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    Critical Reasoning Materials with a Dialectical Focus

    Over on Facebook, Bijan Parsia asked a really great question.  

    [… are there] any critical reasoning courses/textbooks out there that focus at the dialectical (or beyond) level rather than at the argument level. My recollection is that they are very focused at the individual argument level with an unhealthy focus on fallacies rather than thinking very much about overall cognitive strategies (esp. in group settings) or other goals than the cognitive. I recall getting a lot of that from phil of science classes and pedagogy and (interestingly) online dissuasion analysis (see the "poisonous people" video floating about, or even troll bestiaries), but not so much from critical reasoning (which often was shoehorned into a symbolic logic class).

    While I haven't taught critical reasoning in a few years, I also can't recall having run across anything like what Bijan is looking for here. But I don't think it's difficult to see why materials of the sort would be of great value. In fact, I can see how they would be very helpful not just in the 'critical reasoning' context, but more broadly as part of the kind of instruction might give in philosophical process in a lot of our classes. 

    And with that, I throw the question out to the rest of you. Do you know of materials of this sort? Have you developed something of your own that you'd like to share?

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    28 responses to “Critical Reasoning Materials with a Dialectical Focus”

    1. BLS Nelson Avatar
      BLS Nelson

      Tim Kenyon’s “Clear Thinking in a Blurry World” is a critical thinking textbook that has separate chapters on social cognition and cognitive biases in reasoning, so it may be of interest.

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    2. Michael Rooney Avatar
      Michael Rooney

      At risk of being self-promoting: http://www.advancedreasoningforum.org/
      I’m not sure what exactly you’re looking for, and our texts are still focused on the “cognitive” in the sense of “truth-preserving,” but we definitely do not shoehorn reasoning into symbolic logic, and we definitely don’t focus on fallacies first. If anything, Epstein’s approach is about understanding all the methods of logic as abstractions from natural language reasoning. His series of Essays on Logic as the Art of Reasoning Well is a systematic re-thinking of logic with truly minimal metaphysical assumptions.

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    3. Bijan Parsia Avatar
      Bijan Parsia

      Michael, I, for one, welcome the self-promotion 🙂
      From my glance at the TOC of your book, I don’t think it covers the sort of thing I was looking for. I was looking for a discussion that starts from the idea that there might be many goals (even cognitive ones!) in a discussion or dialectic and that you want to be aware of the multiple purposes at hand.
      To take a super simple example, it’s quite familiar to mobilize an inaccurate version of an argument because the accurate version is rather confusing and has a lot of obscuring detail. If we start from an argument evaluation perspective, it’s hard to account for the goodness of the inaccurate argument. If we start from a dialectical perspective, we can say, for example, that the inaccurate version is superior in this context because it facilitates understanding or lets us, as a group, hone in on the key points.
      More complexly, consider how the formulation and presentation of arguments engages or alienates people. Or how particular examples might invoke stereotype threat or reinforce implicit biases.

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    4. Bijan Parsia Avatar
      Bijan Parsia

      So, one tell for the approach I’m looking for would be a discussion of the Gish Gallop. And not just in the debating context, but as part of cognitive self-deception (i.e., you pile up all sorts of considerations in hopes that something works).
      (Nothing against your book at all, of course!)
      BLS Nelson, thanks! I look forward to reading it.

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    5. Bijan Parsia Avatar
      Bijan Parsia

      Sorry to post three in a row, but I had another thought.
      When I teach academic writing to PhD students, one thing I try to stress on them is that there’s more to a successful paper than the strength of the relationship between their evidence and conclusion. Indeed, some presentational moves aren’t made to highlight the strength but to stimulate collateral thinking (or other insight). Similarly, critical reasoning, whether in formulating or critiquing, isn’t necessarily most useful if it merely builds strong rather than otherwise fruitful arguments. And some of those fruits might be not be directly cognitive (e.g., if I leave everyone exhausted and sad instead of joyful because I got stuck in essentially pointless minutae rather than other things, I think that’s bad; conversely, if I leave everyone superexcited and interested, it might not matter that I didn’t get lots of things in the argument right; what I might have been aiming at is collaborations).

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    6. JG Avatar
      JG

      i’m teaching critical thinking for the first time and, on the recommendation of a colleague who’s pretty invested in it, am using ‘a practical study of argument,’ by tracy govier. i can’t say i’m an expert in the field by any stretch, but it seems at least open to a dialectical emphasis, though the bulk of its focus is definitely on argument analysis and fallacy noting. i’ve been supplementing the chapters with op-ed articles and supreme court opinions, though, so that may be why i’ve felt ok with saying it has sympathy with a more dialectical, contextualizing approach.

