As I read Ben Hamby’s piece, I found it hard to disagree with what he was saying. Certainly the willingness to inquire strikes me as extremely important. If that willingness was completely absent in someone, I find it hard to imagine how that person could amount to much as a critical thinker. Still, the pleasant complacency of collegial agreement is itself a cue that perhaps should trigger greater exertion to think critically. So I will adopt a deliberately oppositional stance, (...) one that searches for flaws in the proposal that Ben is asking us to adopt. I will try to present a variety of provocations in this regard, and, if my efforts seem on occasion to be stretches, that’s OK so long as they stimulate further thinking—in this case further thinking about critical thinking and its pedagogy. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to challenge the idea that Toulmin’s main focus in The Uses of Argument is to critique formal deductive logic. I first try to challenge the argument that, on the basis of what Toulmin says about analytic arguments, it is impossible to determine exactly what they are. I will then attempt to determine the basic contours of analytic arguments. Finally, I will conclude that the concept of an analytic argument involves epistemological assumptions to which formal (...) logicians are in no way committed by the nature of their discipline. (shrink)