CriticalThinkingAcademy

It is tempting to think irrationality is primarily a failure of logic: the irrational person commits fallacies, ignores evidence, or draws invalid conclusions. Conspiracy thinking complicates that picture. A conspiracy theory can contain valid inferences, cite genuine data, and even remain internally coherent while something has still gone badly wrong with the inquiry that produced it. That suggests that rationality must consist in more than possessing arguments or updating beliefs consistently. It must also concern the kind of inquiry we are engaged in, the standards governing disagreement, the way evidence is identified and structured, the comparison of rival explanations, the intellectual habits of the inquirer, and the information environment in which inquiry takes place. My aim in this post is to assemble those pieces into a working model of the ideal inquirer . I am especially interested in how that mode...

I’m quite bothered by bad arguments. One in particular is the so called “Free Will Defense”, I want to critique it but first I want to steel man the argument. I'll put it in argumentation schema format, like those proposed by Douglas Walton, similar to what I've done in prior posts. Then i'll identify the hidden assumptions enabling the argument and a comprehensive set of critical questions (CQ) that undercut or defeat the argument; they will target premise plausibility, the assumptions connecting the premises together, and explicit/implicit  definitions/concepts the argument fundamentally relies upon. This "defense" was an argument proposed by philosopher and apologist Alvin Plantinga in response to J.L Mackie's formulation of the logical problem of evil. Mackie, in his 1955 paper "Evil and Omnipotence," argued that the coexistence of an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God with the existence of evil is logically contradictory. Plantinga, ...