The question of the political potential possessed by the philosophies of the Vienna Circle is complex for more than one reason. It is so partly due to the politically heterogeneous membership of the Circle, partly due to the difficult if not extreme political circumstances under which they had to operate, and partly due to the variable meanings of the parameter "political," some of which are and some of which are not compatible with, in turn, variable versions of the doctrine of (...) the value-neutrality of science. For instance, philosophies of science may steadfastly be standing guard against pseudo-scientific nonsense being paraded as worthy of credence in public discourse, this concern for intellectual hygene... (shrink)

It is often suggested that social media is a hostile environment for critical thinking and that a major source for epistemic problems concerning social media is that it facilitates emotions. We argue that emotions per se are not the source of the epistemic problems concerning social media. We propose that instead of focusing on emotions, we should focus on the affective scaffolding of social media. We will show that some affective scaffolds enable desirable epistemic practices, while others obstruct beneficial epistemic (...) practices, or enable hostile epistemic practices. Particularly, we will show that emotions play a crucial role in the epistemic practice of critical thinking and that the affective scaffolding of social media can support, or hinder, online critical thinking. The upshot of our argument is that affective scaffoldings of social media can harness emotions to support beneficial epistemic practices, like online critical thinking. (shrink)

Is argumentation essentially adversarial? The concept of a devil's advocate—a cooperative arguer who assumes the role of an opponent for the sake of the argument—serves as a lens to bring into clearer focus the ways that adversarial arguers can be virtuous and adversariality itself can contribute to argumentation's goals. It also shows the different ways arguments can be adversarial and the different ways that argumentation can be said to be "essentially" adversarial.

In this paper, I argue that, despite the progress made in recent years, virtue argumentation theory still lacks a more systematic acknowledgment of other-regarding virtues. A fuller recognition of such virtues not only enriches the field of research of virtue argumentation theory in significant ways, but also allows for a richer and more intuitive view of the virtuous arguer. A fully virtuous arguer, it is argued, should care to develop both self-regarding and other-regarding virtues. He should be concerned both with (...) his own development as an arguer and with helping other arguers in that regard. (shrink)

There has been considerable recent debate regarding the possible epistemic benefits versus the potential risks of adversariality in argumentation. Nonetheless, this debate has rarely found its way into work on critical thinking theory and instruction. This paper focuses on the implications of the adversariality debate for teaching critical thinking. Is there a way to incorporate the benefits of adversarial argumentation while mitigating the problems? Our response is an approach based on dialectical inquiry which focuses on a confrontation of opposing views (...) within a collaborative framework. (shrink)

In his paper, “Missed Opportunities in Argument Evaluation,” Daniel Cohen has in his sights a “curious” asymmetry in how we evaluate arguments: while we criticize arguments for failing to point out obvious objections to the proposed line of reasoning, we do not consider it critically culpable to fail to take into account arguments for the position. Cohen views this omission as a missed opportunity, for which he lays the blame largely at the metaphorical feet of the “Dominant Adversarial Model” of (...) argumentation – the DAM account. We argue here that, while Cohen criticizes the DAM account for conceptualizing arguments as essentially agonistic, he accepts its basic framing and does not follow his critique where it leads. In so doing, he misses the opportunity to develop an alternative, non-adversarial account of argumentation which would avoid his criticism of how we evaluate arguments. (shrink)