This is Part I of a two-part reflection by Robert Ennis on his involvement in the critical thinking movement. Part I deals with how he got started in the movement and with the development of his influential definition of critical thinking and his conception of what critical thinking involves. Part II of the reflection will appear in the next issue of INQUIRY, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer 2011), and it will cover topics concerned with assessing critical thinking, teaching critical thinking, (...) and what the future may hold. (shrink)

This is Part I of a two-part reflection by Robert Ennis on his involvement in the critical thinking movement. Part I deals with how he got started in the movement and with the development of his influential definition of critical thinking and his conception of what critical thinking involves. Part II of the reflection will appear in the next issue of INQUIRY, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer 2011), and it will cover topics concerned with assessing critical thinking, teaching critical thinking, (...) and what the future may hold. (shrink)

The general goal is to encourage informal logicians and those interested in applied epistemology to look at epidemiology as a paradigmatic science crucially dependant on argumentation to justify its claims. Three specific goals are: 1. exemplify applied epistemology by looking critically at causal argumentation in epidemiology, 2. show that justification of causal claims in epidemiology is a form of “argument to the best explanation,” 3. show that there could be a symbiotic relationship between epidemiology and work in various applied reasoning (...) disciplines such as argumentation and “applied epistemology.”. (shrink)

Ethics and jurisprudence are liable to the remark in common with logic. Almost every writer having taken a different view of some of the particulars which ...