= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
To Learn Critical Thinking, Study Critical Thinking
Critical thinking courses may increase students’ rationality, especially if they do argument mapping.
The following excerpts are from “Does philosophy improve critical thinking skills?”, Ortiz 2007.
1 Excerpts
This thesis makes a first attempt to subject the assumption that studying [Anglo-American analytic] philosophy improves critical thinking skills to rigorous investigation.
…Thus the second task, in Chapter 3, is to articulate and critically examine the standard arguments that are raised in support of the assumption (or rather, would be raised if philosophers were in the habit of providing support for the assumption). These arguments are found to be too weak to establish the truth of the assumption. The failure of the standard arguments leaves open the question of whether the assumption is in fact true. The thesis argues at this point that, since the assumption is making an empirical assertion, it should be investigated using standard empirical techniques as developed in the social sciences. In Chapter 4, I conduct an informal review of the empirical literature. The review finds that evidence from the existing empirical literature is inconclusive. Chapter 5 presents the empirical core of the thesis. I use the technique of meta-analysis to integrate data from a large number of empirical studies. This meta-analysis gives us the best yet fix on the extent to which critical thinking skills improve over a semester of studying philosophy, general university study, and studying critical thinking. The meta-analysis results indicate that students do improve while studying philosophy, and apparently more so than general university students, though we cannot be very confident that this difference is not just the result of random variation. More importantly, studying philosophy is less effective than studying critical thinking, regardless of whether one is being taught in a philosophy department or in some other department. Finally, studying philosophy is much less effective than studying critical thinking using techniques known to be particularly effective such as LAMP.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Formalizing reflective inconsistency
In the post Outlawing Anthropics, there was a brief and intriguing scrap of reasoning, which used the principle of reflective inconsistency, which so far as I know is unique to this community:
If your current system cares about yourself and your future, but doesn't care about very similar xerox-siblings, then you will tend to self-modify to have future copies of yourself care about each other, as this maximizes your expectation of pleasant experience over future selves.
This post expands upon and attempts to formalize that reasoning, in hopes of developing a logical framework for reasoning about reflective inconsistency.
Formalizing informal logic
As an exercise, I take a scrap of argumentation, expand it into a tree diagram (using FreeMind), and then formalize the argument (in Automath). This towards the goal of creating "rationality augmentation" software. In the short term, my suspicion is that such software would look like a group of existing tools glued together with human practices.
About my choice of tools: I investigated Araucaria, Rationale, Argumentative, and Carneades. With the exception of Rationale, they're not as polished graphically as FreeMind, and the rigid argumentation-theory structure was annoying in the early stages of analysis. Using a general-purpose mapping/outlining tool may not be ideal, but it's easy to obtain. The primary reason I used Automath to formalize the argument was because I'm somewhat familiar with it. Another reason is that it's easy to obtain and build (at least, on GNU/Linux).
Automath is an ancient and awesomely flexible proof checker. (Of course, other more modern proof-checkers are often just as flexible, maybe more flexible, and may be more useable.) The amount of "proof checking" done in this example is trivial - roughly, what the checker is checking is: "after assuming all of these bits and pieces of opaque human reasoning, do they form some sort of tree?" - but cutting down a powerful tool leaves a nice upgrade path, in case people start using exotic forms of logic. However, the argument checkers built into the various argumentation-theory tools do not have such upgrade paths, and so are not really credible as candidates to formalize the arguments on this site.
Argument Maps Improve Critical Thinking
Charles R. Twardy provides evidence that a course in argrument mapping, using a particular software tool improves critical thinking. The improvement in critical thinking is measured by performance on a specific multiple choice test (California Critical Thinking Skills Test). This may not be the best way to measure rationality, but my point is that unlike almost everybody else, there was measurement and statistical improvement!
Also, his paper is the best, methodologically, that I've seen in the field of "individual rationality augmentation research".
To summarize my (clumsy) understanding of the activity of argument mapping:
One takes a real argument in natural language. (op-eds are a good source of short arguments, philosophy is a source of long arguments). Then elaborate it into a tree structure, with the main conclusion at the root of the tree. The tree has two kinds of nodes (it is a bipartite graph). The root conclusion is a "claim" node. Every claim node has approximately one sentence of english text associated. The children of a claim are "reasons", which do NOT have english text associated. The children of a reason are claims. Unless I am mistaken, the intended meaning of the connection from a claim's child (a reason) to the parent is implication, and the meaning of a reason is the conjunction of its children.
In elaborating the argument, it's often necessary to insert implicit claims. This should be done abiding by the "Principle of Charity", that you should interpret the argument in such a way as to make it the strongest argument possible.
There are two syntactic rules which can easily find flaws in argument maps:
Software tools for community truth-seeking
In reply to: Community Epistemic Practice
There are software tools, possibly helpful for community truth-seeking. For example, truthmapping.com is described very well here. Also, debategraph.org, and I'm sure there are others.
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}