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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Open Mindedness, Tracy A. Bowell Dr, Justine Kingsbury Dr
Open Mindedness, Tracy A. Bowell Dr, Justine Kingsbury Dr
OSSA Conference Archive
Dewey defines open-mindedness as “freedom from prejudice, partisanship, and other such habits as close the mind and make it unwilling to consider new problems and entertain new ideas" (1910, p. 30). It is commonly included in lists of epistemic and argumentative virtues. We begin this paper with brief discussion of various accounts of open-mindedness. Our principle interest is in what it is to behave as an open-minded enquirer. Drawing on two cases, we consider whether open-minded behaviour varies between the contexts of solitary and community enquiry and whether inquirers face different challenges to behaving open-mindedly in each of these contexts. …
Damed If You Do; Damed If You Don’T: Cohen’S “Missed Opportunities”, Sharon Bailin, Mark Battersby
Damed If You Do; Damed If You Don’T: Cohen’S “Missed Opportunities”, Sharon Bailin, Mark Battersby
OSSA Conference Archive
In his paper, “Missed Opportunities in Argument Evaluation,” Daniel Cohen has in his sights a “curious” asymmetry in how we evaluate arguments: while we criticize arguments for failing to point out obvious objections to the proposed line of reasoning, we do not consider it critically culpable to fail to take into account arguments for the position. Cohen views this omission as a missed opportunity, for which he lays the blame largely at the metaphorical feet of the “Dominant Adversarial Model” of argumentation – the DAM account. We argue here that, while Cohen criticizes the DAM account for conceptualizing arguments as …
Explicating And Negotiating Bias In Interdisciplinary Argumentation Using Abductive Tools: Paper, Bethany K. Laursen
Explicating And Negotiating Bias In Interdisciplinary Argumentation Using Abductive Tools: Paper, Bethany K. Laursen
OSSA Conference Archive
Interdisciplinary inquiry hinges upon abductive arguments that integrate various kinds of information to identify explanations worthy of future study or use. Integrative abduction poses unique challenges, including different kinds of data, too many patterns, too many explanations, mistaken meanings across disciplinary lines, and cognitive, pragmatic, and social biases. Argumentation tools can help explicate and negotiate bias as interdisciplinary investigators sift and winnow candidate patterns and processes in search of the best explanation.
Dialectic Of/Or Agitation? Rethinking Argumentative Virtues In Proletarian Elocution, Satoru Aonuma
Dialectic Of/Or Agitation? Rethinking Argumentative Virtues In Proletarian Elocution, Satoru Aonuma
OSSA Conference Archive
This paper explores the possible rapprochement between Marxism and argumentation attempted in Proletarian Elocution, a 1930 Japanese publication. Against a Western Marxist commonplace that “[a]s far as rhetoric is concerned,… a Marxist must be in a certain sense a Platonist” (Eagleton, 1981), the paper discusses how this work seeks to takes advantage of the inquiry and advocacy dimensions of argumentation for the Marxian strategy of “agitprop” and rearticulate it as part of civic virtues.
Reason In The Balance: Teaching Critical Thinking As Dialectical, Sharon Bailin, Mark Battersby, Patrick Clauss
Reason In The Balance: Teaching Critical Thinking As Dialectical, Sharon Bailin, Mark Battersby, Patrick Clauss
OSSA Conference Archive
In this paper we describe the approach to critical thinking pedagogy used in our new text, Reason in the Balance: An Inquiry Approach to Critical Thinking. In this text we concentrate on develop-ing students’ ability to analyze and assess competing arguments in a dialectical context. This approach shifts the emphasis from the more common and traditional approach of evaluating individual arguments and fallacy identification. Our focus is on teaching students to analyze and assess competing arguments sur-rounding an issue with the goal of achieving a reasoned and justifiable judgment (an enterprise we refer to as inquiry).