Govier

What’s wrong?

January 29, 2013April 4, 2014 Cate Hundleby

The main motivation for the Critical Thinking Squared website and this blog is to raise consciousness about critical thinking pedagogy in the discipline of philosophy. There are a few ways in which scholarship has advanced in recent decades that textbooks continue to ignore. Many of these advances come from argumentation theory, and here are the basic advancements in that field that I find textbooks tend to neglect:

Arguments take place in dialogues. Some theorists view the dialogue as a secondary aspect; but the consensus is that among the range of forms that argumentation can take, arguments take place between people. They are not free-standing but audience-relative, an insight going back to Chaim Perelman and Stephen Toulmin.
Fallacies are forms of argumentation. Without this assumption there is little hope of providing any coherent account of fallacies. While fallacy labels provide a longstanding method for teaching reasoning, the errors we count as fallacies take many different forms and until the development of the informal logic movement there was little method behind the lists of error names. The depth of this problem has been set forth by Charles Hamblin in his book Fallacies (1970). Since then, fallacies have been systematized in three different ways:
1. The three aspects of an argument that may go wrong (acceptable premises, relevance of premises to conclusion, and sufficiency of premises in supporting the conclusion). This analysis structures the classic books by Johnson & Blair and Govier.
2. Presumptive argumentation schemes that may work well or go awry. Identification of the proper working of a presumptive scheme of argumentation, such as an appeal to authority or a generalization, one considers critical questions characteristic of the particular scheme.
3. The pragma-dialectic approach treats fallacies as rule violations but that provides no systematic account of how they arise.

Many textbooks employ the first analysis, but many still lean on ad hoc lists of names and view most types as categorical problems despite the flourishing of epistemologies showing the relevance to reasoning of emotion, testimony, generalization, etc., all of which challenge such categorical dismissals.

The Adversarial Presentation of Fallacies of Argumentation

October 29, 2012April 4, 2014 Cate Hundleby

The table below indicates how a preponderance of textbooks (twenty-four out of thirty surveyed in June 2010) employ at least three techniques involved in “The Adversary Method” identified by Janice Moulton (1983). The table is reprinted from “The authority of the fallacies approach to argument evaluation” by Catherine E. Hundleby (2010) from Informal Logic 30(3), by permission, where further analysis and explanation can be found. The surveyed textbooks are written by authors and designed for courses within the discipline of philosophy, have at least one chapter devoted to fallacies, and are all of those that could be obtained as examination copies over a period of several years. The only systematic effort was to consider texts by established scholars in the field. (Parallel texts in rhetoric and composition do not seem to share the same problems.)

The aspects of fallacies presentation that support the Adversary Method, in increasing order of concern, are as follows.

(a) Ignore the possibility of argument repair

(b) 50% or more very short or decontextualized examples.

(d) A “taxonomic technique” for exercises that provides a range of arguments as mistaken and asks students to indicate which fallacy creates the mistake; or presents a range of arguments that may or may not be mistaken but does not include discussion of acceptable counterparts of fallacies.

Those textbooks not on the table because they do not exhibit three or more aspects of the Adversary Method include those by Bickenbach and Davies (1997), Epstein (2006), Govier (2010), Johnson and Blair (2006), Tindale (2007b), all who have significant bodies of scholarship in argumentation and informal logic. Boss (2010) is another exception, a scholar of moral reasoning who engages feminist issues.

Almost all authors on the table have no publications in informal logic or argumentation. (To assess the authors’ scholarly areas I consulted the current on-line edition of The Philosopher’s Index and the authors’ academic webpages). Only three philosophy textbooks—Walton, Woods, and Irvine (2004), Copi and Cohen (2005), and Engel (2000)—that my analysis reveals to employ the Adversary Method (and so that appear on the Table) have authors who are scholars in the field; and even these are borderline cases. The worst practice, the taxonomic technique, does not appear in Walton, Woods, and Irvine (2004), and many longer, contextualized, and authentic examples can be found in Engel (2000). Engel’s (2000) and Copi and Cohen’s (2005) belong to an early generation of textbooks, which accounts for their failure to reflect recent scholarship.

