From Essay to Disputation: The Liberal Arts in a Digital Age
It seems that everyone from industry is finding Artificial Intelligence (AI) to be useful. Even skeptics of AI are softening to the idea that AI can make work easier. People are confessing that they are using AI to write their emails, to help them set the tone, or to pitch the level of complexity (upward or downward) to better communicate their meaning or to help their recipients understand. Highschool English and history teachers, as well as university professors in the humanities, however, tend to be much more skeptical and worried about their ability to assess student work. Some are banning the use of AI (to hardly any effect); others are moving to the old hand-written bluebook essays from the “old days” (but since no one knows how to write legibly, teachers can hardly read the handwriting). Others are moving toward oral examinations, or some combination of written work and oral examination. We here propose a different solution.
From Writing to Rationality
The essay is not merely a tool of assessment. It is a tool of formation. The essay is a means by which students are taught to think rationally. Like memorization, thinking rationally is also a habit—a habit that essay writing cultivates. Students are taught to establish facts as solid premises, to define terms as foundational starting points, to survey the landscape of opinion for those that are most solid. Then they must move carefully from premises to inferences to conclusions, all while steering a path through detractors and defeaters, whom they must learn to imagine.
The most successful students learn that the first attempt to steer this path in writing is usually rather clumsy and crooked, and that to steer expertly she must return to her ideas, preserved on the page, several times in a process of revision. In revising the paper, the student must reflect on how her ideas fit together and how they might fit together better, on shortcomings in her ideas and in their expression, and on her thought process itself as she encounters an “objective” record of previous moments in that process. Through this process, she hopefully arrives at final, unassailable conclusions. The essay is a powerful tool for forming the habits of rational, linear thinking.
Those disciplines we call the liberal arts or the humanities are there to encourage these rational habits through essay writing. English composition courses as well as philosophy’s critical thinking and logic courses help to establish a foundation for modes of rational thought. Courses in literature, history, and politics, as well as those in the human sciences (anthropology, psychology, and sociology) give students the opportunity to learn specialized skills in particular domains that lead to rational thinking within those domains. The natural sciences were outgrowths from these ways of thinking, where the starting point of facts are empirical data and where the forms of rationality are deployed in the standard style of natural science essays: background, methods, results, and conclusions.
While many in the liberal arts are worried about how AI is undermining a powerful tool for forming and cultivating rational thinking, many liberal arts universities and many small private universities are scaling back their liberal arts programs. Many universities are combining philosophy departments with other departments like religion or history or combining all the liberal arts into a “Department of Humanities” or simply eliminating them.
Daily Nous keeps a depressing list of philosophy departments that are under threat or have been eliminated. Catholic colleges and universities are not immune. Regardless of the clear emphasis on philosophy and theology in the history of Catholic education and its more general celebration of the liberal arts as both the foundation and pinnacle of human thinking, Catholic institutions have been shuttering liberal arts departments, including philosophy and theology programs, right along with secular institutions.
One of the latest examples is St. Norbert College, a Catholic “liberal arts” college in Wisconsin, that is in the middle of considering eliminating their Theology and Religious Studies major among others, and reimagining (whatever that means) their philosophy major. These institutions are abandoning their historic commitment to the liberal arts to bring students seeking practical fields for the sake of employment, a decision they are not hiding. After eliminating a host of majors, including English, history, philosophy, and theology and religious studies, Marymount University, a Catholic “liberal arts” university in Virginia, put out a statement saying that the “decision reflects not only our students’ needs, but our responsibility to prepare them for the fulfilling, in-demand careers of the future.”
It used to be the case that, if one wanted to become a businessperson or an engineer, one had to first do an undergraduate degree full of humanities courses and then could do an MBA or an engineering degree or apprenticeship. Thankfully, medicine and law have retained this tradition of an undergraduate degree before moving on to advanced study, even if most premedical students major in the sciences rather than in liberal arts. Part of the university’s responsibility to prepare students for careers was providing them with a grounding in the liberal arts, which opened for students ways of thinking that extend past the styles of thinking found in STEM. Colleges and universities are increasingly scaling back the required courses in the humanities to appeal to students seeking “in-demand” jobs and it is almost unimaginable that they would require intensive study in the liberal arts before they begin their vocational training.
