Educating Reason: Critical Thinking, Informal logic, and the Philosophy of Education.

Argument theorists often stress the idea of adaptation to context as an alternative to seeing argument as linked propositions. But adaptation is not a clear idea. It is in fact a complicated puzzle. Though many aspects of this puzzle are obscure, one clear conclusion is that the question-answer pair is not a good way to conceptualize adaptation to situation.

Argumentation logicians have recognized a specter of relativism to haunt their philosophy of argument. However, their attempts to dispel pernicious relativism by invoking notions of a universal audience or a community of model interlocutors have not been entirely successful. In fact, their various discussions of a universal audience invoke the context-eschewing formalism of Kant’s categorical imperative. Moreover, they embrace the Kantian method for resolving the antinomies that continually vacillates between opposing extremes – here between a transcendent universal audience and a (...) context-embedded particular audience. This tack ironically restores the very external mediation they thought to obviate in their aim to ‘dethrone’ the absolutism and totalitarianism of formal logic with a democratic turn to audience adherence, the acceptability of premises and inferential links, and a contextual, or participant-relative, notion of cogency. (shrink)

If dialogue is a necessary condition for argument, argumentation in oratory becomes questionable, since rhetoric is not a dialogically structured activity. If special norms apply to the ‘solo’ performances of rhetoric, the orator’s activity may be more appropriately described as reasoning than as arguing. By analyzing in what respect rhetorical texts can be interpreted as dialogue-based and subject to criteria of Informal Logic, the virtues of rhetorical argumentation in contrast to logic and dialectic emerge.

This paper examines whether philosophers of argument, in spite of their disavowing ‘timeless principles’, nevertheless embrace a set of principles, or axioms, to underlie argumentation theory. First, it reviews the thinking of some prominent philosophers of argument; second, it extracts some principles common to their philosophies; and third, it draws out possible consequences for argumentation theory and asks whether such theory has an underlying political posture.

The current view of theoretical statements in science is that they should be literal and precise; ambiguous and metaphorical statements are useful only as pre-theoretical, exegetical, and heuristic devices and as pedagogical tools. In this paper we argue that this view is mistaken. Literal, precise statements apply to those experiential phenomena which can be defined either conventionally by criterial attribution or by internal atomic constitution. Experiential phenomena which are defined relationally and/or functionally, like nursing, in virtue of their nature, require (...) metaphorical description and explanation. In such cases, metaphor is theory-constitutive. Using insights from the philosophies of language and mind, and examples from nursing practice, education, and our own empirical research, we explore the nature of metaphor and its role in theory constitution. We argue that the apparent resistance of certain experiential phenomena to literal description and explanation is not necessarily indicative of pre-theoretic linguistic imprecision. We suggest, rather, that such resistance provides useful insights into the nature of such experiential phenomena. We also suggest that the aim of scientific theory should be methodological or epistemological precision and not merely linguistic precision. (shrink)