We all know we’re not supposed to engage in fallacious argumentation. We might disagree about what fallacies there are or how they work, but we all agree that there are certain moves in argumentation–at least in some contexts–that are just downright, well…dishonest. How do we keep students and others in our charge from wandering down that path? Most of the time the method is to teach and to reinforce practices of good argumentation, while at the same time teaching them how to recognize and nullify, with critique, the fallacious arguments of others. So far the story is not all that different from any other well-known model of moral education. Teach and promote the good, identify and punish the bad. And that works most of the time in the hermetically sealed environment of the classroom. Then our students go out into the world and encounter argumentation like this:
Or this… (more…)
RAIL 