy of mind. Take a controversial topic, such as the possibility of artificial intelligence. It is hotly debated whether something that was not made of biochemical elements roughly like ours could even possibly have the same sort of conscious mental life that we do. So, the question often comes up whether a silicon-based computer, much like a desktop PC, could ever be conscious. One thing that people often bring up is that we have no evidence to show that such physical systems are not conscious, because we can never "crawl inside" the mental life of another conscious thing. Since we cannot disprove it, many people say that we are entitled to assume that things that are sufficiently complex really are conscious in just the way we are. The argument might be put this way:
 

	1. Physical systems of a certain complexity and responsiveness have consciousness.
	2. Some non-human physical systems exhibit comparable levels of complexity and responsiveness.
	3. We cannot disprove that those physical systems are conscious.
	4. Therefore, it is possible that some non-human physical systems are conscious.
	5. Therefore, it is only our own prejudices that hinder us and we should conclude that some non-human physical systems actually are conscious.

The inference from (4) to (5) is obviously a bad one; the fact that something is possible does not entail that it is actually the case. But the move from (3) to (4) may also be a suspect inference. Our inability to disprove something does not show that it is possible. It may only show that we do not have the conceptual resources to prove such things. This bad inference is actually a remarkable inversion of skepticism. Skepticism says it is always possible that we are deceived, so we are never entitled to assert anything. This argument suggests that when we have the least grounds to assert something, we should feel at the greatest liberty to assume something is true. Avoid such reasoning.

Guilt (Or Vindication) By Association

This sort of argument occurs frequently in ethics papers, where students are more apt to discuss people or events that are held up as exemplars of what is wrong or right with the world.  Suppose you are discussing the moral significance of vegetarianism and eating meat with a group of people, when someone blurts out, "You know, Hitler was a vegetarian!  That should tell you all you need to know about vegetarianism!"  This may sound like something I made up, but more than a few people have said this to me in the past, even in my classes.  You can imagine this sort of argument being used to endorse something as well as decrying it.  I once had a student in a philosophy of science class declare, "Einstein was an instrumentalist, and that's good enough for me."

The problem with such an argument is that it is actually an evasion of the issue at hand.  Rather than talking about what is morally right or wrong, true or false, you associate what is in question with something else that gets automatic approval or disapproval.  It's hard to imagine anything that gets more universal disapproval than Hitler, so if you can get people to associate the two, you gather approval or disapproval without having to consider the content of what you are actually arguing for.  The obvious problem with this is that such associations are generally irrelevant.  Hitler drank coffee, tied his shoelaces and brushed his teeth at least twice a day, but that doesn't make any of those activities equivalent to planning and implementing genocide.  Likewise, Einstein's genius and his gentle demeanor don't settle the question of what makes for a satisfactory scientific theory.  The silliest thing to do in response to an argument like this is to get drawn into a debate about the validity of the association; I once saw a website run by vegetarians devoted to uncovering historical evidence that Hitler occasionally cheated and had a little meat.  This suggests that the argument itself is valid and that we must undo it by challenging the premises.  If the association is irrelevant in any case, its truth is beside the point.

You might make the claim that there are more legitimate interpretations of these arguments.  Pointing out Hitler's vegetarianism was meant as an appeal to an exemplar, intended to suggest that vegetarianism is the province of pushy, judgmental people who want to tell others what to do.  A number of things should be said about this.  First, even if an exemplar shares some properties with others of its kind, that does not entail that it will share all of its properties, or even all of the properties relevant to some point of discussion.  (Many vegetarians are not pushy, and in fact, are not even concerned with what anyone else does on this score.)  Second, there is a question of balance and fairness in the choice of exemplar.  Even those who are pushy about their moral views are not generally driven to anything like systematic violence, with some obvious and unfortunate exceptions.  In general, even though you may imply something of legitimate concern by invoking such associations, this sort of argument has the effect of distorting what is relevant to a philosophical argument and you should never include it in writing a paper.
 

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