This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments. It discusses many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It shows students how to use the question 'What argument or evidence would justify me in believing P?', and also how to deal with suppositional arguments beginning with the phrase 'Suppose that X were the case.' It aims to (...) help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, and about philosophy. It will be valuable for students and their teachers in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, law and the social sciences. (shrink)

This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments. It discusses many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It shows students how to use the question 'What argument or evidence would justify me in believing P?', and also how to deal with suppositional arguments beginning with the phrase 'Suppose that X were the case.' It aims to (...) help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, and about philosophy. It will be valuable for students and their teachers in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, law and the social sciences. (shrink)

This text meets the requirements of the OCR AS specification for critical thinking. Alec Fisher shows students how they can develop a range of creative and critical thinking skills that are transferable to other subjects and contexts.

I take 'informal logic' to be the (descriptive and normative) study of 'real arguments'-arguments which are or have been used with the aim of convincing others of a point of view. I argue that the informal logic tradition thus conceived (i) lends strong support to something like Quine's view that our beliefs really support one another like the filaments in a spider's web--and thus that the traditional view that implication is an asymmetric relation is false; (ii) suggests that the classic (...) division of arguments into deductive and inductive has distorted our thinking about the evaluation of real arguments; and (iii) implies that naturalised epistemology is on the right track. (shrink)

This text offers an account of how philosophers in the 20th century have challenged the ideas of the modern philosophers of the 17th century on fundamental questions in epistemology. Featuring examples, self-study questions and further readings, the text introduces and critically defines logical analysis, foundationalism and coherentism.

The atheist who begins to argue his case by saying, ‘Suppose there is an omniscient Being of the sort in which Christians believe ...’ is employing a very familiar move in argumentation. However, most books on argumentation theory ignore ‘suppositions’ completely. Searle omits suppositions entirely from his taxonomy of speech acts and this appears to lead to a similar omission in Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions by van Eemeren and Grootendorst.This paper argues that ‘suppositional argument’ is elegant, powerful and extremely (...) common, that the correct way to understand it is based on Gottlob Frege's distinction between ‘asserted’ and ‘unasserted’ propositions and hence that suppositions are neither assertions nor (and this is more important) assertives. The paper discusses the connections between suppositions and conditionals; it argues that argumentation theory which ignores suppositions is systematically misleading; and it concludes by indicating some possible developments in argumentation theory. (shrink)

A generation before Beardsley, legal scholar John Henry Wigmore invented a scheme for representing arguments in a tree diagram, aimed to help advocates analyze the proof of facts at trial. In this essay, I describe Wigmore's "Chart Method" and trace its origin and influence. Wigmore, I argue, contributes to contemporary theory in two ways. His rhetorical approach to diagramming provides a novel perspective on problems about the theory of reasoning, premise adequacy, and dialectical obligations. Further, he advances a novel solution (...) to the problem of assessing argument quality by representing the strength of argument in meeting objections. (shrink)

I have long been fascinated by the process of argument, so it seemed natural to study philosophy and logic at university, then, as a University teacher, to teach them. Since I gradually realised these subjects didn’t help students to reason and argue well, I tried to devise materials which would. This led first to my writing The Logic of Real Arguments and later, Critical Thinking: An Introduction. If you wish to teach thinking skills it is important to assess whether your (...) methods work, and I have developed several tests of critical thinking for different contexts, including a new UK Critical Thinking examination, now taken by thousands of school students. I worked with Richard Paul, Michael Scriven , Robert Swartz, Robert Ennis and many others. The emergence of the Informal Logic and Critical Thinking movement was an exciting time and I feel fortunate to have been part of it. (shrink)

The various ‘impulses to philosophy’ which are the subject of this series of lectures, include a fascination with the general process of reasoning and argument—with the ‘game of logic’. We are all aware of the importance of reasoning in our lives and how difficult it can be to tell ‘good’ reasoning from ‘bad’.