Tim van Gelder

What if nobody came?

July 18, 2007 by Tim van Gelder

There’s been a mildly interesting thread on the Australian philosopher’s email list (aphil-l) lately. Apparently some fellow paid his own way to the annual conference being held in a small, remote town in NSW all prepared to give his ground-breaking talk on some obscure topic in aesthetics. On the day, nobody showed up to listen – not even a chairperson for the session. The fellow left town immediately, and sometime later complained loudly to the list. There’s been about twenty posts since, most revolving around the difficulty of scheduling minnows against “heavyweights”.

Nobody’s commented on the real source of the difficulty – which is that the conference is a kind of “special olympics” for philosophers, in which everyone who shows up gets a medal (i.e., is able to present). Partly this is a misguided attempt at “inclusiveness”. Partly it is due to the reality that Australian academics are so dismally funded that they can only get meagre contributions to their costs if they are presenting. Hence it is tacitly understood that everyone who registers must be able to present; no work is too ordinary to be included on the program. The result is six or eight parallel sessions for five days in a row, in a conference whose total attendence is only a few hundred people.

Another interesting ommission in the discussion is the larger picture. Just as nobody showed up to this poor fellow’s talk, so nobody *outside* this inbred band showed up at the conference as a whole. (I wasn’t there, so I might be a little bit wrong about this. But I have been in the past, and going by that experience…). In other words, perhaps the discussants on the list would be better focusing their attention not on why philosophical minnows get so little audience at the conference, but on why philosophy itself attracts so little attention even from the rest of the academic world, let alone the larger cultural environment.

I’m reminded of a cartoon from Leunig’s early days, when he still did interesting and original work. A lonely fellow was looking up a drainpipe, which did a dogleg over his head, down behind and up to his rear. All he could see at the end of his telescope was his own…

Posted in Philosophy | 1 Comment »

Whately the …?

July 7, 2007 by Tim van Gelder

I’ve often commented on how odd it is that argument mapping took so long to appear, only starting to take off in the past decade. After all, argument mapping is really just drawing diagrams showing the relationships among propositions in some piece of reasoning or argumentation on some topic we care about. It is a very simple and (at least in hindsight) obvious idea. Yet the consensus among those few of us who take an interest in such things is that the first diagram recognizable as an argument map didn’t appear until the early nineteenth century, tucked away at the back of a book on logic by the Reverend Richard Whately. Which strikes me as completely implausible – surely there are earlier examples?

Seems like Whately was quite an interesting fellow. Steve Simmons, in a recent post on this blog, credited Whately with saying something like the following: “there is no argument so bad that it cannot be rendered more acceptable by embedding it in a sufficiently prolonged text”. Indeed.

I tried but failed to find the original quote. Anyone?

Update: Steve has provided the original: “A very long discussion is one of the most effective veils of Fallacy;….a Fallacy which when stated barely would not deceive a child, may deceive half the world if diluted in a quarto volume”. Whately, Richard. Elements of Logic, New York, Jackson, 1836, p162, found in: ‘Informal Logic’, Douglas N Walton, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p 278.

Posted in Argument, Argument Mapping, Language | Leave a Comment »

How to get going with your thesis

June 26, 2007 by Tim van Gelder

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 I was thinking and feeling. I used the reasoning tools to nail down my main argument, the assertions I am inclined to make in support of that argument, and then what I know (or believe) supports those. Trying to not get bogged down, I next skipped to basis statements that helped me sort out which of these things I know are supported in the literature, which I need to do original logic on, which I need to test using a game model, and which I need to support using case studies. And finally – after months of circling, I went to the text panel and got the skeleton of a précis. Spent three more days cleaning up and thinking, and then as of this morning I sent those 4 pages off to a prospective adviser to start a conversation.

It might also be useful later in the process, articulating and evaluating what you take to be your core arguments.

If you’re writing a thesis, or some other elaborate piece of argumentative prose, then its a good idea to try mapping your arguments just to test whether you really know what they are.

If you actually have any substantial arguments, and if you are truly clear about what they are, mapping them should be a trivial exercise – just whacking claims into boxes and putting those boxes where they belong in the logical hierarchy.

However, it almost never is a trivial exercise. We are, in fact, often quite deluded about the extent to which we really understand our own arguments. Of course often we’re aware that we’re not fully on top of the arguments. The more interesting point here is that, most of the time, when we think we know exactly what they are, we’re laboring under a kind of illusion of clarity. There’s nothing like the demand to lay out the arguments in a map (well, a map observing the core principles of good argument mapping) to puncture the illusion.

