The free online magazine The Reasoner has recently published an interview with me in their February 2010 issue. Much of it is discussing argument mapping and its uses. However the first third or so of the interview covers my earlier work in the foundations of cognitive science (distributed representation, dynamical systems and such topics).
Thanks to Kevin [...]
Archive for the ‘Argument Mapping’ Category
Interview in “The Reasoner”
Posted in Argument Mapping, Intelligence Augmentation, Mapping, Rationale, Reasoning on February 12, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Some argument mapping reading
Posted in Argument Mapping, Critical Thinking, Education on November 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Martin Davies, a colleague of mine at the University of Melbourne and a energetic advocate of argument mapping in teaching critical thinking has published “Computer-assisted argument mapping: a rationale approach” in the journal Higher Education. In the article Martin describes using argument mapping in an upper-level Economics subject, and discusses how the students themselves regarded the [...]
Why are legal arguments so hard to follow?
Posted in Argument, Argument Mapping, Language, Legal Argumentation, Rationale, Reasoning on August 13, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Judges use written judgements to convey the complex set of arguments supporting their decision. However it is difficult to extract the arguments from those written judgements, at the level of clarity and rigour demanded by good-quality argument mapping. This difficulty is due in large part to various aspects of traditional legal prose.
Simple but not easy
Posted in Argument Mapping, Decision mapping, Hypothesis mapping, Mapping, Thinking on May 4, 2009 | 1 Comment »
“As I have said many times, it is simple, but not easy.” – Warren Buffett.
Buffett is of course talking about investment, but the same seems to me to be true of mapping (whether of the decision, argument or hypothesis variants).
The principles are simple enough. What for example could be simpler to state and understand than [...]
The War was Illegal
Posted in Argument Mapping, Deliberation, Legal Argumentation on March 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Following on from the previous post, here is the argument map of the “Gang of 43″ case that the Coalition of the Willing’s war on Iraq would be illegal:
Viewing options:
Click on the image above to view a full-size version; or
(better) view a PDF version; or
(best) download the original bCisive file, allowing you to view and [...]
Yes, the war was legal – argument map
Posted in Argument, Argument Mapping, Critical Thinking, Legal Argumentation, Teaching on March 24, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Greg Hunt’s brave case that the Iraq war was in fact legal presented in an argument map.
Figuring out what We believe
Posted in Argument Mapping, Austhink, Belief, Deliberation, Rationale Consensus, Wisdom of Crowds on March 17, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Think of a collection of people as a kind of collective mind. How do you tell what that collective mind believes?
That may sound like a fanciful philosophical question, but it has very real, even urgent applications. For example the IPCC is a collection of hundreds of scientists, and they put out reports supposedly embodying their [...]
What is argument mapping?
Posted in Argument Mapping on February 17, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Entry to appear in H. Pashler (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the Mind. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Volume expected to appear in 2011.
Argument Mapping
Argument mapping is diagramming the structure of argument, construed broadly to include any kind of argumentative activity such as reasoning, inferences, debates, and cases. This entry briefly surveys the nature, benefits, and historical context [...]
Earliest argument map?
Posted in Argument Mapping on February 15, 2009 | 8 Comments »
The argument mapping community generally deems the first occurrence of argument mapping to be in Richard Whately’s Elements of Logic textbook, first published in 1826. (See e.g. Reed, C., Walton, D. & Macagno, F. (2007) “Argument diagramming in logic, law and artificial intelligence”, Knowledge Engineering Review, 22 (1), pp87-109; p.93.)
To me it is implausible that there are no [...]
Decision mapping easier than argument mapping?
Posted in Argument Mapping, Decision mapping, tagged Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Qaddafi on January 23, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Despite their similarities, decision mapping and argument mapping draw differently on the expertise of the mapping. Decision mapping may be “easier” and thus a better point of entry for novice mappers.
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