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Informal Logic, vol. 32 no.1

Posted in Announcements, Discussion, Informal Logic, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 27, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Informal Logic vol. 32 no. 1

The latest edition of Informal Logic  is now available.  Contributing authors to this volume include Lilian Bermejo-Luque , Louise Cummings , Christoph Lumer, Michael Gary Duncan,  David Botting and Ben Hamby.  While there are, as usual, several very interesting articles, of particular interest to readers of RAIL will be Cristián Santibáñez Yáñez’s thorough and well-researched critical notice of the forthcoming book-length treatment of Mercier and Sperber’s argument theory of reasoning.   The arrival of this book will undoubtedly be one of the highest-impact events of recent years on argumentation studies.  If you’ve not become acquainted with it yet, this critical notice is a good place to start.  (The archives here at RAIL aren’t bad either!)

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Intuition, X-Phi, and Appeal to Expert Authority

Posted in Connections, Discussion, tagged , , , , on March 27, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Here’s an interesting bit of controversy over at Leiter’s blog.  Let us leave aside for the moment that the comment spurring it largely constitutes a (pervasive) misunderstanding of what experimental philosophy is and claims to do.  (A better picture of experimental philosophy can be obtained here.)What I find interesting about it is that one thing that seems to be needed in the conversation that follows in the comment thread is a decent analysis of what it means to appeal to expert authority.

Now where, oh where, would they ever find the kind of analysis they need, I wonder?

Heh.  😉

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Stations: Argumentation Around the Web

Posted in Connections, Discussion, tagged , , , , , , on March 5, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Though I’ve been keeping up with the CFP’s, RAIL readers may have noted that I’ve not been posting much else. Apologies for that! Deadlines, deadlines. 🙂 At times like these I try to assuage my guilt for not writing more of my share of the content here by pointing RAIL readers to interesting posts on other blogs. I may be bogged down with research and writing, but the argumentation blogosphere outside of RAIL is alive and well too. As proof, I humbly suggest to you the following very worthy reads:

First up, check out A Toulminian approach to thought experiments, by our good friend-blog Argumentics. In this post you’ll find the writer’s usual insightful and knowledgeable article analysis, this time on the use of thought experiments in philosophy and in science. Those who are familiar with Maurice Finocchiaro’s work on Galileo might want to read the entire serious of posts at Argumentics on this issue. It’s good stuff. So is the series of posts on Searle’s Chinese Room argument. In fact, just add this blog to your bookmarks. It’s consistently great.

Also consistently great is Jean Goodwin’s blog Between Scientists and Citizens. Though not as prolific as Argumentics (with whom I challenge anyone to keep up), Between Scientists and Citizens consistently serves up gems like this one: Burden of Proof #1: Managing our own thinking, In this post Jean identifies an all-too-familiar argumentative use of the concept of burden-of-proof that, while general in scope, will resonate with readers who have been enjoying Cate’s recent posts too.

Lastly I suggest The dismal state of political discourse, over at Tim Van Gelder’s blog. The reason I suggest it isn’t so much because there’s novel conceptual analysis to be had, but because it’s a wonderful example of van Gelder’s hallmark: practical application of ideas from argumentation theory to concrete problems. This time the problem being taken on is the need for better communication between ordinary citizens and political institutions in Australia.  It’s an interesting project that deserves to be better known. Have a look!

Also, don’t forget to check out the Twitter feed in the top right corner of the page next to the posts or just follow us: @RAILBlog

Happy Reading!

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Ad feminam

Posted in Connections, Discussion, Fallacies, Informal Logic, tagged , , , , , on March 4, 2012| 4 Comments »

Rush Limbaugh’s recent dismissal of Sandra Fluke as a “slut” and a “prostitute” reminds me of how much more vulnerable women are than men to the abusive ad hominem.  There is a a greater number of abusive words associated with women:  add “whore,” “bitch,” “cunt,” “old maid,” “hag,” “bag,” “jezebel,” “hoochie mama,” etc., as opposed to “prick,” “dick,” and “boy toy.”  Plus the feminine insults tend to be considered so bad that people often won’t actually say them, but only allude to them, for instance in saying “the c-word.”

On top of that, women tend not to be listened to, so the ad hominem may always be more effective against women.  Merely pointing out that a speaker is a woman may act as reason to ignore her. The same would apply to any marginalized people.  One’s very identity can undermine one’s claims and one’s reasons.

Lorraine Code has argued in a few places that the dismissal of women’s reasons for being women’s reasons should be identified as ad feminam.  The vulnerability of women to ad hominem suggests indeed that ad feminam deserves recognition as a distinct category.