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    7. Patrick S. O'Donnell Avatar
      Patrick S. O’Donnell

      I wrote a paper some years ago, which was published in an online journal on radical pedagogy, that was intended to be a “critique” of how critical thinking was being taught in our department and—according to my admittedly non-scientific and informal survey results—not a few philosophy departments around the country. It was one of the first things I published (online or otherwise), having entered the academic world in my mid-40s, and I’m now rather embarrassed at the result, if only because I wrote it still angry at having had my course taken from me (and being an adjunct, with more of a background in Religious Studies than Philosophy proper, there was nothing I could do in protest). The paper could have been far shorter and to the point, and today I would make the specific arguments rather differently, but I continue to believe the substance of the critique (perhaps I’m not at all impartial in this assessment) remains sound and useful.
      One of the reasons I wrote the paper was that I discovered colleagues who were teaching the course more or less like an introductory philosophy course for philosophy majors, one with an inappropriate—by my lights—emphasis on deductive reasoning and formal logic. Indeed, the bulk of the class time was devoted to such things and many of the textbooks used encouraged that approach (the textbooks have since changed for the better, but I think there are still topics in need of attention, or at least more attention). Moreover, our department was making the argument to the powers-that-be that our professional colleagues in English were not qualified to teach “critical thinking” (a contest over funds of course in part motivated that argument), and I thought they were deeply mistaken.
      To make a long story short, I developed my own approach to this course, one which placed an emphasis on deductive and inductive reasoning (I also broached the idea of reasoning taking different forms, after Jonardon Ganeri,* in different geo-historical and cultural contexts), as well as introduced insights from cognitive psychology on heuristics and biases that are often debilitating with regard to critical reasoning. In addition, and not unrelated to this, I placed more of an emphasis on informal rather than formal fallacies in reasoning, in part because I found that emphasis to be closer to helping students see what was wrong with arguments they would encounter in their everyday lives in various public fora. Here I had the likes of the late Stephen Toulmin, Douglas Walton, and Alec Fisher, among others, to call upon for guidance. The positive part of this critique suggested that the curriculum should spend far more time on rhetoric, informal logic (specifically, the so-called informal fallacies and presumptive reasoning in dialogue contexts), philosophical reflection on the emotions, psychology, and analogy and metaphor, an emphasis I hoped would displace (as a ‘crowding out’ effect) much (not all mind you!) of the formal logical material in not a few critical thinking texts. Keep in mind that this was a course designed for non-Philosophy majors, although I think it would not hurt those majoring in Philosophy to learn “critical thinking” more along these lines as well.
      I’ll leave it at that: there’s far more to the paper but, again, I’m so embarrassed looking back that I would rather not link to it. Our department chair criticized (to put it mildly if not feebly) the content of my material and took the class away from me: I’ve not taught “critical thinking” again, and I think future students were ill-served by that decision. My anger has passed (some of it sublimated by and canalized in the paper I wrote as a consequence), my time and attention now devoted to other matters.
      * For instance, Ganeri argues that global and historical meta-philosophical reflection helps us appreciate the manner in which reason is “embedded, articulated and manifested in culturally specific ways.” In addition, he enables us to see the manner in which the “forms of rationality” are “interculturally available even if they are not always interculturally instantiated.”

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    8. Patrick S. O'Donnell Avatar
      Patrick S. O’Donnell

      Here’s a copy of something from the syllabus for the class I once taught:
      In general, the following topics are covered in this course:
      standard forms of deductive and inductive reasoning;
      the role and significance of language [as rhetoric] to critical thought;
      analogical and metaphorical reasoning;
      the meaning of propaganda;
      the assessment of risk as it pertains to rational thought;
      common heuristic biases (mental models or rules of thumb) that may impede rational thinking;
      some of the more important informal fallacies; and
      intuition as it pertains to critical analysis.
      And, if time permits [and it usually did!]…
      we will discuss scientific methods and reasoning;
      the idea of dialogue types as crucial to assessing the plausibility, strength and kinds of argument one finds in different arenas of social life; and
      the role of emotions, for better and worse, in critical thinking.

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    9. Bijan Parsia Avatar
      Bijan Parsia

      Thanks Patrick!
      I take it that this:
      http://www.radicalpedagogy.org/radicalpedagogy8/Collective_Self-Examination__Thinking_Critically_about_Critical_Thinking.html
      is the paper? I look forward to reading it.

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    10. Moti Mizrahi Avatar
      Moti Mizrahi

      I think that Why We Argue? by Aikin and Talisse may be what you’re looking for: http://www.whyweargue.com.

