Critical reasoning texts 16 Nov 2009 Have any of my readers either taught or been taught from a good critical reasoning text? If so, can you name it and recount the pros and cons of that text? I’m preparing a subject. Thanks Epistemology Philosophy
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Creationism and Intelligent Design A boycott of Synthese 19 Apr 201122 Apr 2011 Brian Leiter has suggested a professional boycott of the journal Synthese until they admit their error in the disclaimer case, and I am the contact for messages supporting it from publishing philosophers. Leiter says: I would urge all philosophers to stop submitting to Synthese; to withdraw any papers they have… Read More
I haven’t, but if you find a good one, it’d be good if you could have an article about it. I’d be interested in reading something like that too.
I am partial to _Argument: Critical thinking, logic, and the fallacies_ by Woods, Irvine and Walton. The authors are all up on critical thinking scholarship (in the case of Woods and Walton, major figures in the field), and the book is clearly written, accessible, covering a variety of topics. It is also nice because it includes a lot of logic – if you want to spend a significant time on formal stuff you can. It has the basics on probability and causal inference, but it is not a text you could use to teach a “critical thinking but its really philosophy of science” course – the way you could with some other texts. (Hacking’s Introduction to Logic and probability is a text with a focus on probability, if you want that.) Full disclosure: Woods and Irvine are colleagues of mine.
Antony Flew has turned out, in his old age, to be such a … well, anyway … But all that aside, I recall his _Thinking About Thinking_ as being rather good.
I used Merrilee Salmon’s Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking a few times, and like it quite a bit. It is mostly a critical thinking intro, with a lot of attention to arguments in natural discourse, both inductive and deductive, and quite a bit about fallacies, which I loved. There’s also a chapter on causal inference which one can choose to go into at whichever length, and the last few chapters are formal, again to be developed at whichever proportion one chooses.
“Critical reasoning” is a fraud, a con: there is very little evidence that C.R. units actually help students reason any better. Look up Tim Van Gelder (loosely affiliated with U of Melbourne philosophy establishment; has own company trying to market software for teaching Crit Thinking) for details: he’s actually tried to be empirical, given before the sememster and after the semester tests to students to find out if the C.R. unit has any effect: his own course, featuring a software package that helps students diagram the structure of arguments is apparently the only one that has ever been shown by such means to be any use at all. — That said, I’m a bit partial to Bob Fogelin’s “Understanding Arguments,” which may or may not still be in print. Basically because it contained, as appendices, two theoretical texts (Auatin on performative utterances, Grice on conversational implicature) which would allow something interesting to be discussed.
Oh Allen, you do my poor heart grief. I am supposed to be teaching students of business, IT, hospitality, Arts and the like how to do basic reasoning, and while I fear you may be right, it’s what they’re paying me to do, so I will keep this a secret. I knew of Tim’s work, of course. I plan to teach fallacies, mostly, so they know what not to do (and also so they can use impressive sounding Latin terms in their essays) but basically I’m thinking of this as a kind of “How to write essays” course. But Fogelin’s text is out in a new edition, and it looks like it has the right sorts of things, although these students, few of whom will go into a straight philosophy course, may find it above their heads.
Hey, John– Good luck! I had to do a bit of critical thinking tutoring in my years at Melbourne, and hated it: I didn’t think I was doing any good, and had an ugly feeling that the things in the neighborhood that I found interesting (logic, logic and logic) weren’t much use to the students. I’m glad Fogelin’s book is still available (though the identity criteria for “book” seem to be elastic: I looked at the “preview” table of contents and it looked very different from the early editions. … I see it has a chapter on decision-making: a bit of Pascal is always fun, and if a student comes out with an intuitive grasp of the concept of Expected Utility, that would be useful! (Bob Fogelin, b.t.w., was Director of Undergraduate studies at my university when I was an undergraduate: he’s the guy that admitted me to the “Honours Major” in philosophy despite my poor grades….)