Daniel Kies Department of English College of DuPage
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Underlying Assumptions

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Assumptions are beliefs or ideas that we hold to be true — often with little or no evidence required. We make assumptions every day of our lives; for example, as a driver on the highway, I assume that other drivers will obey traffic signals, so that when I go through an intersection with a green light, I assume that the cross traffic will stop at its red light.

Of course, such assumptions are incorrect occasionally. However, generally speaking, most drivers do obey traffic signals and therefore we proceed through intersections on green lights without stopping or even checking first. We assume that the other drivers will comply.

It is easy to see assumptions (and their (often horribly negative) consequences) in everyday examples such as traffic accidents. However, in more abstract situations, such as when reading academic texts, it is not so easy to see assumptions or how they work. So, when thinking about academic argumentation and academic texts, we might reasonably ask, "Where do the assumption lie, exactly?" In other words, where do we look for them in the text we are reading? How do we find them? Good questions.

Personally, I find that a good method for uncovering assumptions in any text starts with thinking about the origins of assumptions and applying those ideas to the reading before me. And so, let's start by discussing the origins of assumptions. It seems to me that assumptions originate in one of four ways:

An Ontology of Assumptions

1. Cultural. As a human being, through accident of birth, I am awash in influences all around me — both subtle and crass — that privilege one idea over another simply because of where and when I was born. This is my cultural heritage. Consequently, I might prefer new over old, Western over Eastern, male over female, etc., depending on the culture into which I am born.

   So, for example, if I were born in South Africa, educated in France, and live in the Middle East, I would have a very different view of the world and how it works than if I were born into the rural areas United States, lived in a small Appalachian town, and were educated in parochial schools. Or if I were born into and lived in an affluent suburb of Chicago, I would have a very different view of the world and how it works than if I were born into and lived in a less privileged neighborhood in Chicago. Geographically, the difference between the affluent suburb and the less privileged neighborhood is small, but the cultural divide is enormous.

   In other words, the circumstances of my life play a role in shaping how I look at the world, how I interpret and understand ideas, people, and events around me. In this way, the cultures I inhabit all contribute to how I think and form the basis for many of the assumptions I make about the world. (And note I wrote cultures because I think it important that we also recognize that each of us simultaneously inhabits several cultures at any one time.) Call this cultural bias or the lens of culture through which I interpret the world, but culture is definitely a powerful influence on us all.

2. Biological. As a human being, through accident of my genetic makeup, I am awash in influences that privilege one idea over another. I prefer the upright over the supine. I prefer the active over the passive. I prefer the future over the past.

   In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson describe in detail how much of human language and cognition depends on analogical reasoning. They argue, for example, that one of the reasons we have so many metaphors such as I'm king of the hill, I'm in seventh heaven, I'm feeling up, I'm on top of the world, etc., is that as a human being I associate up and being upright with good, while down and being down I associate with bad, as in such metaphors as I'm under the weather, I'm feeling low, I'm down in the dumps, or just I'm down. Why is up good and down bad? Biology. When we humans are healthy, we are upright and erect. When we are ill, we are supine, lying flat, laying low. Similarly, we have many metaphors built on the idea that the future is in front, and the past is behind us. Our life's before us, Let's see what comes, and Life's a highway are all examples of metaphors built on the notion that the future is in front of us — and I mean physically in front of us. Conversely, we have metaphors to illustrate that the past is behind us, as in That's behind us now, We must not look back, and Hindsight is 20/20. Why is the future before us and the past behind? Biology again. As human beings, the majority of our sensory organs have evolved at one end of our bodies (the head), rather than being equally dispersed around our bodies. What's more, our sensory organs have evolved to focus our attention in a particular direction (forward). Our eyes and nose can perceive the environment before us better than in any other direction. Likewise, our ears are better at gathering sounds in front of us than from any other direction. Heck, it's even easier for us to taste something in front of us than anywhere else. In this way, our biology lends itself to creating patterns of analogical thinking that may determine much of what we think about the world. These are the assumptions that are biologically determined.

3. Intellectual. As a human being, I have a capacity to reason. Consequently, I prefer fact over opinion, certainty over uncertainty, truth over lies.

   More than two millennia ago, Aristotle argued that if we want to persuade or convince another person, we have just three possible approaches to accomplish that — the three appeals as he called them. We can appeal to the readers' ability to reason and present proof for our claim (rational appeal), we can appeal to our readers' ability to feel sympathy and empathy and present evidence designed to create sympathy for our claim (emotional appeal), and/or we can appeal to our readers' ability to trust an expert and present someone with authority to support our claim (ethical appeal). Good writers, of course, use all possible methods of persuasion.

   Now, as it turns out, different periods of human history have shown a tendency for humans to prefer one kind of appeal over the others. For example, here in the 21^st century (especially in a course on academic argumentation), many people prefer rational appeal over emotional or ethical appeals. We tend to say things like Show me the proof, or Pictures don't lie, or Tell me the facts, and I'll figure it out for myself. Yet even this preference can lead us into making faulty assumptions. If we prefer (meaning we are biased in favor of) rational appeal and undervalue the other appeals, we might easily be duped because of that bias. For example, pictures can be cleverly doctored or only tell half of the story. Forrest Gump never talked to John Kennedy, but if I watch the movie of the same name, I might think he did. Even statistics can be bent to tell a half-truth. Remember that old saying, "The glass is half full"? Is it half full or half empty, as a skeptic might snipe? Well, both, really. It depends on our interpretation of the facts: it's half of something, and depending on our initial point of view that is either half empty or half full. So we can see that our preference (bias?) for rational appeal might lead us to faulty conclusions. And these examples are only a small number of exploits of rational appeal: we haven't yet talked about the danger of anecdotal evidence, the manipulation of statistics, the effects of "truthiness" (a word that many of you might know if you are fans of The Daily Show or especially The Colbert Report). Shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report owe their success to illustrating the danger of ignoring rational appeal in favor of emotional or ethical appeals.

