Puppies do not plagiarize; nor do they offer poor theistic arguments
The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Friday admitted that it tracked Howard Zinn, the noted historian and political activist who died in January, from 1949 to 1974, and the bureau released 423 pages of records from the monitoring of Zinn. Salon noted that this monitoring took place "despite having apparently no evidence that he ever committed a crime." And TPM noted that the records indicate that a senior official at Boston University, where Zinn taught, tried to have him fired in 1970. (If you are wondering if that official might have been John Silber, the long-time BU president with whom Zinn had many disagreements, it wasn't, as Silber hadn't been hired at the time.)Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age (Trip Gabriel, New York Times)
At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.Philosophy and Faith (Gary Gutting, New York Times)
At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.
And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.
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[T]hese cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.
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“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”
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…[Th]e number who believed that copying from the Web constitutes “serious cheating” is declining — to 29 percent on average in recent surveys from 34 percent earlier in the decade.
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A University of Notre Dame anthropologist, Susan D. Blum, disturbed by the high rates of reported plagiarism, set out to understand how students view authorship and the written word, or “texts” in Ms. Blum’s academic language.
She conducted her ethnographic research among 234 Notre Dame undergraduates.
“Today’s students stand at the crossroads of a new way of conceiving texts and the people who create them and who quote them,” she wrote last year in the book “My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture,” published by Cornell University Press.
Ms. Blum argued that student writing exhibits some of the same qualities of pastiche that drive other creative endeavors today — TV shows that constantly reference other shows or rap music that samples from earlier songs.
In an interview, she said the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged.
“Our notion of authorship and originality was born, it flourished, and it may be waning,” Ms. Blum said.
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At the University of California, Davis, of the 196 plagiarism cases referred to the disciplinary office last year, a majority did not involve students ignorant of the need to credit the writing of others.
Many times, said Donald J. Dudley, who oversees the discipline office on the campus of 32,000, it was students who intentionally copied — knowing it was wrong — who were “unwilling to engage the writing process.”….
…The standard view is that philosophers’ disagreements over arguments about God make their views irrelevant to the faith of ordinary believers and non-believers. The claim seems obvious: if we professionals can’t agree among ourselves, what can we have to offer to non-professionals? An appeal to experts requires consensus among those experts, which philosophers don’t have.
This line of thought ignores the fact that when philosophers’ disagree it is only about specific aspects of the most subtle and sophisticated versions of arguments for and against God’s existence…. There is no disagreement among philosophers about the more popular arguments to which theists and atheists typically appeal: as formulated, they do not prove (that is, logically derive from uncontroversial premises) what they claim to prove. They are clearly inadequate in the judgment of qualified professionals. Further, there are no more sophisticated formulations that theists or atheists can accept — the way we do scientific claims — on the authority of expert consensus.
In these popular debates about God’s existence, the winners are neither theists nor atheists, but agnostics — the neglected step-children of religious controversy, who rightly point out that neither side in the debate has made its case. This is the position supported by the consensus of expert philosophical opinion.
This conclusion should particularly discomfit popular proponents of atheism, such as Richard Dawkins, whose position is entirely based on demonstrably faulty arguments. Believers, of course, can fall back on the logically less rigorous support that they characterize as faith. But then they need to reflect on just what sort of support faith can give to religious belief. How are my students’ warm feelings of certainty as they hug one another at Sunday Mass in their dorm really any different from the trust they might experience while under the spell of a really plausible salesperson?
What sort of religious experience could support the claim that Jesus Christ was God incarnate and not just a great moral teacher?. . .
But how can religious experience sustain faith in a specific salvation narrative, particularly given the stark differences among the accounts of the great religious traditions? What sort of religious experience could support the claim that Jesus Christ was God incarnate and not just a great moral teacher? Or that the Bible rather than the Koran is the revelation of God’s own words? Believers may have strong feelings of certainty, but each religion rejects the certainty of all the others, which leaves us asking why they privilege their own faith….
5 comments:
A most excellent post. ES
So what, specifically, are the demonstrably faulty arguments put forth by Dawkins? This fellow can really beg a question.
1:04, you might want to use the link to read Gutting's whole piece, though I don't think he explains or defends his view that Dawkins' arguments for Atheism are demonstrably unsuccessful.
Much of what Prof. Gutting says seems correct to me. As I often note to my students, the familiar and traditional arguments (and all other arguments that I am familiar with) for the existence of (say) the Judeo-Christian-Islamic sort of God range from unsound to very weak. This is, I think, a matter of consensus opinion among philosophers. But one must be careful to recognize what this thesis does and doesn't imply.
I am not as convinced of the other claim perhaps implied or stated by Gutting: that the arguments for God's non-existence similarly fail. It is true, of course, that the simple versions of the "problem of evil," which are often used to defend Atheism, are simplistic and unconvincing. There are inductive versions, however, that, arguably, are north of "weak." That is, I have encountered a fair number of philosophers who defend, not the idea that God's nonexistence is proven, but that it is more probable that the J-C-I God does not exist than that He does exist. (This kind of position is often the sort that natural scientists take.) And so, here, perhaps, Gutting makes a controversial claim. Not sure.
Scientists (and philosophers) like to say that one "can't prove a negative"--that is, that one cannot prove that something doesn't exist, since, in order to do that, one must examine the entire universe in a glance, something that we cannot hope to do. But, again, that is consistent with supposing that it is not likely that such-and-such exists.
I am unfamiliar with the details of Dawkins' views, but it is important to remember that the following two assertions are logically distinct:
A: There are no successful arguments for God's existence.
B: We have a good reason to suppose that God does not exist.
A is likely correct. But to infer B from A is to commit what logicians/scientists call the "appeal to ignorance" fallacy, i.e., supposing that the failure to prove X is evidence against X, which it is not. If one is to embrace the notion that God does not exist, one will have to provide evidence, an argument. That's hard to do. One would think that a scientist such as Dawkins would be aware of these considerations, but who knows.
How does one provide evidence of the non existence of something, no matter how absurd the posit? And why would it be that person's burden of proof?
The burden of proof is indeed different for those who assert that something exists and those who assert that it does not. The former can prove that X exists simply by presenting an instance of X. However, the latter can never reach a situation in which their case is made. In various ways, however, one can make a case that X is not likely to occur or to exist--e.g., if it is a phenomenon that violates physical laws (as now understood).
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