While the liberal arts are crumbling around us and constantly on the chopping block during budget cuts, generative AI is undermining one of their essential tools of formation—the essay. If AI successfully undermines the essay and the capacity of liberal arts professors to teach students to write well and through the essay to think well, what little reason the liberal arts have used to justify their existence in the career-oriented universities will disappear. Employers and therefore university administrators may still care about being able to write well and think rationally, but as AI takes on more of the writing tasks, they will care less about those skills. Replacing essays with examinations that emphasize information will not help us, as certainly employers and administrators will not care if students can regurgitate Plato’s theory of the forms or Hegel’s view of absolute spirit.
Yet before the essay became the dominant mode of formation, the liberal arts had alternative pedagogical techniques. These techniques might not only help those in the liberal arts productively respond to new and emerging forms of AI but also to reclaim their role in student formation and to form students in ways those students need, both in terms of their existential needs that philosophy and theology courses should be helping to address and in terms of their practical needs to interact well with AI.
From Orality to Literacy and (Possibly) Back Again
Before the liberal arts were organized around the essay, the medieval university organized itself around another technique of formation, the disputation. Disputations were a structured form of debate that revolved around four characters: the respondent, the opponent, the praeses, and the audience.
The basic form of the disputation is that the praeses would pose a question and sometimes an answer; a respondent would take up a position and provide some arguments for the position, or if the praeses provided an answer, she would defend the position held by the praeses. A single opponent (and sometimes a group of opponents) would pose objections to the respondent; and audience members would then ask questions and pose objections. The praeses oversaw the whole thing; the praeses was not simply a neutral moderator and judge but was in some instances also an aid for the respondent, especially if the respondent was defending the praeses’s own positions.
Disputations combined an engagement with tradition through texts with critical attention to the spoken word. The praeses’s questions tended to arise through engagement with a written tradition, whether in terms of a question about interpretation or in terms of a question that had been historically important, e.g., whether virtues are habits. While they were based on written traditions, these traditions were brought into the present through the activity of speaking and debating. They served as a mediating technique between what had been handed on from history and the novel insight, observation, or controversy of the present moment.
Disputations were not simply an alterative mode of assessment or even an alternative mode of examining truth, they were also an alternative tool of formation. Like the essay, they formed students to think rationally, but they cultivated a different form of rationality, a more public form of rationality.
Unlike the essay, where students seek foundational starting points through precise definitions, in the disputation the emphasis falls on establishing shared starting points between the respondent, her opponents, and the audience. Once she can recognize a shared starting point, she must move carefully from premises to inferences to conclusions; the respondent must not simply focus on the logical validity of the moves, but she must bring the opponent and the audience along for the ride publicly and tailor her arguments to her particular audience. In many respects, the latter is as important as the former; there is a marriage of logic and rhetoric, which brings private and public knowledge together.
Moreover, since the student cannot write the steps down and return to them, she must depend on an alternative form of external memory, her fellow disputants. The opponents and audience are responsible for pointing to the clumsy and crooked reasoning that in an essay is corrected by the writer, who is arguing alone and for herself. To perform well, the opponents and audience must cultivate a critical form of listening and the respondent must learn to gloss her previous statements when fellow disputants point out errors, missteps, or clumsy expressions.
Thus, the metacognitive activities of revision are now a collaborative activity; rational thinking is a group project. The back and forth of the disputation, the activity of statement, objection, and re-statement through gloss is anything but a linear process heading toward final, unassailable conclusions. It is a process of constant mediation between a tradition handed on to students, the present insights of the disputants, and the need to address the particular audience to whom and for whom the student is speaking. Disputations were a powerful tool for forming the habits of an alternative mode of rational thinking. Thinking together is part of the goal.
The Contemporary Disputation: A Course Description
So, perhaps we should return to the disputation as a tool of formation. Given that AI is useful only insofar as one asks the right question and only insofar as a human discerns the value of the output, then we might want to design introductory courses that place the products of artificial intelligence at the forefront, asking students to engage critically, skeptically, and thus perhaps more fruitfully with AI outputs, and to do so together. At the heart of this course is a disputation about the products of an AI platform.
What might such a course look like? It will be labor intensive, and it will require small groups of students. Imagine the course meeting three times each week for fifty minutes. Monday’s class would be used for two things. First a lecture and discussion on the topic for the week. In the last twenty minutes or so, two questions are posed to an AI device. The AI’s response will become the fodder for Wednesday’s and Friday’s disputation, as described below. One could even vary which AI platform one uses, to help illustrate to students that the devices themselves are better and worse at various tasks, depending on different features of the AI’s design, such as the purpose for which it was designed, the data that was used to train it, and the explicit and implicit ethical or political rules built into it.
