Michael Alan Gilbert (born 1945), also known by his femme alter ego Miqqi Alicia Gilbert, is an American-Canadian argumentation theorist, cross-dresser, author, academic, activist and professor emeritus at York University's Department of Philosophy.
His first field of research is the interdisciplinary area of argumentation theory that cuts across philosophy, linguistics, social psychology, and communication theory. His approach emphasizes and demands credibility for non-logical modes of communication, rooted in the belief that information, particularly in arguments, is exchanged "not through statements, but through messages which include familiar meaning, context, bodily communications, power relations, and intuitions". His most notable work is on models of argumentation that challenge logical, dialectical, and rhetorical traditions. He developed the theories of multi-modal argumentation and coalescent argumentation to showcase and address the mechanisms used by interlocutors to argue in the marketplace.
Gilbert's second area of research is gender studies, examining the foundation and nature of the socially constructed gender binary, and its implementation across institutional and social settings. He explores the role of gender diversity as a catalyst for disrupting the norm and unsettling the binary. As a life-long cross dresser, he studies the practice both as Michael and Miqqi Alicia Gilbert, his femme alter ego, to re-establish cross-dressing as an "opportunity for personal growth and exploration."
Early life and education Gilbert was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where he attended Erasmus Hall High School. He completed an undergraduate degree in philosophy and political science from Hunter College, City University of New York. Until June 1968, he studied graduate-level philosophy at State University of New York (SUNY), where his interest in logic first began. In September 1968, he emigrated to Canada for "political reasons" and enrolled in University of Waterloo. He started looking into the paradoxes of material implication that focus on anomalous theorems [p כ (q כ p)] ("a true statement is implied by everything") and [~p כ (p כ q)] ("a false statement implies everything"). Scholars Nuel Belnap and Alan Ross Anderson "introduced relevance to the idea of logic as a means of fixing these paradoxes." Gilbert's doctoral thesis entitled "A Formal Analysis of Relevance" argued that the idea of relevance they relied on was "simplistic and did not do the job it was intended to." He was awarded a PhD in philosophy in 1974.
Career To supplement his income during his final year of graduate studies, Gilbert developed a course entitled "How to Win an Argument" for Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ontario. Soon after, he was offered a contract position at the University of Toronto's Department of Philosophy, where he was a lecturer from 1973 to 1975. Between 1974 and 1980, he taught the course at University of Toronto's School of Continuing Studies.
In 1975, Gilbert was appointed as a professor of philosophy at York University and directed the Department of Philosophy's undergraduate program through the 1990s and 2000s. As of 2018, he is a professor emeritus at York University.
Gilbert was known to deliver lectures as Miqqi Alicia once every semester. In doing so, he transformed into a "walking illustration" of the core tenets underpinning his scholarship – one that positioned gender as a social construct "propped up by deeply imbedded conditioning" and affirmed that "what is constructed can be deconstructed" insofar that the sex you're born with should not limit your freedom to cross over into another.
In 1999, Salon reported that while teaching a second-year philosophy course on gender and sexuality, Gilbert asked his class of 90 students if they'd be interested in a question-answer session with a transgender person and witness a "living deconstruction of gender dichotomy." While most students agreed to participate, he did issue a formal warning that those uncomfortable with the idea of seeing such a person should skip the upcoming class. A few days later, the tenured professor showed up as Miqqi Alicia, dressed in a skirt, sweater, and low heels. Her walk was "more tentative" in comparison to Michael's "lumbering gait." Her nails were manicured and she wore earrings. As she entered, the students whispered and giggled. She allowed the class ten to fifteen minutes to get used to her femme alter ego, before proceeding with her lecture. She started by explaining that transgender is an umbrella term that applied to "anyone who is uncomfortable with, objects to or plays with his or her birth-designated gender." Next, she told her students that a male cross-dresser doesn't consider himself to be a woman. "I'm a man with a man's body and I don't want anyone to touch it with a scalpel," she explained. The students were supportive of Gilbert's en femme appearance, taking notes and addressing him as Miqqi. A male student pointed out how "all professors impose their styles and lives on their class, from their worn tweed jackets with leather patches to the endless heterosexual references to wives and children." A female student noted that Miqqi Alicia subverted the "creepiness factor" and dispelled common stereotypes associated with transgender people. "It's not sexual. [Michael] is not being caught going through his wife's underwear or wearing garters and heels," she added.
In the year leading up to his classroom appearance as Miqqi Alicia, Gilbert received mainstream media coverage for intentionally "self-outing". He believed that a tenured academic, especially one belonging to a marginalized group, ought to say what's unpopular. "I have the obligation to expose myself as transgendered in order that others, for whom the risk might be greater, can also do so," he said.
