Critical Thinking in a Digital Age: Argumentation and the projects of new media literacy

Critical thinking unites the modern university in an effort to train students across the curricular to exercise independent, informed judgment. Critical thinking is a useful tool in developing literacy in a time of dominance by the mass media. The development of new communication technologies challenge assumptions guiding critical thinking by giving rise to novel contexts for the production and evaluation of arguments. This paper examines the challenges to revise critical thinking and develop strategies for new media literacy for participatory, digital culture

Commentary on “The Stance of Personal Public Apology”: Transgression & Apologia: Disjoining Standpoints of Justice, Publicity and Drama

This paper responds to Professor Martha Cheng’s standpoint analysis of transgression and apologia in three twenty first century media-promoted controversies: Tiger Woods, Paula Deen, and Bryan Williams. Argument strategies are differentiated by genres that aim at justice, publicity, and drama. Forensics, public relations, and entertainment mix across media apparatus. I emphasize the disjunctures among these acts of argument and thereby provide an alternative to analysis and synthesis of the argumentation as discourse

Rhetoric, Communication, and Information

The practices of architecture and rhetoric have been closely entwined since antiquity. University of Chicago philosopher Richard McKeon mobilized this conceit to identify architectonic rhetoric as giving rise to the communication arts. State of the art communication practices would construct a pluralistic, global world for the twentieth century. The contemporary digital revolution has transferred the communication arts into information control systems through polytechtonic rhetorics. This essay calls for critique where communication is at issue for a control society

Complex Cases and Legitimation Inferences: Extending the Toulmin Model to Deliberative Argument in Controversy

A warrant may be grounded in personal testimony, technical method, or public consensus. The justified choice of a field, in authorizing the warrant and providing further extension of support constitutes a legitimation inference. Complex cases evolve when there are a surplus of good reasons as potential support for a claim, and a choice must be made either to select a single ground for the claim or to advance independently valid reasons, differentially grounded, as support. Complex cases enter the realm of controversy when not all relevant grounds offer the same degree of support or point in the same direction, and a choice to select some grounds and discard others must be justified. The justification of the selection of grounds constitutes a legitimation warrant—a missing element of the Toulmin model

The virtues of reason and the problem of other minds: Reflections on argumentation in a new century

From early modernity, philosophers have engaged in skeptical discussions concerning knowledge of the existence, state, and standing of other minds. The analogical move from self to other unfolds as controversy. This paper reposes the problem as an argumentation predicament and examines analogy as an opening to the study of rhetorical cognition. Rhetorical cognition is identified as a productive process coming to terms with an other through testing sustainable error. The paper explains how self-sustaining risk is theorized by Aristotle’s virtue ethics in the polis. Moral hazard is identified as a threat to modern argument communities