Studies in Critical Thinking, 2Nd Ed

Studies in Critical Thinking, 2nd Ed Studies in Critical Thinking, 2nd Ed Edited by J. Anthony Blair WINDSOR STUDIES IN ARGUMENTATION WINDSOR, ON Contents Preface xi Part I. Introductory Introduction 3 1. What critical thinking is 7 Alec Fisher Part II. On Teaching Critical Thinking Introduction to Part II 29 2. Teaching critical thinking 31 J. Anthony Blair and Michael Scriven 3. Validity 37 Derek Allen 4. Teaching argument construction 51 Justine Kingsbury 5. Encouraging critical thinking about students’ own 57 beliefs Tracy Bowell and Justine Kingsbury 6. Middle Ground: Settling a public controversy by 61 means of a reasonable compromise Jan Albert van Laar 7. Using arguments to inquire 71 Mark Battersby and Sharon Bailin Part III. About Argument and Arguments Introduction to Part III 85 8. Arguments and critical thinking 87 J. Anthony Blair 9. The concept of an argument 101 David Hitchcock 10. Using computer-aided argument mapping to teach 115 reasoning Martin Davies, Ashley Barnett, and Tim van Gelder 11. Argumentation schemes and their application in 153 argument mining Douglas Walton 12. Constructing effective arguments 181 Beth Innocenti 13. Judging arguments 191 J. Anthony Blair 14. An introduction to the study of fallaciousness 209 Christopher W. Tindale Part IV. Other Elements of Critical Thinking Introduction to Part IV 225 15. How a critical thinker uses the web 227 Sally Jackson 16. Definition 249 Robert H. Ennis 17. Generalizing 271 Dale Hample and Yiwen Dai 18. Appeals to authority: sources and experts 289 Mark Battersby 19. Logic and critical thinking 307 G.C. Goddu 20. Abduction and inference to the best explanation 329 John Woods 21. The unruly logic of evaluation 351 Michael Scriven Index 373 Studies in Critical Thinking Second Edition Windsor Studies in Argumentation Vol. 8 Edited by J. Anthony Blair Copyright of each Chapter belongs to the authors (2021) Digital Edition available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non- Commercial 4.0 License vii WSIA Editors Editors in Chief Leo Groarke (Trent University) Christopher Tindale (University of Windsor) Board of Editors Mark Battersby (Capilano University) Camille Cameron (Dalhousie University) Emmanuelle Danblon (Université libre de Bruxelles) Ian Dove (University of Nevada Las Vegas) Bart Garssen (University of Amsterdam) Michael Gilbert (York University) David Godden (Michigan State University) Jean Goodwin (North Carolina State University) Hans V. Hansen (University of Windsor) Gabrijela Kišiček (University of Zagreb) Marcin Koszowy (University of Białystok) Marcin Lewiński (New University of Lisbon) Catherine H. Palczewski (University of Northern Iowa) Chris Reed (University of Dundee) Andrea Rocci (University of Lugano) Paul van den Hoven (Tilburg University) Cristián Santibáñez Yáñez (Diego Portales University) Igor Ž. Žagar (University of Maribor & University of Primorska) Frank Zenker (Lund University) Windsor Studies In Argumentation Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric University of Windsor 401 Sunset Avenue, Windsor, Ontario, Canada ix Preface Preface to the 1st edition The distant origins of Studies in Critical Thinking lie in the recommendation of a committee of the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking (AILACT) that an authoritative anthology on critical thinking should be pre- pared, with two ends in view. One was to be of service to new instructors of critical thinking courses. The other was to demonstrate to the scholarly com- munity that critical thinking is a field that calls for serious and respectable academic attention. More proximately, at the 2016 conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation at the University of Windsor, Michael Scriven, who had been a member of that AILACT committee, convened a meeting to pro- mote the idea of such a book and see what support there was for it. Somehow my long-time collaborator Ralph Johnson and I agreed to co-edit the book, with Scriven’s guidance, if AILACT would give us a free hand. Having no other offers, AILACT agreed. The idea of dividing the book into a section (Part II) with teaching material and one section (Parts III & IV) with material related to the theoretical under- pinning of critical thinking came from Scriven, and Johnson and I happily adopted it. About a year into work on the book, Johnson chose to withdraw from the project for personal reasons. So, while he played a role in the early planning, he cannot be held responsible for the final product. Michael Scriven served as a consultant to the editors, and subsequently, to the editor. I cannot thank him enough for his encouragement, his always use- ful suggestions and for his general guidance and material support for the project. I would like to thank the contributors, who met deadlines promptly, toler- ated delays and editorial intrusion patiently, and produced either new work or suggested and adapted already-published work, both of extraordinary quality. I am grateful to Leo Groarke and Christopher Tindale, the editors-in-chief of the Windsor Studies In Argumentation (WSIA) series