Critical Thinking

Bowell, Tracy; Kemp, Gary

doi:10.4324/9780203874134

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Where arguments rely on source information, they are deemed fallacious, as, for example, with ad hominem arguments, which attack the credibility of the source, or appeals to authority, which are based on the source's credibility. Such arguments feature prominently in traditional catalogs of fallacies (e.g., Woods et al, 2004 ) and textbooks on critical thinking (e.g., Bowell and Kemp, 2002 ; Hughes et al, 2010 ; Rainbolt and Dwyer, 2012 ). However, even this tradition increasingly holds that such arguments are sometimes reasonable, and focuses on distinguishing fallacious and non-fallacious forms (e.g., Walton, 1998 ; van Eemeren et al, 2009 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Bi-directional Relationship between Source Characteristics and Message Content

et al. 2018

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Much of what we believe we know, we know through the testimony of others (Coady, 1992). While there has been long-standing evidence that people are sensitive to the characteristics of the sources of testimony, for example in the context of persuasion, researchers have only recently begun to explore the wider implications of source reliability considerations for the nature of our beliefs. Likewise, much remains to be established concerning what factors influence source reliability. In this paper, we examine, both theoretically and empirically, the implications of using message content as a cue to source reliability. We present a set of experiments examining the relationship between source information and message content in people's responses to simple communications. The results show that people spontaneously revise their beliefs in the reliability of the source on the basis of the expectedness of a source's claim and, conversely, adjust message impact by perceived reliability; hence source reliability and message content have a bi-directional relationship. The implications are discussed for a variety of psychological, philosophical and political issues such as belief polarization and dual-route models of persuasion.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Bi-directional Relationship between Source Characteristics and Message Content

et al. 2018

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“…Cohesion is crucial, then, to the effectiveness of a written argument and thus to its persuasiveness. 3…”

Section: ])mentioning

confidence: 99%

Digitally deconstructing ‘straw man’ and ‘wicker man’ arguments: A software-aided pedagogy

O’Halloran

2018

AAC

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This article models a software-based pedagogy, targetted at undergraduates, for assisting with detection and deconstruction of straw man arguments. The pedagogy is useful particularly where the student is unfamiliar with the standpoint attacked in the argument, where the text describing the standpoint is large and where the argument is lengthy too. I use a digital text analysis tool-Sketch Engine-to help reveal and deconstruct a straw man argument which misrepresents one specific aspect of a book. I then go on to use this tool in combination with another digital text analysis tool-WMatrix-to demonstrate too how the book's wider standpoints conflict with the argument's framing. I thus also show the argument to be a much bigger straw man, what I refer to as a wicker man. Advantages of using the digital tools are that (i) they efficiently set the student up to judge whether or not central topics in a large text being attacked are relevant absences from the argument attacking that text; (ii) the potential for arbitrariness in judging whether or not the argument is a straw man or a wicker man is significantly reduced, making in principle for scrupulous evaluation.

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“…In my reconstruction, I do not 'extract' premises from the sentences as is often the case in argumentation studies and critical thinking studies (e.g. Walton 2006;Bowell and Kemp 2010). This is because my focus, in Section 5, will be on exploring whether or not the cohesive structure of arguments in Hitchens' text is unstable.…”

Section: Electronic Deconstruction Ii: Identifying Arguments In Relatmentioning

confidence: 99%

A corpus-based deconstructive strategy for critically engaging with arguments

O’Halloran¹

2013

Argument & Computation

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My broad concern is with texts which aim to persuade an audience of a particular point of view on a particular topic-persuasion texts. Political speeches and newspaper editorials are examples of this text type. I put forward a strategy for critically engaging with such texts. Its focus is a persuasion text's cohesion-how it is held together through its vocabulary and grammar. The strategy explores whether or not the cohesion of a persuasion text is unstable, if it deconstructs. Since a persuasion text's credibility is dependent, amongst other things, on effective cohesion, showing where a persuasion text's cohesion deconstructs diminishes its credibility. I call this critical reading strategy Electronic Deconstruction: 'Electronic' reflects the fact that the strategy draws on corpus linguistic method; 'Deconstruction' refers to the deconstructive approach of this strategy. An advantage of Electronic Deconstruction is that it can still facilitate critical engagement with an argument where it is difficult to reconstruct all its premises. This is because its evaluative focus is a persuasion text's cohesive structure rather than its logical structure. To demonstrate Electronic Deconstruction, the article employs a case-study, a text written in 2008 by the late political journalist, Christopher Hitchens, which justified his continuing support for the 2003 Iraq intervention by US-led coalition forces. After highlighting a number of frustrations in identification of its arguments, and thus for critical assessment of its logical soundness, I show how Electronic Deconstruction as an alternative critical engagement circumvents incomplete reconstruction by doing the following: revealing that the text's cohesive structure is unstable via an electronic deconstructive analysis which draws on a two-billion word corpus, the Oxford English Corpus. The article employs two corpus linguistic software tools: 'Sketchengine' (http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/) and 'WMatrix' (http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/).

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Critical Thinking

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

The Bi-directional Relationship between Source Characteristics and Message Content

The Bi-directional Relationship between Source Characteristics and Message Content

Digitally deconstructing ‘straw man’ and ‘wicker man’ arguments: A software-aided pedagogy

A corpus-based deconstructive strategy for critically engaging with arguments

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