Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Discussion’ Category

Culture and Critical Thinking

Posted in Critical Thinking, Discussion, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 13, 2011| 3 Comments »

In a recent post on the Chronicle of Higher Education website, frequent contributor and NAS president Peter Wood laments:

“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.”

Wood’s complaint about critical thinking is the punchline to a piece that is largely about how much of intellectual worth is lost when scholars and societies view culture (any culture) through a myopic, modern lens.  To assess this complaint fairly one has to have an idea as to what Wood means by the much vexed term “critical thinking”. Thankfully, he tells us what he means in another posting on the Chronicle website:

“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’ chief source of anti-intellectualism.”

It is hard to disagree with the substance of Wood’s assertion here. Though it is important to take account of how gender, race, and class might exert distorting effects on one’s thinking, critical thinking certainly does not reduce to such considerations, simpliciter. But why think that it does in the first place? Wood’s assertions here and elsewhere (for example, here) seem to presuppose that everyone in the academy (at least in the US) thinks of critical thinking in this way.

But they don’t. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Fallacies of climate science?

Posted in Connections, Discussion, Fallacies, tagged , , , , , , , on December 8, 2011| 2 Comments »

So-called “climate-gate” involved a number of accusations that concerns about global warming are based on bad and fallacious reasoning.  As the deeper analysis comes in, the email messages from the University of East Anglia turn out to be rather unremarkable if a little protective and no cause to believe that the reasoning behind climate concerns is poor.  However, the initial accusations of “bad science” have given authority to people whose reasoning about the issues is itself manifestly poor, as evidenced by today’s appointment of University of Western Ontario professor Chris Essex as the official climate advisor to the President of the World Federation of Scientists.

Essex’s reasoning on this subject is notably bad.  Not only does he maintain contrary to the considered evidence that the UEA researchers behaved irresponsibly, but he also publicly and repeatedly employs bad analogies to defend his own climate scepticism.  Essex argues that temperatures are like phone numbers, lacking relevance to their means.  From The National Post:

“Many people think that you can make sense out of an average of anything at all. My usual reply is to ask what an average over telephone numbers means. Temperature is like that. When averaged, it does not produce an actual temperature of anything, any more than an average over telephone numbers must be a callable number, let alone a number you might care to call.”

That analogy neglects the manifest empirical relationship between a temperature reading and a climactic situation, compared with the randomness of whether a phone number can be called.  Sure Essex claims to have stumped a statistician with his analogy, but can he actually stump a climate scientist?

I suspect, or at least hope, he couldn’t stump my argumentation students.  I’m quite sure he couldn’t stump my social epistemology students, who have learned a lot about expertise this term.  Mathematicians and physicists seem to have special desire to make general pronouncements about other fields in which they lack expertise.  This is much like the credentials of the “scientists” on creationist websites who are not actually biologists but in abstract fields.

(Thanks to Wayne Myrvold for pointing out this appointment and how terrible it is.)

Read Full Post »

Dancing an Explanation

Posted in Connections, Discussion, Rhetoric, Teaching, tagged , , , , , , , on December 3, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Some readers of RAIL may already with John Bohannon’s brilliant competition Dance your PhD.  In the video below, given at a TED event in Brussels, Bohannon generalizes the point that Dance your PhD essentially makes: Explanations can be effectively delivered in any number of ways.  Though the suggestion that dancers might replace the ubiquitous and dreaded PowerPoint is a bit tongue-in-cheek to be sure, I think that the observations Bohannon makes here about it’s pitfalls are spot on and worthy of consideration.

I have to admit that I’m also seized with curiosity as to how or even whether this could be done with arguments.  At the very least the results would put a whole new “spin” on Michael Gilbert‘s theory of visceral argument. 🙂

Enjoy.

Read Full Post »

Name-dropping

Posted in Critical Thinking, Discussion, Informal Logic, Teaching, tagged , , , on November 22, 2011| 4 Comments »

This article from the Denver Post stresses the usefulness of philosophy, including how “emphasis on informal and symbolic logic” helps with computer science.  In accounts of philosophy curricula, unfortunately, reference to informal logic is typically just name-dropping, as the textbook authors are mostly not scholars in the field, and instructors rarely have any relevant training.  That seems to be the case here:  Colorado State has only one logician on faculty, and he specializes in formal logic.