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    11. Moti Mizrahi Avatar
      Moti Mizrahi

      I think that Why We Argue? by Aikin and Talisse may be what you’re looking for: http://www.whyweargue.com.

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    12. Miles Rind Avatar
      Miles Rind

      That’s Trudy Govier. I’ve looked at the book and it struck me as a very good one to use if your course is just going to be about analyzing and evaluating arguments and you are not going to have the students buy anything else (because the Govier text by itself is so expensive).

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    13. Miles Rind Avatar
      Miles Rind

      I too am teaching critical thinking for the first time, also as an adjunct lecturer. I had the devil of a time selecting a textbook. I was determined that the course should not be just a course in informal logic. To me a course that does not inquire into how our reasoning and judgment go wrong at the intuitive level, before we meet with or make any arguments, does not merit the name of “critical thinking.” So I needed to have some texts on the psychology of judgment (I opted for Don’t Believe Everything You Think by Thomas Kida) and on particular sources and loci of bad thinking (I selected Bullspotting: Finding Facts in an Age of Misinformation by Loren Collins). It remained to choose a book on argumentation. I would have liked to use The Elements of Reasoning by Munson and Black, but I found that it was priced at $90, and I could not ask my students to buy that and $40 worth of other books too. Further, I found that nearly all other textbooks of informal logic were priced equally high or even higher, some as much as $160–which is extortionate. I eventually settled on Fundamentals of Critical Argumentation by Douglas Walton, published by Cambridge with the modest price of $45. I had high hopes of the book, not just on account of the author’s remarkable publication record but because he does not try to shoehorn all argumentation into the molds of deductive and inductive inference but treats other modes of argumentation in terms of “argumentation schemes,” rather than merely as fallacies. But I have been terribly disappointed by the book, which is diffusely written and sometimes, I think, positively incoherent. Its treatment of categorical logic is almost useless and its treatment of inductive inference verges on the incompetent. In writing materials to give to the students to make up for the deficiencies of Walton, I have made a fair start on writing my own textbook, but the work is killing me, and I will be glad to move on to applied psychology in a couple of weeks.

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    14. Patrick S. O'Donnell Avatar
      Patrick S. O’Donnell

      Miles, I chose not use a book from Walton as a text for my class but did select stuff from several of his books, e.g., one on Plausible Argumentation and another on Informal Logic (I recall using a somewhat standard ‘critical thinking’ text, which I supplemented with my own material from motley sources).

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    15. Miles Rind Avatar
      Miles Rind

      Your course sounds interesting to me, Patrick. You mention Toulmin. Reading The Uses of Argument was a turning point for me. I still find it difficult to say what I got out of it, or even to recapitulate the contents of the book, despite my having read through it twice and read some chapters even more times, but it certainly stirred up a lot of things in my thinking about what reasoning is and what, if anything, formal logic has to do with it. Yet in teaching my present class I have found myself falling back into the habit of coming up with phony-baloney examples of “arguments” that are really just collections of sentences that are not only abstracted from any context of discourse but that in many cases could not even plausibly be imagined to come from such a context. Walton emphasizes “dialogue” but he falls into the same sort of artificiality. I have a very bad conscience about the business but I’m not sure what to do about it. I own a copy of that curious textbook that Toulmin produced in collaboration with a couple of others, though it is now in storage and I haven’t looked at it in a long time, but as I recall, when I looked at it I didn’t trust a method of argumentation analysis that did away with the very idea of premises and a conclusion. Maybe I need to look at it again, and maybe it’s time for another go at The Uses of Argument!

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    16. Charles R Avatar
      Charles R

      Patrick, that class sounds amazing and expansive. How did you fit that into a semester?

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    17. Patrick S. O'Donnell Avatar
      Patrick S. O’Donnell

