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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Informal Logic: Issues and Techniques

Informal Logic: Issues and Techniques

Grennan, Wayne

Hardcover

Logic

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0773515429
ISBN13: 9780773515420
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: Apr 11 1997
Pages: 280
Weight: 1.46
Height: 1.15 Width: 6.22 Depth: 9.28
Language: English

In this insightful critique of informal logic and critical thinking strategies and techniques, Wayne Grennan examines argument evaluation techniques currently used in both formal and informal logic texts and, finding them lacking, proposes a new system of evaluation.

Grennan bases his evaluation of arguments on two criteria: logical adequacy and pragmatic adequacy. He asserts that the common formal logic systems, while logically sound, are not very useful for evaluating everyday inferences, which are almost all deductively invalid as stated. Turning to informal logic, he points out that while more recent informal logic and critical thinking texts are superior in that their authors recognize the need to evaluate everyday arguments inductively, they typically cover only inductive fallacies, ignoring the inductively sound patterns frequently used in successful persuasion. To redress these problems, Grennan introduces a variety of additional inductive patterns.

Concluding that informal logic texts do not encourage precision in evaluating arguments, Grennan proposes a new argument evaluation procedure that expresses judgments of inferential strength in terms of probabilities. Based on theories of Stephen Toulmin, Roderick Chisholm, and John Pollock, his proposed system allows for a more precise judgment of the persuasive force of arguments.

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