Kettle Logic in Higher Education

Or, No one is using kettle logic, they are right to use kettle logic, and there is simply no such thing as kettle logic

In both The Interpretation of Dreams and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud recalls a humorous anecdote of a man who borrows his neighbor’s kettle and returns it broken. He defends himself with the following argument:

1. The kettle isn’t broken;

2. it was broken when you gave it to me; and

3. I never borrowed your kettle in the first place.

For Freud, it is an illustration of the way that contradictions can exist in both dreams and jokes, reflecting the fact that the unconscious does not obey the canons of logic. For members of my academic age cohort, the anecdote took on political implications when Žižek placed it at the center of his critique of the rationale for the Iraq War. In classic style, he asked: is not the problem with the pro-war argument precisely not that there are not sufficient reasons to invade Iraq, but too many reasons?! That is to say, the Iraq War was simultaneously an act of revenge, a vindication of national strength, and a selfless mission in defense of freedom—indeed, even a mission to vindicate distinctively liberal principles like women’s rights. As in the kettle logic, these reasons cannot be simultaneously true. The fact that they are all strung together is not an attempt at logical argumentation, but an attempt to distract attention from an obvious wrong.

In my many years in online forums, I have repeatedly noticed kettle logic at work in long threads. It is very typical for people to respond only to the most recent statement of their interlocutor, with no regard for their own consistency, leading their position to shift over time. A classic example is the typical response when you claim that someone has misunderstood your post:

1. I didn’t say you said anything different from what you just clarified;

2. it’s your fault that I misunderstood because you’re a crappy writer; and

3. my so-called “misunderstanding” is your actual belief that you are trying to obscure now that you are facing criticism.

But we can also see similar dynamics in many kinds of arguments. We can probably think of many conservative examples, but one of my favorites is a liberal one:

1. Political correctness/critical race theory/wokeness is completely made up by conservatives to tar liberals;

2. political correctness/critical race theory/wokeness is actually just common sense and/or simple politeness; and

3. political correctness/critical race theory/wokeness is desperately necessary to radically change society for the better.

In the original formulation from Freud, the point is simply the contradiction as such. In neither context does he elaborate on the meaning of the three terms of the anecdote, which is not even original to him. But after spending a lot of time thinking about (and, in my view at least, responding to) kettle logic-style arguments, I believe there is a kind of inner necessity to the three statements. All are escalating attempts to disavow responsibility by disavowing the underlying reality more and more radically.

The first step is most minimal, accepting that the speaker had entered into a situation of moral accountability (he took on the commitment to take care of the kettle the neighbor lent him) but asserting that the described wrong did not occur.

The second may seem to be less radical, insofar as he admits the wrong occurred, but he displaces it into the past and thereby implicitly shifts responsibility for the breakage onto the neighbor. After all, the owner either broke it himself or lent it to a less responsible neighbor previously—and presumably didn’t even notice its poor condition until just now!

The third is of course the most radical, denying that the scenario of moral responsibility ever occurred in any sense. This is importantly different from the first, with which it could easily be confused. To put it in the most schematic terms, position 1 is conceding that some change has occurred—in this case, the kettle has changed hands—but denies the wrong associated with that change. The third denies that the supposed change even happened at all.

With that in mind, I would like to outline a few cases of kettle logic in the academy. The first concerns a phenomenon that is near and dear to my heart, and which I take some degree of credit for sounding the alarm on: the precipitous decline in student reading comprehension and stamina. Using the tripartite scheme, the positions people typically take on this are as follows:

1. Yes, the decline is happening, but it’s not a problem because their lack of reading prowess is more than compensated by other important skills (such as creating TikTok videos—I shit you not, I have literally heard this response).

2. Yes, the decline is happening, but it is part of a longer decline that has arguably been happening ever since the concept of reading was invented (and here we often learn that professors always complained that students didn’t read enough or that people once thought that—get this!—TV might harm reading and concentration skills).

