The Relationship between Critical Thinking, Frequency, Informal Fallacy and Evidence in Argumentative Writing

The present study was an investigation of the relationship between the EFL learners’ critical thinking, their frequency, and types of informal fallacy and evidence in argumentative writing. Few studies have been conducted to investigate these issues. To this end, 356-second grade female senior state high school students from four schools in Zanjan were selected through multistage cluster random sampling (MCRS) method and based on Cambridge placement test (2010); 130 students proved to be upper-intermediate and participated in this correlational study. The main data collection stage took place for one month. Then, the informal fallacies based on Johnson's definitions and four types of evidence categorized in Hoeke and Hustinkx were identified and counted within language learners' argumentative writings. The evaluation of the arguments was also conducted based on Walton, Reed, and Macagno. Based on the results achieved from the first research question, there was a significant negative correlation observed between the participants' critical thinking and the frequency of use of informal fallacies in their written argumentation. Based on the results achieved from the second research question, there was a potential and significant correlation between the participants' critical thinking and the frequency of use of informal fallacies. Keywords: Argumentative Writing, Critical Thinking, Evidence, Informal Fallacy.

Infinite Time and Contingent Beings: Aquinas’s Third Way Revisited

Many commentators have accused Aquinas of committing either a formal or an informal fallacy in his Third Way argument. I believe it is possible to revise the Third Way argument so as to avoid such errors. I here present a revision of the first part of the Third Way that is (a) immune to the objections most commonly raised against it, (b) consonant with the basic tenets of Thomism, and (c) plausible from a contemporary point of view.

Profiles of Dialogue for Amphiboly

Amphiboly has been widely recognized, starting from the time of Aristotle, as an informal fallacy arising from grammatical ambiguity. This paper applies the profiles of dialogue tool to the fallacy of amphiboly, providing a five-step evidence-based procedure whereby a syntactically ambiguous sentence uttered in a natural language text can be evaluated as committing a fallacy of amphiboly (or not). A user applies the tool to a natural language text by comparing a descriptive graph, representing how the argumentation actually went, to a normative graph, representing how the argumentation should ideally have proceeded.

Epistemic and deontic authority in the argumentum ad verecundiam

The aim of this paper is to elaborate tools that would allow us to analyse arguments from authority and guard against fallacious uses of them. To accomplish this aim, we extend the list of existing argumentation schemes representing arguments from authority. For this purpose, we formulate a new argumentation scheme for argument from deontic authority along with a matching set of critical questions used to evaluate it. We argue that clarifying the ambiguity between arguments from epistemic and deontic authority helps building a better explanation of the informal fallacy of appeal to authority (argumentum ad verecundiam).

Ethotic arguments and fallacies: The credibility function in multi-agent dialogue systems

In this paper, it is shown how formal dialectic can be extended to model multi-agent argumentation in which each participant is an agent. An agent is viewed as a participant in a dialogue who not only has goals, and the capability for actions, but who also has stable characteristics of types that can be relevant to an assessment of some of her arguments used in that dialogue. When agents engage in argumentation in dialogues, each agent has a credibility function that can be adjusted upwards or downwards by certain types of arguments brought forward by the other agent in the dialogue. One type is the argument against the person or argumentum ad hominem, in which personal attack on one party's character is used to attack his argument. Another is the appeal to expert opinion, traditionally associated with the informal fallacy called the argumentum ad verecundiam. In any particular case, an agent will begin a dialogue with a given degree of credibility, and what is here called the credibility function will affect the plausibility of the arguments put forward by that agent. In this paper, an agent is shown to have specific character traits that are vital to properly judging how this credibility function should affect the plausibility of her arguments, including veracity, prudence, sincerity and openness to opposed arguments. When one of these traits is a relevant basis for an adjustment in a credibility function, there is a shift to a subdialogue in which the argumentation in the case is re-evaluated. In such a case, it is shown how the outcome can legitimately be a reduction in the credibility rating of the arguer who was attacked. Then it is shown how the credibility function should be brought into an argument evaluation in the case, yielding the outcome that the argument is assigned a lower plausibility value.

The Cogent Reasoning Model of Informal Fallacies

An infonnal fallacy is a reasoning error with three features: the reasoning employs an implicit cogent pattern; the fallacy results from one or more false premises; there is culpable ignorance or deception associated with the falsity of the premises. A reconstruction and analysis of the cogent reasoning patterns in fourteen standard infonnal fallacy types plus several variations are given. Defense of the CMR account covers: a general failure to apply the principle of charity in informal fallacy contexts; empirical evidence for it; how it explains Walton's point that there are both fallacious and non-fallacious instances of fallacy types; how it avoids most "relevance" problems, pennits clearer taxonomizing, and promises pedagogical advantages; how it solves a "demarcation problem."

Has the Ontological Argument been Refuted?

Suppose we say that a deductive argument is probative just in case it is (i) valid in point of logical form, (ii) possesses true premises, and (iii) is free of informal fallacy. We can then say that an argument is normatively persuasive for a person if and only if it is both probative and has premises that can be accepted, without any breach of epistemic propriety, by the person in question. If the premises of a probative argument would be accepted by any reasonable person, I will call such an argument demonstrative.