Over on Facebook, Bijan Parsia asked a really great question.
[... are there] any critical reasoning courses/textbooks out there that focus at the dialectical (or beyond) level rather than at the argument level. My recollection is that they are very focused at the individual argument level with an unhealthy focus on fallacies rather than thinking very much about overall cognitive strategies (esp. in group settings) or other goals than the cognitive. I recall getting a lot of that from phil of science classes and pedagogy and (interestingly) online dissuasion analysis (see the "poisonous people" video floating about, or even troll bestiaries), but not so much from critical reasoning (which often was shoehorned into a symbolic logic class).
While I haven't taught critical reasoning in a few years, I also can't recall having run across anything like what Bijan is looking for here. But I don't think it's difficult to see why materials of the sort would be of great value. In fact, I can see how they would be very helpful not just in the 'critical reasoning' context, but more broadly as part of the kind of instruction might give in philosophical process in a lot of our classes.
And with that, I throw the question out to the rest of you. Do you know of materials of this sort? Have you developed something of your own that you'd like to share?
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