PHL 340/HMS 410. Freedom and Determinism. Winter,
2000
HOW TO DO THE WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
with 2 sample paragraphs as illustration:
[Assignment #1 -- Specific Guidelines]
[Assignment #2 -- Specific Guidelines]
[Assignment #3 - - Threaded Discussion]
FINAL EXAM ASSIGNMENT
In the writing assignments I ask you to carefully
review a good part of the readings (or film, etc.). A review may be done
in more than one way. One approach could be to write a cogent summary of
the contents of the readings, and follow this with some analysis of your
own. A second way might be to compare and contrast the content of the readings,
including both the conclusions and the arguments behind those conclusions.
A third way might be to stake out a position of your own at the beginning
and then show in some detail exactly where it is the same or different
from the positions in the readings. Or aspects of these three could be
mixed.
A review requires getting all the major specifics correct and assembling
them in a coherent and understandable order. This is tedious work. It is
tedious because it demands clarity of understanding. Repeatedly, a person
has to go back to the readings or to class notes and try again to understand
things clearly enough to be able to summarize them with precision. This
produces a clear, coherent and thorough understanding that probably cannot
be achieved without such a painstaking process.
It is good to take a position in these assignments, to offer your
own reflections. But this is not required. In any case do not indulge yourself
too much in such ruminations. These are a wonderful by-product of the review
process. They will be part of your discussions now and life-long reflections.
But first build a strong base for your current and future thoughts. Review
well and carefully.
ILLUSTRATION OF HOW TO WRITE A REVIEW. These two paragraphs (with
an extra line or two) illustrate the method of first summarizing and then
commenting. The second paragraph is probably longer than it ought to be
in a summary-plus-commentary form, long enough to begin to slip in some
"summary" type material as part of its exposition, closer to the third
approach mentioned above.
SUMMARY AND COMMENTARY
[Summary. (Note that it begins with a review of Skinner's basic
position. It would continue with a review of Sartre's basic position, perhaps
partly by contrast with Skinner's.)]
B. F. Skinner and Jean Paul
Sartre take stridently opposite positions on individual responsibility.
Skinner argues that the decisions we make, and the values upon which we
base those decisions, are products of our long-term interaction with our
environment. This interaction includes physical experiences of pleasure
and pain. Ice cream tastes good. Whoever has a taste of ice cream will
tend to seek to taste it again. This interaction also includes the effect
of other people on us. Parents give ice cream for what the parents call
good behavior. If the parents respond to their children's good behavior
by immediately offering the children ice cream, even if the parents do
not say they are doing it as a reward, the children will nonetheless experience
this behavior as reward-producing (or, perhaps more exactly, as reward-producing
when done in the presence of parents) and have a greater tendency to engage
in that behavior again when their parents are around. A life time of rewarding
experiences gradually produces a complex layer of learned behavioral tendencies;
similarly, painful experiences will produce their own layers of behavioral
tendencies, intermingled with the results of the rewarding experiences.
In general, the best way to understand the behavior of any adult is as
the product of a life-time of conditioning, not as the result of free and
responsible individual decisions. So says Skinner.
Sartre, on the other hand, places
full responsibility for every person's life and behavior in the free choices
of each individual. . . . . [The summary continues with Sartre's position.]
[Commentary]
Neither of the two positions seems adequate.
An obvious reason is that each is extreme. A combination of the two, a
middle ground, might be better. But a middle ground would still not be
enough, because the basic flaws in each position is more than just a matter
of excess in one direction. First of all, Skinner overlook implications
of his own goals. While he argues that we are puppets of our environment,
that inner intentions do not count, he nonetheless has a set of intentions
of his own that he believes does count. There is a difference between unintended
conditioning and intended conditioning. Parents may condition their children
to like broccoli by always mixing it with good tasting sesame seeds and
oil, not because they intend to train their children but because that is
the only way the parents like their broccoli. Skinner wrote his book, however,
because he wants people to decide just which behaviors they are intentionally
going to try to promote by connecting those behaviors with rewards. He
is a parent who deliberately decides to connect broccoli eating with whatever
good tastes it may take to produce a love of broccoli. He argues that we
need to condition each other to behave in ways that promote ecological
wisdom and avoid nuclear war. But he is not at all clear on how he came
to be conditioned to prefer those values. He may claim that his environment
conditioned him to prefer clean air and no nukes. But obviously not everyone's
environment has had the same effect. Skinner seems to believe that he and
others can intervene in the unintentional process of conditioning that
all people undergo and add some intentional conditioning. So inner intentions,
and the thoughts and plans and feelings that are involved in those intentions,
are a significant part of Skinner's program. That means that . . . .
[The commentary on Skinner would then be followed by a commentary
on Sartre. I do not know whether I could sustain the claim I began with
in the commentary, that finding a middle ground will still not be enough.
These sample paragraphs are to illustrate that you should include a detailed
review of the relevant positions, not just offer your own thoughts about
the topics.]
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