CriticalThinkingAcademy

 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 depth, it refers to a process by which one or more particip...

Why is it that people are obsessed with the objective/subjective distinction? You see these terms in all sorts of debates, calling your opponent “subjective” kind of means you won the fight. For example I hear them claim that atheism is subject to radical relativism, or that religious morality is “objective” and that there is no “solid ground to base claims of morality without god”. A lot of arguments revolve around this distinction, I think due to this weird misunderstanding of objectivity and subjectivity. Social construction is conflated with radical relativism, and while I agree there are people who label themselves as relativists who also adhere to social constructivism I do not think that the concept implies a radical relativism of the sort “there are no facts”. No one can actually be a relativist, you simply cannot survive. So we must be clear as to what this means in the context of the objective/subjective distinction and social construction. Let’s start with the notion of “int...