Knowledge Claims can be Tested

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Janet’s outsider position was also evident in her use of examples. While Roger continually tested authors’ claims through the use of examples and test cases, Janet used examples only to clarify or illustrate. She viewed “the book” as something to be understood and reported, not questioned or elaborated on. Examples occupy an important position in the domain of ethics, a point Roger makes in his introduction: “Examples... play a great role in writings about paternalism. They serve both to inspire insight and to correct mistaken definitions.” In this literature, cases of people paternalizing and being paternalized abound. Roger used cases not only to clarify issues raised in the readings, but to generate new issues and to test their limits, as in the following excerpt, where he considers the “morality condition” mentioned earlier:

I’ll have to discuss whether there is really a need for a morality condition [. . .] you recall the case of the two competitors, A... and B,... where B doesn’t want A to withdraw... but A does want to withdraw for B’s good [. . .] I don’t know whether that’s paternalism or not... I’m inclined to think it isn’t paternalism... though it’s something closely related... similar in spirit... it’s only similar insofar as it’s intended for the other person’s good and B is at clash with his will...

now on some of the definitions we’ve got... that would count as paternalism... but I think this is enough to say... that that’s too broad... because I don’t think this is... not like a standard case of paternalism... though it does satisfy those conditions and is for that reason... to the extent we are tempted to think that perhaps it falls under the definition of paternalism...

Roger used the case of the two competitors to compare the various positions in the literature and explore the concept of paternalism itself. He had used this case before; it appeared a number of times in his text and transcripts. He was thus able to integrate a number of issues by relating them all to this and a handful of other instances. In all, only seven distinct cases figure prominently in Roger’s work.⁶

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In contrast, Janet used twenty-four distinct cases to think through her ideas, rarely considering any particular case more than once. She regularly inserted examples in her paper, one or two for each point she made, noting “examples are important cause if someone’s reading it... they don’t understand... that’s like how [we] make them understand.” In addition to this explanatory purpose, examples sometimes served a clarifying function for Janet herself. At one point, to answer a question prompted by one of the readings, “Do all paternalistic acts deceive, break a promise or cheat?” Janet consulted a list of examples she had generated, decided that forcing a child to eat vegetables didn’t fit any of those categories, and concluded “all paternalistic acts do not deceive, break a promise or cheat.” She did not seem to see, however, that she was taking issue with a defining condition proposed by one of the authors; her goal was simply to determine the truth of the matter. She concluded that the condition didn’t hold and therefore did not include it in her final paper. We found it encouraging that Janet thought to use examples to help her understand her source material, but because she didn’t have the goal of responding to these authors she failed to take advantage of this generative practice. Because she created new examples for every point she covered, she was not able to use them to help examine connections and contrasts. The topic remained for Janet a series of isolated facts and issues. Examples helped her move down the ladder of abstraction but never up, whereas they enabled Roger to run up and down the ladder at will, constructing categories at one moment, testing and illustrating key features the next.