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Philopolis at Guelph

Posted in Announcements, Critical Thinking, Discussion, News, Seminar/Workshop/Program Announcements, Uncategorized, Workshops on February 29, 2012| Leave a Comment »

University of Guelph graduate students (it’s my understanding) have been organizing in a serious fashion to take philosophy out of the ivory tower.  A two-day series of events, with six concurrent sessions addresses issues from Einstein to zombies, heuristics, and feminism. 

Philopolis Guelph, inspired by Philopolis Montreal aims to “[do] a better job [than academic philosophers have been doing] of engaging in dialogue with the public: this requires finding a common language, as well as being explicit about the relevance of the ideas at issue. Both academic philosophers and the broader public stand to benefit one another greatly through this kind of exchange—free of jargon, of minced words, and of exclusionary assumptions. ”

Philopolis’ resistance to academic jargon and presumption promises to make philosophy accountable as well as show non-philosophers how valuable philosophy can be.  The development of a common language is a creative endeavour that requires public engagement, and making assumptions explicit is an important principle of critical thinking to put into practice.

Philosophers sometimes think we own “critical thinking,” which is an extremely dangerous assumption in itself.  Sociologists, neurologists and physicists engage in critical thinking too, and are more aware of the limitations to their methods.

I know at Guelph they’ve been talking about this sort of event for years, and I spoke at one such around 2004.  Unfortunately, that lacked the upswell and publicity that supports this event.  Such savvy is to the credit of the graduate students, I expect.

As a faculty brat, I have a long-abiding affection for graduate students from the old days when there were more personal relationships between faculty and graduate students.  While that intimacy could and often did involve a number of problems regarding sexual morality and nepotism, some of us benefited in the most benign ways.  As the numbers of graduate students swell — at least in Canada where governments are putting money into that sector of education (mostly to the exclusion of others), many freshly-minted doctors will be disappointed by their job prospects.  The benefit however (and this is the reason the government puts the money there) is for society in general.  Graduate students have insight, passion, networking skills, and drive that can drive social and intellectual progress.  That power is well-demonstrated by Philopolis Guelph.

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Women in logic

Posted in Connections, Critical Thinking, Discussion, Humor, Logic, tagged , , , , , , on February 22, 2012| 17 Comments »

This [a disconnected link to a logic course webpage] is no way to get women into logic.  The “naughty schoolgirls” Vince Hendricks, an editor of Synthese, probably the most prestigious epistemology journal, anticipates in his logic class will surprise the rest of us.  The kinderwhore fashion is ten years out of date and provides too little clothing for Copenhagen.  In all seriousness, it’s such a throwback (except for the iPod) that I thought it was The Onion.

Hendricks gradually removed the images, beginning with these, which I caught with screen shots.  The page was changed to indicate they come from a magazine spread, which does not mitigate Hendricks’ choice to use cheesecake to advertise logic.  Perhaps mooning is a new transformation rule that he’s taught his students?

A similar arrogance, though not specifically sexist, was noted on the part of Hendricks by the Leiter Report, when he shut down criticisms of creationism.  Leiter  credits the  feminist philosophers blog for breaking the cheesecake story, (I thank them for my first joke,) and you can find more discussion there.  But here on RAIL are the screen shots everyone has asked for as a record of what logic looks like without feminism, even now.

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Burden of proof and intellectual property

Posted in Connections, Discussion, Rhetoric, Teaching, tagged , , , , , , , on January 19, 2012| 1 Comment »

Do PIPA and SOPA threaten to reverse legal burden of proof in the US?  Clay Shirky argues they do.  I don’t know enough about the legal system, or the proposed legislation.  However, this is a serious allegation with implications far beyond the US.

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Trolls

Posted in Connections, Discussion, Fallacies, Rhetoric, tagged , , , , , , on January 6, 2012| 1 Comment »

The increasing popularity of on-line discussions has given rise to an argumentative neologism that may be more widely applicable: “trolls.”  Trolls commit an inappropriate move in an argument, saying something unreasonable that derails the discussion.  (I recall analogously in my highschool biology class we learned to ask the teacher, Mr. Houghton, about living through the London Blitz in order to steer the conversation away from the work at hand.)

These unpleasant people are not trolling the web in the sense of carefree fishing, or surfing, but today Mike Elgan, who bills himself as “the world’s only loveable technology writer,” suggests that trolls are seeking something, namely attention.  That quest does not particularly distinguish trolls from the rest of us, but it does explain the behaviour as depending on that exclusive or predominant motivation.

Trolls are argumentative, and they may be either deliberate and malicious or inadvertent and well-intentioned.  Egan’s distinction, borrowed from Matt Honan, between deliberate and inadvertent trolls corresponds to Walton’s distinction between fallacies that are sophisms and those that are paralogisms.