This problem is deeply ironic, for the scholarship being neglected was developed for the very purpose of filling the gap between logical theory and logical practice. Much scholarship in symbolic logic may be irrelevant to undergraduate pedagogy, but informal logic is a movement developed substantially for the purpose of creating an approach to logic that would be more relevant to students.

When philosophers appeal to “informal logic” or philosophers claim ownership over the teaching of “critical thinking,” it verges on fraud.  The baiting with informal logic scholarship devoted to critical thinking and switching it for a loose distillation of the cultural standards in the discipline of philosophy is going to catch up with us eventually.

It’s time for philosophers to wake up and put our money, our faculty positions, our textbook buying power, and our textbook reviews where the scholarship is.  Philosophy can be highly relevant if we hold ourselves to higher scholarly standards.

Read Full Post »

Improvisation and Argumentation

Posted in Connections, Discussion, Rhetoric, tagged , , , , , , on November 6, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Ah, the wonders of Twitter. In a chain of argumentation that wandered around quite a bit today, the question of improvisation (what it is, how best to characterize it, etc.) came up. For those RAIL readers who are classically trained rhetoricians, this question will no doubt call to mind Book Ten of Quintillian’s Institutio Oratoria, which deals with extemporaneous speech. This led to the contribution of the video below by one of the participants.

http://youtu.be/3cswYCMQnl4

The expansive talk herein is by George E. Lewis, the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. The general gist of it is that much of human interaction is understandable as improvisation (as understood in a manner analogous to the sort that occurs in musical performance). If this were right, then interesting consequences would follow for argumentation, at least when argumentation is considered as a dialectical process between two or more persons.  For starters, one such consequence would be that argumentation needs to be seen more as a cooperative than a competitive phenomenon. Accordingly, many of the “moves” of various participants would have to be understood outside the scope of strategies for “winning”.  There are other potential results too, I think, but they’re likely to appear differentially according to the approach to argumentation one takes. (For example, I find myself wondering with great interest how those working within the framework of normative pragmatics would understand improvisation in argumentation, but I’ll leave the answering of that wonder to those more qualified than I to speak on it.)

It is an interesting talk, but be warned: it is a little on the longish side and it’s general orientation from within a Continental philosophical framework may not be everyone’s cup of tea. If, knowing that, you’re not scared, then have go at it!

I would be remiss if I did not thank consummate jazz musician Vijay Iyer 1) for getting involved in our Twitter conversation at all and 2) for posting the above video in the hopes of enlightening us as to the nature and power of improvisation.  In return, I post this video of his wonderful trio covering Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” in which they, yes, improvise delightfully.

Read Full Post »

Items of Interest in The Reasoner

Posted in Connections, Discussion, tagged , , , , , , on October 29, 2011| 2 Comments »

For those who may not be aware of it yet, The Reasoner is wonderful, interdisciplinary, monthly publication devoted to matters that fall largely within the sphere of formal logic and research on reasoning.  Because the focus is so often on formal methods this may not seem, at first, to be the kind of thing that most argumentation theorists naturally would be inclined to look at, but I find it often contains vignettes, short articles, and interviews that ofter serious food for thought to those with interests in informal logic, argumentation, and critical thinking.

A case in point is the most recent issue (vol. 5 no. 11), which contains a fascinating interview with mathematical logician Wilfrid Hodges and a sharp little essay attacking the distinction between critical and creative thinking by A. Minh Nguyen. (Readers of this blog may recall similar ruminations offered in this post from April of 2010).  To whet your appetite, here’s a quote from the Hodges interview:

I have no patience at all with the view of Kant, followed by Frege and some modern writers, that logic studies how we ought to think and psychology studies how we do think. A logician can tell you that if you reason by rule X, then you will sometimes find yourself deducing false conclusions from true premises. It does follow that if you want never to deduce false conclusions from true premises, you ought not to use rule X. So for example you ought not to use rule X in a research paper in pure mathematics. But in real life, where time and memory are often limited and premises are often dubious in one way or another, rule X might be for practical purposes exactly what you need. One of the major achievements of logic of the last fifty years is to start taking seriously the constraints under which we reason, and the different aims that we can have in our reasoning. This expansion of logic gives many openings for collaboration between logicians and cognitivists [i.e. cognitive scientists].