Groups of four students will then prepare for a disputation on Wednesday’s and Friday’s class sessions. Each of the four students will be assigned to one of four different roles: Fact-checker, Opponent, Respondent, and President.
The President presides over the disputation, ensuring decorum, that the rules of engagement are followed, and may occasionally rule on what is or is not permitted. The president may also step in if the Respondent or Opponent is struggling to respond. The President presides over the activity of disputation.
The Fact-Checker gives a presentation on the trustworthiness of the facts as they are articulated by the AI’s response and on how the facts are established by the AI. For example, the presentation might explain what data the AI was initially trained on and currently has access to, how up to date that data is, and how that could influence its answer. The platforms themselves, also, always construct the facts given the purposes for which the platform itself was designed. The Fact-Checker’s presentation should therefore include a discussion of factors that influence how the AI constructs the facts in its answers. For example, who built the AI, why did they build it (e.g., for profit or research), did they state principles that guide their design, and how might these factors influence the type of answer given.
The Opponent will then critically engage the product of the AI, challenging its facts, its rational argument, and its conclusions. Critical theory might inform the way that a student engages with the results. For example, what are the presuppositions behind the AI’s answers and how might these serve the interests of those who developed the AI, as explained by the Fact-Checker. The Opponent’s role is to challenge vigorously the AI’s product.
The Respondent then defends the AI’s product, possibly establishing better facts, or challenging the reasoning of the Opponent. These arguments must engage both with the Fact-checker’s presentation and the Opponent’s critiques. The Respondent’s role is to show that the AI’s work can stand up to rational scrutiny, and the ways that its products are still useful.
Finally, the President will give a brief summary of the whole process, and then put the disputed question to a vote. The President might simply ask, “Who won the disputation?” But it may also be helpful to ask students, “Given the disputation, does the AI’s answers stand up to critical scrutiny?” Each person in the class, including the four players, will vote on the AI’s response to the disputed question and the President announces the result.
The most important question—does the AI’s answers stand up to critical scrutiny—is of course the purpose of the course; it gets students to think of AI and the answers it provides as something that needs to be scrutinized on many levels: the trustworthiness of its facts, the validity of its arguments, whether the facts and logics are compelling. It will also place the AI device into a human context, where the human activity of disputation is the most important feature. In this context, the AI device is a tool assisting in human formation, rather than a technology taking over the formative activities from humans. This approach to AI would undermine both uncritical trust and distrust in AI. This approach would also promote human solidarity as perhaps the important element in our relationship to AI tools.
Each week there will be two disputations and each time a student group comes to dispute an AI’s product, roles are rotated, such that each student gets to play each role. One could even put the same question to two different AI platforms, and at the end of the week vote which AI did the task better, which is more trustworthy for the task of this particular question. The whole point would be to form students in the uses of AI, rather than unhelpfully allowing or disallowing students to use it to write their papers.
In fact, there might not even be papers at all in the course and no exams, only disputations. Grading could even be 360 grading, where the professor gives each role-player a grade, the non-role-playing students assess each of the role-playing students on their performance in the role, and each of the four role-players give themselves and their role-playing colleagues a grade. Rubrics for evaluation can be established beforehand by the professor to establish the ideal for each of the four roles played by students. Each group’s final disputation will be the “final exam” for the course.
While this course description would be for a general introductory course, we can imagine similar courses for specific fields of study. A business disputation course might focus on the use of AI devices for business tasks. Courses in the natural sciences might use AI’s that predict “the best” set of experiments to test a novel hypothesis. We can even imagine similar courses in medicine or law.
The technologies that surround us and that we engage with form us in ways of which we are often unconscious. After the printing press was developed, the liberal arts harnessed the formative power of writing to cultivate rational thinking. As we enter the era of AI, the liberal arts must harness the formative power of this new technology to cultivate new forms of rationality. To do this, the liberal arts, however, do not need to invent new pedagogical techniques from scratch. The tradition of the liberal arts is a treasure trove of alternative modes of formation besides the essay.
We have presented here one alternative technique—the disputation—which in the past taught students to bring a past recorded in writing into the present through speaking. The disputation can serve as a tried-and-true mode of forming critical and rational thinking. By adapting the disputation to the contemporary work of AI, those of us in the liberal arts can help harness this new technology for student formation. Adapting disputations in this way can also help us show administrators and students a way the liberal arts are still relevant for “in-demand careers of the future,” which will certainly require disputing the products of AI.