The rules of good arguments, good logic, and relevant evidence are the points to emphasize and enforce.
So disallow any and all appeals to social proof, and you eliminate the ability for these people to waste everyone else's time.
If someone wants to argue the Earth is 6,000 years old, let them take a couple of cracks at it. But once it's clear they are deviating from the rules of scientific reasoning in science class, make it clear that is the reason for disallowing their arguments and move on.
"We cannot allow academia to be consumed with discussions over whether gravity is a social construction, especially not because right-wing partisans feel that only mostly owning the field of economics means that academia is engaged in conspiracy against them."
Take this sentence, for example. It's not clear at all how the second clause logically follows from the first.
Discourse and unpopular ideas drive discovery and learning more than memorization ever will. It does not mean that unpopular views are "right" it means that the act of understanding, listening to other perspectives and being able to construct your own beliefs in that discourse is a net win and absolutely core to higher learning; even if the unpopular view is garbage.
In science you'd want to use the scientific method and reject appeals to faith.
Theology, while its foundational principles may be established on the basis of revelation such as scripture, often proceeds from foundational principles by logic.
Please explain how you proceed logically from the position that eating from the tree of knowledge is sin?
This doesn't seem hard. Apologist hat on.
It wasn't the knowledge that was bad, it's that the knowledge was attained by doing what God said not to. Certainly, we can condemn things done in pursuit of knowledge - Mengele being probably the easiest example.
That hat fit kinda funny.
This is merely an interpretation (incidentally, of which all text requires). How do you know it is the correct one?
I interpreted fleitz (in the bit I quoted) as saying "if knowledge is bad, then we shouldn't be using logic to get us more knowledge, so the whole exercise is absurd." I was pointing out that there's at least one out.
=)
No, they shouldn't, and I'll follow-up as to why below.
>Very quickly, the proposal that the moon is made of Vince Foster would be dismissed as false. This is critical thinking in action.
Given sufficient rhetorical skill and sufficiently many appeals to "open thought" or "questioning assumptions" or "viewpoint diversity" - in short, various forms of postmodern denial of the external world and the strict rules for reasoning about it - a sufficiently motivated student or professor will manage to make "the moon is made of Vince Foster" the center of attention.
We are living in the same world, with the same academic institutions, which was fooled by the Sokal Hoax, and we are also dealing with the human psychology of social proof, in which giving time and energy to considering an idea in-detail is considered evidence for the idea's truth (rather than evidence for its vagueness or logical complexity).
We cannot allow academia to be consumed with discussions over whether gravity is a social construction, especially not because right-wing partisans feel that only mostly owning the field of economics means that academia is engaged in conspiracy against them.