The interview moves from considerations like this one to a discussion of the relationship between logic and cognitive science, and includes an interesting discussion of the logic of the medieval Arab philosopher Ibn Sina.

The Reasoner is an open access publication. Its present and past issues as well are all downloadable in .pdf format free of charge.

Read Full Post »

Open Access to THEORIA Symposium Issue on Bermejo-Luque’s “Giving Reasons”

Posted in Announcements, Discussion, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 22, 2011| 2 Comments »

The journal THEORIA has just published its 72nd issue with a symposium on Lilian Bermejo-Luque’s, Giving Reasons (Springer, 2011. Argumentation Series). The discussants are John Biro, Harvey Siegel, James B. Freeman, David Hitchcock, Robert C. Pinto and Luis Vega.

In Giving Reasons, Bermejo-Luque attempts to set out and defend an original approach to argumentation theory that hinges on what she calls “argumentation as a second order speech-act complex”.  The discussion that emerges between Bermejo-Luque and her distinguished panel of respondents about this approach to argumentation theory  is an interesting one.  Click here to view the journal page, from which all articles can be accessed free of charge: http://www.ehu.es/ojs/index.php/THEORIA/issue/current.

Read Full Post »

Point of Inquiry Interview with Hugo Mercier

Posted in Argumentation, Connections, Discussion, Teaching, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 16, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Rhetoricians will appreciate the presence of an attentive, if quadrupedal, audience in addition to the speakers.

An interesting phone interview with Hugo Mercier popped up today on Point of Inquiry, the blog for the Center for Inquiry.  The role of the confirmation bias, disagreement, and polarization are covered in this interesting discussion.  There are some very familiar themes here for argumentation theorists. It’s well worth a listen.  The clear and economical discussion of what can be complicated ideas here makes the podcast something potentially useful in advanced classes on reasoning too. The interview is about 40 minutes long. Click on the link below to listen.

Interview with Hugo Mercier

(Note: The file may take a moment to load depending upon your connection speed, so do be patient!)

 

Read Full Post »

CFP: American Dialectic

Posted in CFP, Discussion, tagged , , , , , on July 17, 2011| Leave a Comment »

AMERICAN DIALECTIC

Now accepting submissions in all areas of philosophy.

American Dialectic takes an exciting new approach to scholarly publication by promoting greater philosophical engagement between readers and authors.  Lead articles are published at the beginning of each term and are followed throughout by edited responses written by our readers.  By publishing articles, questions, and responses together, American Dialectic creates an active place for the dialectical exchange of ideas in print, and ultimately fosters the continued intellectual development of contributors, respondents, and readers alike.

We hope that this unique publishing mechanism will encourage critical thinking, active participation, and renewed enthusiasm for scholarly discourse in philosophy and related fields.  To start reading or make a submission visit:

www.AmericanDialectic.org

Note: Those desiring more information about AD might want to check out the write up of the journal that I did here. SP

Read Full Post »

Informal Logic vol. 31 no.2

Posted in Announcements, Discussion, Informal Logic, Pragma-dialectics, Rhetoric, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Informal Logic vol. 31 no. 2

Volume 31, number 2 of Informal Logic is now available for your reading pleasure.  Particularly recommended in this issue is Geoff Goddu’s 2010 AILACT Essay Prize-winning article on the process/product ambiguity.  I had the good fortune to see this work in an earlier phase at ISSA last summer and I’m very happy to see it in print here.  It’s a valuable article not only for it’s methodological challenge to what is for many in the study of argumentation a foundational notion, but because it spurs us to think more carefully about the metaphysics of argument in general.  The paper and its author well deserve the recognition of the AILACT prize.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »