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

Commentary on: Frans H. van Eemeren and Bart Garssen\u27s Argumentative patterns in discourse

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Commentary on “America vs. Apple: the Argumentative Function of Metonyms”: Defeasible Rhetoric: Networks, Security, & Metonyms

The government took Apple to court to demand decryption of a terrorist cell phone. The warrant issued rested on the assumption that law enforcement should be able to do its work through extension of “access” across the population of encrypted iphones. Each phone exists as a defeasible (Rescher 1977) site whose cooperation (access) is assumed to be opened by the the manufacturer if directed to do so by government, unless cause can be shown otherwise. Defeasible argument couples rhetorically with metonymic force as a powerful argument trajectory. The reversal of burden of proof, now placed on the company to defend its encryption, permits the government to extend the scope of its power by turning cell phone companies into its helpers. This is the manner in which a government would commandeer innocent third parties into becoming its undercover agents, its spies, or its hackers (Goldman & Segall 2016). The test case was crucial for Apple, but it was resolved by the discovery of a third-party who could gather the information without the manufacturers complicity