CriticalThinkingAcademy

It would be very hard to boil down the political landscape in the United States to a simple description but I want to address one characteristic that is regularly attributed to it. Everyone seems to be divided on the proposition "the United States is inherently racist". This actually seems to be one of the single most important dividing lines between "The Right" and "The Left"; if you agree with the statement you are "a leftist" and if you disagree with the statement you are "a Nazi". If you think of yourself as "someone on the left" but do not share this presupposition in all of its generality, you are deemed suspect. If you think of yourself as relatively conservative about social issues but try to have a conversation about race as a factor contributing to social disparities, you are deemed suspect. I would bargain that there are a significant amount of people who do not see this proposition as categorical; but nuanced, comp...

 I was exposed to Stephen Toulmin  during a second year course at University on critical thinking. This class was radically transformative; awakening me to the practice and application of critical thinking. Much of my time in school had revolved around uncritically absorbing information presented to me during powerpoint lectures, reading a textbook, or completing problem sets. After exposure to different forms of argument evaluation, patterns of reasoning, skepticism, introspection, forms of evidence, forms of explanation, certainty vs uncertainty, free thought, critical questioning, the Socratic Method, argument analysis, debating, rhetoric, higher order thinking, intellectual humility, elements of interpretation and many other features of critical thought, I became extremely confident in my thinking.  This propelled me forward in my other studies. I could actually start to see the bigger picture, how different disciplines interconnect, deeper principles governing whole...

 Pragma-dialectics is a type of argumentation theory used to evaluate argument in practice. Pragma refers to the pragmatic notion while dialectics denotes the fact that argument typically takes place within a dialectic process. The idea is that argumentation is a speech act with specific goals depending on the objectives of the conversation.  Referring to the Wikipedia page , the theoretical justification states: In pragma-dialectics, argumentation is viewed as a communicative and interactional discourse phenomenon that is to be studied from a normative as well as a descriptive perspective. The  dialectical  dimension is inspired by normative insights from  critical rationalism  and  formal dialectics , the pragmatic dimension by descriptive insights from  speech act theory ,  Gricean  language philosophy and  discourse analysis . [2] The term "dialectic" has a long history ranging from Plato to Hegel. Without going into much d...