Towards a Research Agenda for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking.

Attempts to use Toulmin's argument model in teaching argument have had mixed success. We suggest using it specifically to teach academic writing. Moreover, we think it should be used to teach what major constituents are characteristic of academic wri ting, rather than how to make each individual point. For example, one important feature of academic writing is that the writer should carefully discuss the warrant for the data she uses, whereas debaters in practical argument are rarely required to do so. (...) Extensive experience from the teaching of academic writing along these lines will be drawn upon. (shrink)

I begin by formulating the problem of the nature of fallacy in terms of the logic of the negative evaluation of argument, that is, in terms of a theory of logical criticism; here I discuss several features of my approach and several advantages vis-à-vis other approaches; a main feature of my approach is the concern to avoid both formalist and empiricist excesses. I then define six types of fallaciousness, labeled formal, explanatory, presuppositional, positive, semantical, and persuasive; they all involve arguments (...) whose conclusion may be said not to follow from the premises, that is, they involve the logical evaluation of relationships among propositions. I also provide a set of data consisting of four historical cases or nine specific instances of fallacious arguments; these all pertain to the Copernican controversy about the earth's motion in the seventeenth century. I end with a discussion of further problems and inquiries that deserve attention. (shrink)

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.