3. The decline is not real at all, or at least we cannot know it’s happening since we lack clear “data” (the near-universal consensus of all college educators who are asked about this phenomenon being merely “anecdotal,” because no survey was formally administered and no numerical result was produced).

Given my personal stake in the debate, I have waded into this disproportionately often, including on Substack, and I can confirm that the “argument” shifts seamlessly from position to position depending on the rhetorical needs of the moment.

We can detect a similar pattern in discussions of the likely impact of AI on education. The positions seem to be as follows:

1. Yes, AI is going to change our pedagogy, but not in a harmful way—it will save students from drudgery and allow them to focus on higher-level tasks (“higher-level” than, e.g., formulating a hypothesis, constructing an argument, or evaluating evidence).

2. Yes, AI is hurting students’ education, but it is part of a longer trend that has perhaps existed as long as the university itself—after all, students have always sought to cheat on papers, have often done a poor job, have not understood the purpose or benefit of their writing assignments, etc. (One is often tempted to cite the Phaedrus at this point.)

3. No, AI is not fundamentally affecting education at all, because it is simply a “tool” like calculators, computers, Venn diagrams, phonetic writing, perhaps even language itself—after all, what is writing but remixing of words and ideas that in some sense already exist?

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to generate the kettle logic for other major systemic problems—for instance, the production of more PhDs than there are dignified full-time teaching jobs, the abuse of adjunct instructors, or the gradual ratcheting down of traditional academic subjects in favor of narrowly job-oriented coursework. Admittedly, in some of these cases, it may not be as easy to vividly recall a specific real-life response that corresponds to the kettle logic scheme, simply because it’s unlikely that we have recently been in an argument about them. And I think that’s a give-away of what’s really going on here. As Tim Burke pointed out when I was venting on Notes about a recent kettle logic-style encounter about the reading issue, people tend to lean on those contradictory, self-exculpating arguments when faced with problems that seem simply too big to deal with.

We could perhaps say that kettle logic arguments represent the “bargaining stage” in our attempt to accept the unacceptable. In terms of the structure of the academic workforce or the curriculum, for example, most of us have resigned ourselves to the fact that powerful forces beyond our control are absolutely determined to crush traditional academic institutions and values and that what we view as the most important and authentic academic work is doomed to exist only in isolated pockets.

The kettle logic only comes out when trying to be “supportive” to a graduate student who raises concerns about their likely future prospects. It is simply too hard to think about the fact that the system as currently constituted actively exploits idealistic young people, inducing them to take on often crippling debts, waste a decade or more of their prime earning years, and almost certainly set themselves up for bitter humiliation—all so that service courses can be provided marginally more cheaply. It is especially hard to think about the ways that one might be complicit in such dynamics, for instance through one’s desire for the intellectual satisfactions that come with working with graduate students or being freed to teach only upper-level undergraduate courses to self-selecting groups of majors. (I mourn the fact that I will almost certainly never have the opportunity to work with grad students, but I am oddly grateful for the moral luck of not having to deal with that particular form of complicity.)

Similarly, it is very difficult to think that the disciplines of reading and writing that were so deeply formative for us are being systematically destroyed—indeed, we may turn out to be the final generation to be truly competent in them—by companies that have figured out ways to profit massively from, to put it bluntly, inducing us to fritter away our life on worthless bullshit. It is even more upsetting to ponder the fact that the same trajectory is culminating in a technology that will make essentially everyone’s life worse—including by robbing future generations of the ability to recognize what has been taken from them. The prospect of fighting against such a powerful and malign force is scary and fraught with risk, especially because the values that would motivate us to fight are already so marginal.

And so we talk at and past each other, mouthing thoughtless responses we don’t even believe in—as shown by our willingness to shift to another contradictory position after the slightest pushback—in order to disavow our responsibility for saving our own institutions and our own disciplines and the project of human thought to which we have ostensibly devoted our entire lives. I take some cold comfort in the fact that, even if the arguments are intensely irritating to me now, they will be over soon enough, in the brave new world where everyone has finally run down the clock and there’s no option but to give up.