ABSTRACT
Public discourse is ailing. Richard Lipsky calls the athleticization of politics, "the transposition of sports values into political discourse". Intellectual virtues are cognitive character traits that involve a motivation for intellectual goods like true belief, knowledge, and wisdom. Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson describes: "Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever one holds two cognitions that are psychologically inconsistent". The chapter presents two patterns of thought that frequently contribute to this difficulty: the assailment-by-entailment and attitude-to-agent fallacies, and have shown how damaging these fallacies can be, both to public discourse and to classroom discussions. In his book Intellectual Character, Ron Ritchhart notes several features of so-called "thinking routines". The athleticization of the classroom makes it difficult for educators to provide an atmosphere in which students can engage in mutually beneficial and constructive dialogue. Students who are tempted to attribute to a dissenter a vicious character trait should consider whether they have good grounds for this.