The amount of effort you find you need to put in to get a tolerably good map of your arguments is a measure of the lack of clarity you have about those arguments.

(This assumes that you’re using a tool, like Rationale, which reduces to almost nothing the mechanics of producing an argument map diagram.)

Posted in Argument, Argument Mapping, Reasoning, Research | 3 Comments »

Clichés have a silver lining

June 19, 2007 by Tim van Gelder

The Telegraph is carrying a piece, At the end of the day, you’ve given 110 per cent, which mocks clichés – and implicitly, those who use them. The piece contains ten or so winning entries in a competition to cram the most cliches into a short text.

Interestingly, the word “cliché” doesn’t appear in the piece – they use “infuriating phrase” instead. Maybe there’s a subtle difference there.

It is mildly amusing, though all the cleverness and jollity soon becomes a bit tiresome.

Not so long ago, I would have read the piece with the attitude that one as reader is presumed to have – a kind of smug superiority. Of course *I* wouldn’t use these clichés – only the dull, the vulgar, the crass, the stupid would rely on such banal and overworked turns of phrase.

However I feel a little different now. Having been doing far more “business communication” – writing, and especially conversing – than I ever used to do, I find myself relying on clichés more than ever before. Is this because my brain is atrophying the longer I spend away from the intellectual realms of philosophy and cognitive science? Perhaps.

But I think there might be something else at work. Communication is only in part a matter of sending information, contained in the meaning of one’s words, to another person. It is also about establishing a kind of rapport – conversing with them rather than talking to them. In that “conversing with”, clichés are very useful. They are standard moves from a common repertoire, allowing conversants to synchronize their thoughts and attitudes. Sure, instead of saying “we’ll be giving it 110%” you could say something like “we’ll be working like untenured academics” but the very originality of such a phrase is likely to throw some sand in the conversational gears.

There is a useful analogy with that universal business cliché, the standard handshake. Such a dull way of greeting somebody! Why not, instead, try shaking their hand side-to-side, or with one’s fingers clenched, or with a wet hand, or… or hold their arm, stroke their hair, touch their nose… Try any of these more imaginative alternatives, and you’ll instantly create the perception that you are at the very least a bit odd. You’ll seriously impair your chances of a successful business relationship. People want to know that they’ll be able to “play the business game” with you, by standard rules, not your creative and unpredictable rules. Shaking hands in a more or less normal way is just an opening signal that you’re interested to see the game go well.

So give clichés a break. There’s something to be said for them.

Posted in Business, Language | Leave a Comment »

Want Logic? Teach Logic

May 23, 2007 by Tim van Gelder

That’s the title the editor gave to a letter I had published in the Education Age (21 May 07), commenting on an opinion piece by my University of Melbourne colleague Marty Ross. Since they don’t make the letters to Education Age available online, I’m putting it up here.

Marty’s piece generally was very good. He and I have no deep disagreement; but this letter puts into relief one point where we’d differ at least in emphasis.

According to Marty Ross, the purpose of teaching mathematics is “training in logical thinking, learning to reason about anything.” But mathematics is a poor way to achieve this goal, and there are better reasons to study the “queen of the sciences”.

Ross is recycling an idea as old as Euclid himself, for we can find in Plato the view that reasoning is like a muscle, which can be strengthened through training in some formal discipline such as mathematics or grammar.

The view is plausible, even appealing, but it is misguided. It violates a key insight of research into cognitive skills, known as the “problem of transfer”: skills learned in one situation “transfer” to other situations far less than we would expect. Studying mathematics may help students learn to prove theorems, but quite different kinds of reasoning are usually needed in everyday life and the workplace.

There is a better way. General “informal” reasoning skills can be taught directly, i.e., as skills in their own right. In recent years, some remarkably effective methods for doing this have emerged.   Crudely, to Ross I would say: if you want to improve general reasoning, why not teach general reasoning? Why teach something else, in the forlorn hope that some general reasoning skills will result?

Unfortunately, effective direct approaches are not widely used. In addition to its mauling of mathematics, a major problem in the Victorian education system is its failure to systematically teach the fourth R, reasoning.