Yet Elgan points out that those who are well-intentioned and argumentative (the academy is so full) are not always trolls.  Passionate advocacy frequently may be trying but it need not be ugly, and it is often beautiful and worthwhile.

How then do we identify trolls?  Might this be a species of fallacy that can be identified as deviating from an otherwise acceptable form of argumentation, that is to say forms of advocacy?  Perhaps we could articulate the appropriate critical questions (using the Walton / Tindale model of fallacies) for identifying such trolls.

If the desire for attention is the cause of the misstep, then what is the missing (or side-lined) motivation that would be appropriate?  How ought we to be motivated?  That is a central question of argumentation theory, and answers include resolving disagreement (pragma-dialectics) and developing understanding (epistemology). Fabricated disagreement and errant claims thus would be paradigmatic troll moves, but that is only to say they are fallacious.

If trolls fit no particular pattern of fallacious reasoning, they may nonetheless indicate a new need for fallacy instruction: preventing trolls from derailing discussion.  On-line trolls have made available for instructors a new wealth of examples of fallacies.  Students should also learn that the fallacies approach to argument evaluation may be a good defense against trolls, a way to defuse a diversion by naming the problem.  While this rhetorical power of the fallacies approach can be misused, it can also be valuable in dealing with trolls.

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Guest Post: Why is the National Association of Scholars Saying Such Awful Things about Critical Thinking?

Posted in Critical Thinking, Discussion, Guest Posts, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 29, 2011| 1 Comment »

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest article by longtime critical thinking advocate and researcher Donald Lazere.  Prof. Lazere is Professor Emeritus of English at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

WHY IS THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF SCHOLARS SAYING SUCH AWFUL THINGS ABOUT CRITICAL THINKING?

Donald Lazere, Professor Emeritus of English, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo

Two of National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood’s recent “Innovations” blogs in the online Chronicle of Higher Education renewed NAS’s long-running attack on the theory and teaching of critical thinking, about which he and I had an e-mail go-round a few years ago. I think there have been several semantic misunderstandings here that have needlessly exacerbated the dispute, and I will try, once again, to overcome these here.

In “The Curriculum of Forgetting“ (Nov. 21), Wood wrote “What we need is a reversal of cultural tides, a restoration of the basic principle that the university is responsible for keeping the past imaginatively alive and available for the present.  The stance of generalized antagonism to the whole of Western civilization and the elevation of “critical thinking” in the sense of facile reductionism (everything at bottom is about race-gender-class hierarchy) makes the university function more and more as our society’s chief source of anti-intellectualism.”

In “Leaf Taking” (Dec. 4), he added, “We have elevated ‘critical thinking’ as the chief and worthiest end of a liberal education.  Perhaps it is time for a reassessment.   The critical thinker who is deaf to culture’s deeper appeals is impoverished in some profound ways.  He is equipped to take everything apart but not to put anything together.  We need more minds capable of moving at ease and grasping the whole.”

I posted the following comment in response to the Dec. 4 piece, but as I should have made clearer, it was directed more to the previous one: (more…)

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Does Teaching Critical Thinking Include Challenging Students’ Beliefs?

Posted in Critical Thinking, Discussion, Teaching, tagged , , , , , , on December 23, 2011| 7 Comments »

This past term I had a rather unpleasant experience in my critical thinking class. I was confronted with a subset of students who walked in the door assured that I had nothing to teach them about critical thinking. I learned this because they vocally resisted absolutely everything with which they did not personally agree. Unfortunately, this wound up being nearly everything in the class–especially when it ran against the notion that everything is a matter of opinion, a matter for an eternal debate in which all views are equally right.

Now, many readers are probably thinking, “cry me a river, that happens to me every term”. I agree. It happens to me almost every term too. What was different this time was how long it lasted (all term, without let-up) and how deep the resistance went. Not even the definition of deductive validity was accepted as offering a legitimate, if technical and limited, usage of the word ‘valid’.  The only validity these students recognized was the sense in which a point of view was “valid to me”, full-stop.  They didn’t bother learning the technical sense of ‘valid’ well enough to offer even cursory reasons for why they wouldn’t accept it. Nor could they articulate what it was, exactly, that made a point of view “valid to me” when asked. This is just one example. On multiple occasions, I got the distinct impression that my refrain that sometimes it takes more than an affirmative “gut feeling” to make it reasonable to hold a position was being taken as a personal affront by some of the students. “How dare I”, their attitude demanded, “try to teach them that things were not as they believed?” (more…)

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