References

Bassham, G., Irwin, W., Nardone, H., and Wallace, J.M. (2005). Critical thinking: A student’s introduction. Toronto: McGraw-Hill.

Bickenbach, J.E. and Davies, J.M. (1997). Good reasons for better arguments: As introduction to the skills and values of critical thinking. Orchard Park, NY: Broadview.

Boss, J.A. (2010) Think: Critical thinking and logic skills for everyday life. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Burton (2002). The voice of reason: Fundamentals of critical thinking. New York: Oxford University Press.

Carey, S.S. (2000). The uses and abuses of argument: Critical thinking and the fallacies. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield.

Copi, I.M., and Cohen, C. (2005). Introduction to logic, 12^th edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ:Prentice Hall.

Copi, I.M., Cohen, C., and Flage, D.E. (2007). Essentials of logic, 2^nd edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Damer, T.E. (2005). Attacking faulty reasoning: A practical guide to fallacy-free arguments, sixth edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Dayton (2010) Critical thinking, logic, and argument. Pearson Education Canada.

Engel, S.M. (2000). With good reason: An introduction to informal fallacies, 6^th edition. Boston: St. Martin’s Press.

Flage, D.E. (2004). The art of questioning: An introduction to critical thinking. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Govier, T. (2010). A practical study of argument. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Gula, R.J. (2002). Nonsense: A handbook of logical fallacies. Mount Jackson, VA: Axios Press.

Hughes, W. and Lavery, J. (2008). Critical thinking: An introduction to the basic skills, 5^th edition. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview.

Johnson, R. H. and Blair, J.A. (2006). Logical self-defense. New York: International debate education association.

Kenyon, T. (2008). Clear thinking in a blurry world. Toronto: Nelson.

Leblanc, J. (1998). Thinking clearly: A guide to critical reasoning. W.W. Norton & Co.

Lee, Stephen P. (2002). What is the argument? Critical thinking in the real world. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Moore, B.N. and Parker, R. (2007). Critical thinking, 8^th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Reichenbach, B.R. (2001). Introduction to critical thinking. New York: McGraw Hill.

Rudinow, J., Barry, V.E., Letteri, M. (2008). Invitation to critical thinking, 1^st Canadian edition. Toronto: Thomson.

Saindon, J. (2008). Argument and argumentation. Toronto: Nelson.

Schick, T., Jr. and Vaughn, L. (2005). How to think about weird things, 4^th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Schwarze, S. and Lape, H. (2000). Thinking Socratically. Prentice Hall.

Teays, W. (2006). Second thoughts: Critical thinking for a diverse society, 3^rd edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Tindale, Christopher. (2007b). Fallacies and argument appraisal. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press: 155-170.

Vaughn, L. and MacDonald, C. (2008). The power of critical thinking, Canadian edition. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press.

Wilson, D.C. (1999). A guide to good reasoning. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Woods, J., Irvine, A. and Walton, D. (2004). Argument: Critical thinking, logic and the fallacies, second edition. Toronto: Prentice Hall.

Fallacies and failure

August 24, 2012April 4, 2014 Cate Hundleby

Why teach fallacies? There is no universal way to get an argument wrong, many argue. It’s derivative on some positive theory of argumentation. We have positive theories to support fallacy theory (the three aspects of argument strength from Blair and Johnson, and Govier; argumentation schemes from Walton; or pragma-dialectical errors) so why concentrate on an archaic theory of failure? Doesn’t that encourage an unhealthy emphasis on nay-saying? knee-jerk scepticism? Certainly it can.

For the exact same reasons teaching fallacies can be a serious opportunity for students to learn about the value of failure. “Teaching students to fail” by Edward Burger in Inside Higher Ed recommends not only informing students about the value of taking risks and learning from their own failure, but making that part of the assessment. He makes it sound pretty simple and very effective.

Combining this with fallacies seems perfect, as it encourages students to consider the epistemological (or in Douglas Walton‘s terms maieutic) qualities of fallacy analysis and criticism in general. I’m teaching fallacies this term so I’ll let you know how it goes!

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