for taking on the book’s publication. Many thanks to Tamilyn Mulvaney, assistant to the Direc- tor of the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric (CRRAR) at the University of Windsor, who provided invaluable assistance xi in the preparation of the manuscript, to Dave Johnston of Windsor’s Leddy Library, who shepherded the manuscript through the PressBooks protocols, and to Ellen Duckman, for the cover. I dedicate this book, with love, to my wife, June Blair, on whose support I constantly rely. J. Anthony Blair Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric University of Windsor Preface to the 2nd edition The 1st edition of Studies in Critical Thinking was rushed to publication, with the consequence that it is sprinkled with rather more errors than should be tol- erated. These have been corrected in this revised edition and the authors who wanted to have had the opportunity to further fine-tune their chapters. I remain grateful to CRRAR’s publishing arm, Windsor Studies in Argu- mentation, for arranging for the book’s electronic distribution and for an inex- pensive hardcover copy available from Amazon. In addition to those listed in the Preface to the 1st edition, my thanks go to Waleed Mebane for his immaculate service as editorial assistant. Without his help, this 2nd edition would not have been possible. And many thanks to Ellen Duckman for the new cover. My wholehearted thanks go to the anonymous donor whose generous grant to CRRAR financed the expenses entailed in the preparation of the book. As ever, I thank my wife, June, with love, for her forbearance and support. J. Anthony Blair Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric University of Windsor June 2020 xii Original Publication of Essays Chapter 4, © Justine Kingsbury, “Teaching Argument Construction” originally appeared in the Teaching Supplement of Informal Logic, 2002, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. TS1-4. Part of Chapter 9, by David Hitchcock, uses material from “The concept of an argument”, pp. 518-529 in Hitchcock’s book On Reasoning and Argument: Essays in Informal Logic and on Critical Thinking 2017, © Springer Interna- tional Publishing AG 2017, used here with the kind permission of Springer. Chapter 11, by Douglas Walton, originally appeared as “Argument Mining by Applying Argumentation Schemes” in Studies in Logic 2011, Vol. 4 (1): pp. 38-64, and is reproduced with permission of Studies in Logic, The Institute of Logic and Cognition, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China. Chapter 14, © Christopher Tindale, “An Introduction to the Study of Falla- ciousness” is a slightly modified version of Chapter 1 of his book, Fallacies and Argument Appraisal, 2007, published by Cambridge University Press, and reproduced with permission. xiii I Introductory 1 Introduction As we enter the third decade of the 21st century the need for critical thinking by voters, consumers, families, teachers, businesses, governments, and more is as urgent as ever. Formal instruction in critical thinking at the post-sec- ondary level still usually occurs in a one-semester course offered to first- year students at colleges and universities, frequently but by no means always housed in philosophy departments or programs. The instructors tend to be junior faculty members whose own formal training in critical thinking, if any, tends to consist of the one-semester critical thinking course that they took as first-year undergraduates 5-10 years earlier, often supplemented by a couple of years’ experience as teaching assistants for such a course while graduate students—time spent grading assignments and sometimes leading weekly tutorial sections. In many cases the critical thinking course a depart- ment offers has evolved from—and differs little from—the “introduction to logic” course, now supplemented with some informal logic. The result is that many instructors of critical thinking courses are thrown in at the deep end. Understandably, most reach for the textbooks on the market to stay afloat. Textbook publishers have shown considerable interest in the profits available from the dedicated critical thinking course market, publishing scores of handbooks. Best sellers are revised frequently in minor ways to reduce resale. But textbook authors are rarely experts in every topic the publishers want covered to maximize sales, and even if they were, the sort of understanding that instructors should have in order to be at home teaching wide variety of topics pertinent to acquiring critical thinking skills and dispositions could not be included in an introductory textbook. Granting exceptions, by and large critical thinking textbooks err on the side of the safety of tradition, and don’t always reflect the latest research. With instructors themselves learning from the textbook any material unfamiliar to them that it contains, too often what the students receive is undigested and outdated. Meanwhile “critical thinking” has become a buzzword, or buzz-term. It is found in virtually every college and university mission statement.

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