OK, I know picking on climate pseudoskeptics is like… well, shooting fish in a barrel. (Not that I’ve ever shot fish in a barrel – but Mythbusters have shown it is easy to do, and that’s good enough for me.) But this example illustrates an important general point. One of the most basic, widespread and [...]
Archive for the ‘Reasoning’ Category
Layered visual argument
Posted in Argument, Argumentation, Deliberation, Reasoning, Visual Deliberation on April 4, 2011 | 1 Comment »
A brilliant cartoon presents four arguments visually, and its main argument implicitly.
How are critical thinking skills acquired? Five perspectives
Posted in Argument Mapping, Critical Thinking, Education, Expertise, Reasoning, Teaching, Thinking on October 20, 2010 | 5 Comments »
The five main theories about how critical thinking skills are acquired are Formal Training, Theoretical Instruction, Situated Cognition, Practice, and Evolutionary Psychology. The most credible theory is Practice.
Interview in “The Reasoner”
Posted in Argument Mapping, Intelligence Augmentation, Mapping, Rationale, Reasoning on February 12, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
The Bushfire Royal Commission should explain its reasoning better
Posted in Argument, Communication, Legal Argumentation, Reasoning on September 2, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
One lesson of the terrible Black Saturday fires in Victoria was that lines of communication can break down, with tragic consequences. Information which may have been available to some did not reach and so could not inform the decisions of those who had to act. The recently-released interim report of the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission [...]
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.
Future trend: hypothesis mapping displacing ACH
Posted in ACH, Analysis of Competing Hypotheses, bCisive, Hypothesis mapping, Hypothesis Testing, Reasoning on December 15, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Slides from a presentation at an intelligence & security seminar in Canberra last week. Thanks to Brett Peppler for getting me the gig.
Mega-Litigation
Posted in Argument, Argument Mapping, Legal Argumentation, Reasoning on August 29, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Maybe this post should’ve been called “Why judges should be paid more.” Simon Lewis alerted me to the written judgment of Justice Ronald Sackville in the case Seven Network Limited v News Limited, otherwise known as the C7 case, or “Kerry Stokes against the world.” This is a monster (1200 pages, 76mb in rtf format) [...]
The Rationale for Rationale™
Posted in Argument Mapping, Education, Intelligence Augmentation, Rationale, Reasoning, Research on July 26, 2007 | 2 Comments »
Now available – the final version of my paper prepared in connection with the conference Graphic and Visual Representations of Evidence and Inference in Legal Settings in January this year. The paper is now called The Rationale for Rationale™.
How to get going with your thesis
Posted in Argument, Argument Mapping, Reasoning, Research on June 26, 2007 | 3 Comments »
A new Rationale user working on a PhD thesis emailed the following: I finished my comps in March and have been working to nail down my dissertation topic since. I have too many interests and little discipline so it’s been daunting. Notably, I sat down last week with rationale and decided to map out what [...]
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- How to write an opinion piece: rewrite an Economist piece. theage.com.au/business/austr… via @theage 2 hours ago
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Can this be true?- Oh wait that's a "t"Last year, the Federal Reserve allowed Bank of America to move a huge portfolio of dangerous bets into a side of the company that happens to be FDIC-insured, putting all of us on the hook for as much as $55 trillion in irresponsible gambles.
- Education don't helpAnd here’s the mind-blowing surprise: For Republicans, having a college degree didn’t appear to make one any more open to what scientists have to say. On the contrary, better-educated Republicans were more skeptical of modern climate science than their less educated brethren. Only 19 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed that the planet is warming d […]
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