CriticalThinkingAcademy

 I want to discuss how to approach evaluating research. You do not need to be an expert to ask the right questions or understand the general procedures experts follow when publishing quantitative or qualitative research. You do not need to be a statistician to know whether the results of a study answer the intended question. As with many arguments, researchers follow a general schematic. The schematic is different from an argument scheme in that it has been deemed ideal and variations have been ranked according to their strength. The research process represents the ideal form of inference for inferring causation from limited observations in a data set. As with all forms of argument, critical questions can be applied to probe various features of the inferential process, ultimately evaluating the conclusion. Your questions should be substantial. Sometimes they can be simple yes/no, other times more complex and open ended, or they can be directed at assessing the implications of acce...

 Very often we want to make claims about something. These claims might be explanations, interpretations, predictions, recommendations, strategies for action, propositions about states of affairs, judgements, assessments, and many more. Normally, we want to persuade or convince someone of the truth of our claims to invoke action. If your objective is to move someone to action, you might need to engage in means-end reasoning to get them to reconstruct their current goal structure . In other instances, we might want to convince someone of our position to gain alignment on a specific problem, without invoking action. Or we might investigate claims simply out of our intellectual curiosity to reduce uncertainty or gain understanding of a concept. All of this will eventually lead us to engage with someone else (written or verbal) in a discussion, dialogue, or argument. There are times during disagreement when the people you encounter might resort to coercion, manipulation, and deception ...