      Several things we did in class were oodles of fun: discussing analogical reasoning and metaphors (while I drew upon Lakoff and Johnson, I avoided their overall philosophical claims which I found, and still find, extravagant, especially with regard to philosophy of mind issues), endeavoring to illustrate how ubiquitous they are even in the so-called “hard” or natural sciences. With regard to scientific explanation and representation, I tried to communicate the significance of models and “map-making” (after Kitcher and others). Some stuff was fairly straightforward, like the discussion of euphemisms (in our case, largely drawn from political discourse), other material a bit more difficult: with regard to “rhetoric,” for instance, I invoked Deirdre McCloskey’s early work on the rhetoric of economics (e.g., the book by that title and Knowledge and Persuasion…), and discussed specific concepts that showed the role questionable or unexamined presuppositions and assumptions, like the notion of “preference(s)” formation and expression. When I illustrated informal fallacies, I used material from my favorite social scientists, like Jon Elster in Making Sense of Marx discussing ideological illusions that embody the fallacy of composition. In fact, Elster was the source of many of our best examples for introducing such topics from cognitive psychology (and philosophy) as weakness of will, self-deception, and wishful thinking.
      On the emotions and rhetoric (among other things): I tried to help them appreciate why it is often the case that, in the words of Amartya Sen, “Fiction is a general method of coming to grips with facts. There is nothing illegitimate in being helped by War and Peace to an understanding of the Napoleonic Wars in Russia, or by Grapes of Wrath to digesting aspects of the Depression.” Put more starkly by Herbert A. Simon: “most human beings are able to attend to issues longer, to think harder about them, to receive deeper impressions that last longer, if information is presented in a context of emotion—a sort of hot dressing—than if it is presented wholly without affect.”
      Finally, by way of discussing what it might mean to “think critically” about ethics and morality, I drew insights from Colin McGinn’s Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (1997) and Iris Murdoch’s argument that our “moral life is not intermittent or specialized, it is not a peculiar separate area of our existence,” and the fact that “we are all always deploying and directing our energy, refining or blunting it, purifying or corrupting it, and it is always easier to do a thing a second time…” (an idea common both to classical Greek philosophy and several Asian philosophical traditions, notably Confucianism and Buddhism).

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    18. Patrick S. O'Donnell Avatar
      Patrick S. O’Donnell

      I’m not sure…and perhaps not always successfully. Undoubtedly we gave important topics too little time and I did not have the class long enough to learn what worked and what didn’t by way of cutting, shaping, and polishing its contents. I spent an entire (unemployed) summer putting together the material after looking at far too many critical thinking text books and syllabuses I found online. I tend toward excess, embodying the maxim that one doesn’t learn what is enough until one is intimately apprised of what is more than enough (or something like that).

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    19. Patrick S. O'Donnell Avatar
      Patrick S. O’Donnell

      Charles, I might have mentioned that the amount of material in that class seems comparatively small alongside what I routinely teach: “world religions,” in which I’m expected to introduce SEVEN religious traditions to my students in the course of one semester! It’s utterly absurd…but I’m in no position to complain or do anything about it….

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    20. Ehud Avatar
      Ehud

      I haven’t looked at it in ages, but I remember that I really enjoyed reading /Straight and Crooked Thinking/ (Robert H. Thouless) as a kid. I suspect it might still prove useful, and it seems to be freely available online.

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    21. Patrick S. O'Donnell Avatar
      Patrick S. O’Donnell

      I did not want people to read the paper because I believe it to be awful! Also, when it was archived, they screwed up the formatting. There was ample reason for why I did not provide the link! (Of course I knew that it could be found with little effort, but…).

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    22. Bijan Parsia Avatar
      Bijan Parsia

      My apologies, I somehow missed that bit (or rather, didn’t fully process it). If a moderator wants to delete my comment, I’ve no objection.
      I read the paper and I don’t see that it’s unlinkable, FWIW.

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    23. Patrick S. O'Donnell Avatar
      Patrick S. O’Donnell

      Thanks Bijan, I informed Ed that I can live with it (albeit with flushed face) at this point.

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    24. Michael B Avatar
      Michael B

      http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Know-What-isnt-Fallibility/dp/0029117062/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391797415&sr=8-1&keywords=how+we+know+what+isn%27t+so

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    25. Bijan Parsia Avatar
      Bijan Parsia

      Michael B, thanks! That’s in the right space (as are many of the related).

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    26. Michael B Avatar
      Michael B

      Welcome. I read (most of) this towards the end of my undergraduate time (out of interest, not part of a reading list) and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
      Hope you and your students get something good out of it 🙂

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    27. David Morrow Avatar
      David Morrow

      Bijan,
      I just ran across Michael Gilbert’s new book, Arguing with People, in Broadview in a promotional email. Based on the table of contents and the description, it looks like there’s some chance it might do what you want: http://broadviewpress.com/product.php?productid=1858&cat=0&page=1#toc
      Patrick,
      If I too may indulge in a little self-promotion, Anthony Weston and I recently expanded his little Rulebook for Arguments into a full-fledged critical thinking textbook, published by Hackett as A Workbook for Arguments. I think it offers a lot of what you were looking for, and it only costs $25: http://www.hackettpublishing.com/a-workbook-for-arguments-a-complete-course-in-critical-thinking-2694

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    28. Bijan Parsia Avatar
      Bijan Parsia

      David,
      ooh, Gilbert’s book looks super promising. Thanks.

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