York University honoured Gilbert with the Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching for full-time Tenured Faculty for his "creative teaching strategies and commitment to deep and sustained learning."
Research
Models of argumentation Gilbert's models of argumentation recognize that discourse cannot always be taken at face value. He discourages reviewing discourse from a strict logical lens and resorting to literal understandings i.e. emotions do not belong in arguments; innuendo or sarcasm do not belong, and so on. Instead, his emphasis is on observing what is happening and uncovering what lies at the heart of an argument i.e. the sociolinguistic and sociopsychological aspects. Other argumentation experts, most notably Barbara O'Keefe who proposed the communication theory of message design logic, have opted for similar approaches in this field.
According to Gilbert, his work on argumentation aligns more closely with the traditional rhetoric ("an argument is an attempt at persuasion to reach an agreement") as opposed to logic, which focuses on the product of the argument or dialectical concerns such as interaction between interlocutors. "In the logical view, we express everything in propositions while in the rhetorical we express ourselves in messages," he explained. He finds traditional rhetoric to be "more contextual" as it offers "a lot more information than the mysterious and highly metaphysical proposition." As a result, both multi-modal argumentation and coalescent argumentation are "less antagonistic to the rhetorical argumentative tradition than the logical one" with the former recognizing the "modes of persuasion utilized by arguers" and the latter theorizing that "arguments can function from agreement." That said, Gilbert's work parts with the rhetorical tradition by not relying on oral or written language as a means of persuasion. His work is influenced by contemporary rhetorical theorists Wayne Brockriede and Charles Arthur Willard. He agrees with latter that "people will use all the tools available to them to persuade, and these tools are not always verbal or direct."
Multi-model argumentation With a background in philosophical tradition and extensive training in logic, Gilbert's work challenges how logic conceives of arguments. In 1976, his first paper in the area of formal logic was published by Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic. While teaching an introductory course on logic as a graduate student, he realized that his class, consisting predominantly of pupils from an arts background, struggled with formal logic. Pupils with an engineering background however found formal logic less challenging, but did not account for its philosophical aspects. "That class really caused me to pause and think, leading me to design a curriculum that taught non-standard logic," Gilbert said, "I started to become unhappy with formal logic and my redesigned curriculum was motivated by philosophical issues, such as truths and falsities." He also observed that people in the marketplace did not argue very logically most of the time. "It's not that they were being illogical; it was that they weren't using just logic when they argued. They demonstrated other ways of thinking," Gilbert explained. As a philosopher, he continued to become more and more dissatisfied with formal logic because he felt that it wasn't serving the public. "Teaching modal logic or working with logical axioms, did not truly impact how we reason in real argumentative settings," he said, "Formal logic, and even informal logic, focus on arguments as products or proof. When we evaluate an argument's premises and determine whether they support their conclusion – this has limited usefulness for solving disagreements between people."
In his book How to Win an Argument (1979), he described a "visceral" argument between friends about whether a woman could be a police officer. Gilbert noted that when a man claimed that women cannot be police officers, the woman responded by flipping him over her shoulder. These "recollections of influences" prompted his development of the multi-modal argumentation model that respects the "rhetorical tradition" and is based on how people actually conduct themselves in an argument. The model provided a taxonomy of arguments, proposing four argument modes that act as a "vehicle for relaying a message in argumentation." The modes are as follows: logical (arguments rooted in traditional, reasoned view), emotional (arguments that use emotion for rationale), visceral (arguments that rely on physical or environmental factors, e.g. an eye roll), and kisceral (arguments that rest on the intuition or energy).
According to Gilbert: "An argument's persuasive force is based on the mode that is most prominent in each argument." He theorized that argumentative interactions rarely occur in a single mode and typically feature a combination of these modes, with one of them being the "more predominant mode of persuasion based on particular circumstances." In later publications, he acknowledged that these modes are not exhaustive.
Gilbert believes that it is not theoretically important for multi-modal argumentation to have a normative framework given that the model is "highly situationally focused". According to him, situational rationality allows the rules people create to be accepted in a particular argumentative encounter, thereby agreeing with Christopher Tisdale's proposition that arguers "create rhetorical situations in which the rules and processes are contextually dependent". For example, people who yell in argumentative discussions are likely to be shunned and isolated for going against the universally-accepted rule of not being verbally abusive to others in a conversation.
Gilbert doesn't consider himself to be "anti-logical" but clarifies that "logic does not serve [his] purpose." In 2011, he further argued that informal logic can embrace multi-modal argumentation by liberating itself from the "yolk of formal logic."
Coalescent argumentation