Abstract
Informal logic is a newly self-conscious sub-discipline of philosophy that seeks to develop criteria, standards and procedures for the construction, identification, analysis, interpretation, evaluation and criticism of arguments. It is the philosophy of argument, or the philosophy of argumentation, and by extension the philosophy of reasoning. It overlaps with social epistemology and with applied epistemology, and is a significant part of philosophy, now recognized by the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés Philosophiques (FISP) under the label ‘philosophy of argumentation’. An argument is a structure in which either one or more reasons are advanced for or against a claim or a conclusion is drawn from a set of premisses. A simple argument is a second-order illocutionary act in which one or more suppositives or assertives are adduced in support of or in opposition to an illocutionary act of any type. A complex argument is one built up from simpler arguments by chaining (when the conclusion of one argument is used as a premiss of another) or embedding (when one or more pieces of suppositional reasoning are adduced in support of a conclusion). Authors of arguments use them for various purposes. Critical thinking is a process of reflectively thinking about an issue with a view to reaching a reasoned judgment on what is to be believed or done. Education at all levels should aim to develop critical thinkers, i.e. people who think critically when it is appropriate to do so. The fundamental attitude of a critical thinker is a willingness to inquire, in fact a love of inquiry; derivatively, critical thinkers are fair-minded and open-minded, and they proportion the confidence they have in their beliefs to the strength of the evidence for them. The knowledge and skills required by a critical thinker come from formal logic, informal logic, cognitive psychology, epistemology, philosophy of science, statistics, and other disciplines. There is good evidence for the effectiveness of mixing explicit instruction in critical thinking with subject-matter instruction in a setting that includes student discussion, engagement with a problem, and coaching. This evidence is consistent with John Hattie’s recommendation of “visible teaching” and “visible learning” in which teachers see how well their teaching is coming across and learners see how well they are learning.
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Notes
- 1.
This verdict requires modification of the definition three sentences ago of deductive validity, so as to require that the ruling out be non-trivial, i.e. not due either to the meaning ruling out that the premisses are true or to the meaning ruling out that the conclusion is untrue.
- 2.
Readers who find fault with it can replace it with another deductively valid argument that meets their standards for argument quality and transform it in a similar way.
- 3.
Readers who find fault with the added premiss can replace it with another irrelevant premiss that meets their standard of premiss adequacy.
- 4.
My argument for this position is inspired by reflection on the reason why Hellenistic Stoic logicians regarded an argument with a redundant premiss as deductively invalid (Hitchcock 2005).
- 5.
See the first circular for the 24th World Congress of Philosophy, to be held in Beijing on 13–20 August 2018, at https://www.fisp.org/documents/WCP%202018%20First%20Circular%20English.pdf; accessed 2016 08 07.
- 6.
I owe this insight to my colleague Wilfrid J. Waluchow , who pointed it out in response to a talk I gave to the McMaster philosophy department in January 2016.
- 7.
The word is taken from (Bermejo-Luque 2011), without necessarily subscribing to that work’s account of this second-order illocutionary act.
- 8.
I am following here a suggestion of my colleague Richard T. W. Arthur in response to a talk that I gave to the McMaster philosophy department in January 2016.
- 9.
At least, that was the intention. The first base clause of the earlier definition declared that a triple consisting of a set of assertives, a conclusion indicator and an illocutionary act of any type was an argument, as was a triple consisting of an illocutionary act, a premiss indicator, and a set of assertives. But, as Goddu (2010) pointed out through a series of counterexamples, a triple is not a string of symbols. The earlier base clause implied that a sequence of three utterances by different people at widely separated times would count as an argument, which it obviously is not.
- 10.
The word ‘utterance’ covers not just spoken sounds but also written marks, typed symbols, images, gestures, thoughts, and so forth—any occurrence that expresses one or more propositions.
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Acknowledgements
With respect to section 32.2, I would like to express my appreciation to Geoffrey Goddu and James Freeman for their careful critical and constructive comments on the earlier definition of argument, to J. Anthony Blair for his comments on an earlier version of the present definition of argument, and to members of the McMaster philosophy department for their comments on my presentation of an earlier version of the section, especially Wilfrid J. Waluchow , Katharina Stevens , Richard T. W. Arthur , Liao Zhicong (Tonny Liao), and Maggie O’Brien . Special thanks to Nicholas Griffin for his notes of those comments.
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Hitchcock, D. (2017). Postscript. In: On Reasoning and Argument. Argumentation Library, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53562-3_32
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