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September 18, 2017 Cate Hundleby

My first impression as I started to work with Reason in the Balance (2nd edition) was excitement at the wealth of instructor resources. Just the introduction to the Instructor’s Manual provides a wealth of strategies for managing and designing the class.

I have also been pleased to find the Powerpoint slides, and the quizzes, which are immense help especially for the first time one uses the book. Given how often new instructors are given critical thinking courses to teach, these aids can be invaluable. Even a veteran like myself can be aided in making the best use of an unfamiliar book.

I am still enjoying these resources: I am happily using and reworking many of the powerpoint slides — it saves a great deal of time and energy. So far, my biggest disappointment is that I have been looking for something I can’t find. The second chapter has an exercise that refers to a video the instructor will show — so the students may apply the analysis just taught. It seems like a great activity for class, and I was looking forward to it. I expected given all the resources that some suggestions would be provided, but found none.

So, I was torn between trying to come up with something myself, and risking not finding anything that works, or using a less dynamic exercise. But after 20 minutes I did find a fun example:

Normally I avoid sports examples like the plague but I thought the students would enjoy it, and indeed they did. It was good to go beyond my comfort zone and into arenas more familiar to some of them. We used it to apply the 5 guiding questions for inquiry set forth by Bailin and Battersby. It works remarkably well given that one can really only hear one side of the discussion, and the volume is extremely inconsistent. I wish the authors had provided an appropriate clip — or two!

Exercising the textbook masters: Artificial examples

April 24, 2016 Cate Hundleby

This term I taught from Douglas Walton’s Fundamentals of Critical Argumentation (Cambridge UP, 2005) and I was excited to do so. I’m a big fan of Walton’s pragmatic approach to argumentation for it’s ability to make sense of fallacies and it’s pluralism — the convergence of which I will be exploring more in my own research and which I think are both valuable for education. Teaching from this comprehensive text promised to immerse me and the students in Walton’s vision.

I knew of some limitations of Walton’s text from my own perspective, including the almost complete reliance on manufactured examples. I appreciate, and rely on, manufactured examples to provide maximally clear and uncontroversial exemplars of aspects of argumentation, but they also may mislead students into thinking that argument analysis can and should be cut and dried when it is not. That false belief also can encourage students to think that the application of the analysis they know trumps other forms of interpretation which can make logic a type of bullying tool, even a tool of domination (without anyone having such domineering intentions).

My way of addressing this problem (and some of the course’s content requirements) was to supplement Walton with Mark Battersby’s Is that a Fact? A Fieldguide to Statistical and Scientific Information (most recent edition Broadview, 2016). Battersby’s book provides rich detail in its treatment of real examples and many of the themes overlap, allowing for what promised to be a healthy yin and yang approach. Battersby’s book had also been recommended to me by a friend who teaches CEGEP in Quebec.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t realized Battersby provides no exercises (maybe the new edition does?), and that made it hard to integrate Battersby’s deep theoretical treatment of concrete cases with the logic of argumentation. The course began to seem disjointed and Battersby ended up getting less use that I’d hoped.

Walton too was disappointing. Some difficult subjects were covered too briefly and not only with only abstract examples but with very few examples for practice. This is the flipside to the comprehensive nature of Walton’s theory: he covers not only argumentation schemes — his stock in trade, but the larger context of dialogue types and the more traditional analysis of argument diagramming and even a dash of formal logic.

I do think the students learned much of what I intended, though I am more conscious of these intentions now. The dialogical context of argumentation orients both Walton’s and Battersby’s approaches, but it also complicates the teaching of reasoning. I believe now that it cannot be taught at the introductory level with real examples. The closest way to do so may be with Tindale’s Fallacies and Argument Appraisal (Cambridge U P, 2007), an extension of Walton’s approach but restricted by a set of inference schemes that receive deep treatment.

In the future, for a general course on reasoning, I will look to Battersby and Sharon Bailin’s book Reason in the Balance: An Inquiry Approach to Critical Thinking (now in an affordable Hackett edition too! 2016). I have heard nothing but good things about this book, and I know it contains substantial examples and exercises. I many have to give up on the desire for real examples (I’m not sure yet). I did this too when I used Brian L. Epstein’s Critical Thinking (Advanced Reasoning Forum), which makes develops a cartoon world to provide artificial restrictions on the interpretation of argument examples. Originally I laughed at this, but I found it extremely valuable.

Many demands must be balanced in developing a critical thinking course, but good examples have to be a priority. That often requires artificial examples and the challenge is to transition from the artificial to the real, in the hope that will encourage “knowledge transfer” — a concept I hope to learn more about so that I’m doing less guess-work in my pedagogy. I think I’ll start here.

A sample syllabus

September 4, 2012September 5, 2012 Cate Hundleby

One of the things I hope to add to this page over the long run is a series of best practices and models: syllabi, exercises, etc. I don’t expect these all to come from me and if you have something you’d like to share please send it along.

I am teaching a course (module) on fallacies this term, and in case you are interested, here is my syllabus. It is based on the way the textbook author, Chris Tindale, designs his own course, but has my own spin. In particular, I plan this time to have some discussion and assignments addressing constructive failure, a notion popular in business and creative thinking and that has many adherents in pedagogy too. I have also developed a youtube playlist to play at the beginning of class to pick up on the particular themes as we progress through the syllabus.

My technique for using the book is to leave all the case studies/exercises in the book for student practice, and to bring my own examples for in-class analysis. This book adopts the “critical questions” approach associated especially with Doug Walton, according to which fallacies are deviations from argumentation or inference schemes that may often (or in certain cases) be acceptable. The questions are used to devise the strength or weakness of a particular employment of an inference scheme, such as appeal to the person.

The critical questions/inference schemes approach gets past the problem that many putative cases of fallacy can be given positive interpretation. Thus interpretation plays a central role in the course/module, which might seem to open a messy can of worms but I find it a useful way to teach students how to justify their analysis. And to teach the value of changing their interpretations as they reflect more deeply on the reasoning they encounter, and recognize they can improve on their initial impressions. Pressing students to be accountable for their interpretations (along with their evaluations) is one reason that I think fallacies can be a valuable way to teach argumentation.

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