   Secondly, since we do have a preference for rational appeal, we are also at risk of undervaluing emotional and ethical appeals, thereby making us more vulnerable to those approaches. If we don't learn to evaluate all the evidence presented for us, then we might be unduly swayed by pictures of women and children put in harm's way in times of war. Stories such as those are compelling and persuasive. However, we must evaluate those pieces of evidence as rigorously as any other piece of evidence.

4. Idiosyncratic. As a human being, I have a history — a unique history.

   Consequently, I might have had experiences that lead me to assume that all dogs are vicious, all heights are bad, all doctors cause pain, etc. These idiosyncratic assumptions are the least "predictable" set of assumptions for a reader to anticipate. These are the assumptions we suffer because of traumatic events in our personal narratives.

   Often, at this point, some of us might want to add racism or sexism or ageism to the list of idiosyncratic assumptions, because the mention of a "traumatic event" triggers a memory of something bad associated with race or gender or age. Yet I wonder if such cases are better described as examples of how cultural assumptions can cross with idiosyncratic experience (and here I am implying that racism, sexism, and ageism are cultural, not idiosyncratic, in origin). I think we can agree that such mixtures of the origins of assumptions are possible.

Keeping those four sources of assumptions in mind, we should try to consider and anticipate the possible cultural, biological, intellectual, and personal biases that every writer brings to the act of composing an academic argument. This is how we find the underlying assumptions.

Some assumptions may have supporting evidence (and are called warranted assumptions), but many assumptions have no supporting evidence at all (and are called unwarranted assumptions). In the study of religion, for example, many people make all sorts of assumptions about the existence of a god (or gods), the origins of the universe, the source of good and evil, etc. Indeed, the religious among us have a word for accepting or believing an idea with no evidence required — faith. Furthermore, some authors will come out directly and tell the reader what s/he assumes before s/he begins an essay or an argument. For example, the linguist Noam Chomsky is in the habit of beginning articles in his discipline by writing something like "I assume familiarity with Jespersen (1930), Lee (1953), and Harris (1956)." Rarely do writers make such explicit assumptions. More commonly, the reader must determine what the writer's assumptions are since the writer is not so explicit at all; such assumptions are called implicit assumptions. See Figure 1.

Figure 1: A Typology of Assumptions

Generally speaking, we tend to trust writers and their conclusions more when they explicitly state their assumptions and support them with reasoning or evidence. However, even if they are explicit, we should not think that all those assumptions are relevant and valid: we still need to evaluate those assumptions just as critically as we would any other kind of assumption.

Relevancy and validity are the twin measures of an assumption's worth. For example, if we wanted to argue in favor of legalizing marijuana, we can't simply say that prohibition against alcohol was a failure and so too prohibition against marijuana is a failure as well. Instead of just assuming that the failure of Prohibition in the 1930s is relevant to our arguments about legalization, we really should demonstrate the relevancy of Prohibition then to prohibition now. Similarly, we should also demonstrate the validity of our assumptions. So, for instance, if we were to argue —through a joke — that "before a thief can steal, he must get elected," we would be assuming that all politicians are corrupt. That's an assumption that certainly has a degree of face validity, but we really are obligated to demonstrate the validity of such a sweeping generalization before anyone would take such an argument seriously.

Any kind of assumption can become a limiting assumption when that assumption blocks or interferes with our ability to think clearly about any particular issue. Consider Figure 2 below. After looking briefly at the field of letters, one notices the letter M nestled among the Os. What is harder to see is the letter Q because our eyes trick us into believing that all round letters in the field must be Os. The assumption that all round letters are Os limits our ability to perceive the difference between the letters at the bottom of the field. Limiting assumption can be very destructive.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOMOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOQOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Figure 2: Pattern Recognition and Limiting Assumptions

Often people give themselves messages like, "I'm an art major, so I'm no good at math" or "I don't like English, so I can't learn to write" or "I won't learn anything there; it's just the College of DuPage." Such messages have the effect of becoming true (even if they are not) simply because we act as if they are true based on our beliefs, our assumptions. Assumptions are the operating principle behind self-fulfilling prophecies. If we believe something to be true even though it is not tested or not even true, we often act as if it were true.

 

Two Puzzles Based on Limiting Assumptions Try these two puzzles. Each is based on an assumption, one visual, one cognitive. Each puzzle demonstrates how assumptions can limit our ability to think about different problems. 1. A Visual Assumption On a piece of scrap paper, connect all nine dots by drawing four straight lines without lifting the pencil from the paper. To see a solution of the puzzle, click on the puzzle itself. 2. A Cognitive Assumption Solve this riddle: A father and son are in a terrible car accident. The father is killed and the son, critically injured, is rushed into emergency surgery. The surgeon walks into the operating room, looks at the boy's face and says, "I can't operate on this boy; he's my son." Explain. (Then click here for a solution.)

Assumptions must be tested and evaluated just as rigorously as evidence. Just as we weigh the merits of an author's claim, so too must we weigh the relevance and the validity of the author's assumptions.

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