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Uncovering Assumptions: An Economist Speaks

In the following Voice from Across the Curriculum, economics professor James Marshall foregrounds the importance of uncovering assumptions in designing and answering research questions.

Voices From Across the Curriculum

What’s beneath the question? On some occasions, students find that they have confronted an issue that cannot be resolved by the deductive method. This can be exciting for them. Will cutting marginal tax rates cause people to work more? The answer is yes or no, depending on the premises underlying the workleisure preferences incorporated into your model.

—James Marshall, Professor of Economics

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Try This 4.3: Uncovering Assumptions: Fieldwork

You can practice uncovering assumptions with all kinds of material— newspaper editorials, statements you see on billboards, ideas you are studying in your courses, jokes, and so forth. Try a little fieldwork: spend a week jotting down in your notebook interesting statements you overhear. Choose the best of these from the standpoint of the implied (but unstated) premises upon which each statement seems to rest. Then make a list of the uncovered assumptions.

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3. REFORMULATING BINARIES

HOW TO REFORMULATE BINARIES

Step 1: Locate a range of opposing categories.

Step 2: Define and analyze the key terms.

Step 3: Question the accuracy of the binary and rephrase the terms. Step 4: Substitute “to what extent?” for “either/or.”

Binaries are an essential component of thinking and writing analytically. They have already figured significantly in earlier chapters—as part of The Method after locating repetitions and strands, and as Move 3 of the Five Analytical Moves, in searching for patterns. We wish now to focus on a new use of binaries, one that takes place in higher order analysis, when you are “going deeper.” This move is reformulating binaries.

First, here is a quick reprise on the benefits and dangers of binary thinking. When you run into a binary opposition in your thinking, it is like a fork in the road, a place where two paths going in different directions present themselves and you pause to choose the direction you will take. Binary oppositions are sites of uncertainty, places where there is struggle among various points of view. As such, binaries are the breeding ground of ideas. And, as we suggested in our discussion of The Method in Chapter 2, when you determine the organizing contrast in whatever you are analyzing, you have found the structural beam that gives conceptual shape to a piece.

If you leap too quickly to a binary, however, one that is too general or inaccurate, you can get stuck in oversimplification, in rigidly dichotomized points of view. At that point, you are in the grasp of a reductive habit of mind called either/or thinking.

The solution is to remember that, when you find a binary opposition in an essay, film, political campaign, or anything else, you have located the argument that the film, essay, or campaign is having with itself, the place where something is at issue. Your next step is to immediately begin to ask questions about and complicate the binary. To “complicate” a binary is to discover evidence that unsettles it and to formulate alternatively worded binaries that more accurately describe what is at issue in the evidence.

Step 1: Locate a range of opposing categories (binaries). Finding binaries will help you find the questions around which almost anything is organized. Use The Method to help you uncover the binary oppositions in your subject matter that might function as organizing contrasts.

Step 2: Define and analyze the key terms. By analyzing the terms of most binaries, you should come to question them and ultimately arrive at a more complex and qualified position.

Step 3: Question the accuracy of the binary and rephrase the terms. Think of the binary as a starting point—a kind of deliberate overgeneralization—that allows you to set up positions you