Reasoning Critically

Identifying and Evaluating Arguments
Erscheinungsjahr 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4051-6280-7
Verlag: Wiley

Buch, Englisch, 336 Seiten, Format (B × H): 189 mm x 246 mm

In the United States critical reasoning is big business. Most colleges and universities, even entire state university systems, require a critical reasoning course. While we believe that philosophy is a natural home for critical reasoning, we also believe that traditional logic courses are not suitable to this end. They don't improve students' abilities to identify and evaluate arguments in the reading they do for their courses and in their efforts to be informed citizens.
When we accepted a challenge from colleagues in other disciplines to offer a critical reasoning course that would teach students to analyze real argumentative discourse, we looked unsuccessfully for suitable texts. Critical reasoning is dominated by two kinds of texts. Typical of the first group are Hurley, and Moore and Parker, offering a smorgasbord of elementary formal logic, informal fallacies, inductive arguments, criticisms of debaters' tricks, etc. They also contain perfunctory discussions of argument diagramming, but give almost no attention to the identification of arguments in real discourse; they focus instead on evaluating specimens that have been pruned, paraphrased or invented so as to minimize the difficulties of identification. We rejected this type of text because, until students are good at making arguments explicit, concepts and techniques of evaluation have no application outside the problems contrived for the text.
Typical of the second group are Thomas, Nolt, Govier and Fisher, who do emphasize argument diagramming. But they, too, are unsatisfactory. Some of the arguments used as illustrations and exercises are so simple they almost diagram themselves. In other cases, the author has done a lot of the work of identification by removing the various side remarks and paraphrasing into a manageable format. And, while Fisher's text features a number of uncut, complex pieces of reasoning, he offers little instruction in extracting the argument from them. His method amounts to saying, 'Do as I do.' Out of desperation, we wrote our own text, Inference and Implication (Kendall Hunt, 1998). Reasoning Critically: Identifying and Evaluating Arguments is a substantial revision and expansion of that text.Our goal then and now has been to help students to recognize reasoning when they see it, extract the argument from the discourse in which it is embedded, represent it by means of a diagram, and evaluate its strength. No pedagogical approach achieves this goal like working with real discourse, in all its complexity. Both texts are based on this pedagogical approach, though the revision is more faithful to it. This said, our text is not for everyone; it is only for those committed to working with reasoning as it occurs in what students read outside of a logic class. It is not for people who would be satisfied with, for example, Hurley or Thomas

.Inference and Implication grew from notes we wrote to help students with difficulties they had in analyzing specimens of reasoning they had found on their own. We were led to novel and useful discussions of various topics, e.g., how to justify adding implicit material to an argument, how to distinguish implicit premises from presuppositions, and how to make use of discount expressions, such as 'but,' 'however,' etc. Conventional wisdom on these matters is either non-existent, incorrect or unhelpful. Most importantly, we gained a deeper understanding of how to teach argument evaluation. Our students often brought us specimens that contained criticisms of arguments. Fidelity to these passages required that we articulate the strategies of evaluation people actually employ. Here traditional logical pedagogy misses the mark. Criticism based on an argument's form, for example, far from being among these strategies, was virtually never used. Everyday demonstrations of invalidity typically flesh out the context to show that the premises could support a conclusion contrary to the stated one. Thus, we concentrate on p

Zielgruppe

Non-majors taking courses in critical thinking/reasoning classes, informal logic classes, and students preparing for LSAT, GMAT and GRE examinations.MDRCritical Reasoning (in Philosophy) 1,489Critical Readingm, Writing and Thinking 3,301

Autoren/Hrsg.

Malone, Michael

Sherry, David

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Philosophische Logik, Argumentationstheorie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Geschichte der Westlichen Philosophie Westliche Philosophie: 20./21. Jahrhundert

Über Autor(innen)

Michael Malone is Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Northern Arizona University, where he specialises in Philosophy of Mind, Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Science.
David Sherry is Professor of Philosophy at Northern Arizona University, where he specialises in History of Philosophy, Logic and Philosophy of Math.
They have co-authored a number of papers on informal reasoning.