Lets not try to make mathematics carry a burden it cannot bear. Lets instead teach mathematics to give all students at least a chance to appreciate the profundity, and beauty, of the most magnificent achievements of the human intellect.    Meanwhile, lets teach general informal reasoning skills using more direct and effective approaches.

Posted in Education, Reasoning, Teaching | 3 Comments »

How long does it take to map an argument?

May 15, 2007 by Tim van Gelder

At a number of universities around the world, people are now setting up studies to help determine the extent to which argument maps, or Rationale use, can help build skills or improve performance on difficult tasks.

One such person asked in an email: “What is the average time for an adult learner to complete the building of an argument in Rationale?”

Unfortunately there is no simple answer to that question. The time needed can vary enormously, depending on factors such as:

how complex is the argument?
are they coming up with their own argument (easier) or trying to map out an argument from a text written by somebody else (generally quite hard)?
how exhaustive and correct should the maps be? Should all principles of argument mapping properly observed? Or is “anything which looks good enough to them” acceptable?

On one hand, a simple argument of their own, done sloppily, should take only a minute or two. But mapping an argument from, say, a journal article or opinion piece, and doing it properly, can take hours, even for somebody highly skilled. And at the other extreme, mapping a truly complex body of argumentation can take months, even years. Austhink is just completing an argument mapping assignment for a government department, looking at all the arguments surrounding a controversial major equipment purchase. This has taken about four months with two people working on it. Consider also the “mother of all maps,” Robert Horn’s Can Computers Think? series of maps, which took a team of people a number of years.

In practice, most non-specialists have only a finite appetite for mapping arguments, and limited capacity to apprehend deficiencies in their own work, and so are unlikely to spend more than, say, 1/2 an hour on any given task. So, returning to the original question, here’s a very rough guess:

Simple tasks (e.g., coming up with one, single-reason argument for a claim) – allow a few minutes per task
Complex tasks – allow around half an hour, or more

Posted in Argument Mapping, Austhink, Reasoning, Research | Leave a Comment »

"One especially ambitious new offering…"

May 8, 2007 by Tim van Gelder

The eminent journalist and author James Fallows writes an influential technology column, and in the latest one has discussed Rationale, in the context of software tools to help people “develop, refine, and express ideas”.

I didn’t realise it upon first reading, but buried in the article is an account of the various kinds and levels of intellectual work. By implication, at the peak of this intellectual pyramid is… deliberative thinking of the kind supported by Rationale.

Some quotes:

“Do computers make us smarter? Probably not. But they can reduce the burden of some largely mechanical processes through which we develop, refine, and express ideas—which is a lot of what it means to think… In a surprisingly wide range of other ways, the simple, brainless efficiencies offered by computers can assist in the tasks that make up intellectual work. Before considering one especially ambitious new offering of this sort, it’s worth reviewing the practical, chore-like components of high-level modern work and the corresponding programs that, in my view, handle each chore best…”

“An elementary step is capturing thoughts—ideas, obligations, possibilities—when and where they occur to you…The next largely mechanical task is saving material you come across in your work, whether it is something unexpected on the Internet or the result of more purposeful research…The next practical task involved in thinking is finding things when you want them—the right citation for your legal argument, the right chronology to remind you who said what when…Next is sorting, the important and subtle task of grouping items according to similarities and differences. In a sense, this kind of pattern recognition is the highest level of human intelligence… Both sorting and the next step, outlining, take us closer to the point where mechanical processes merge with intellectual ones. Assigning something to a category inevitably affects our conception of that category, and arraying ideas visually, as in an outline, inevitably affects our view of how the ideas fit…”

“This leads to the newest ambitious entry: Rationale, an “argument processor” from a start-up company in Melbourne, Australia, called Austhink…”

“In operation, the Rationale program is quite simple. You state a main contention you are trying to test—I should buy a new house, we should invade Iran—and then systematically list each of the supporting claims for it. Then you list the objections to each claim, and the rebuttals to those objections, and so on until you’re down to first principles—all of which are shown as connected boxes on a map…”

“The more factors there are to weigh in making a decision—and, especially, the more views there are to reconcile when more than one person is involved in a choice—the more helpful this logic map can be.”

You need to be a subscriber to Atlantic Monthly to access Fallows’ full column online. (In the US, everyone should be a subscriber, because it is such a great magazine and subscriptions cost almost nothing.) Non-subscribers can email me, and I’ll email you a link from the magazine website which should work for three days.

Posted in Austhink, Cognition, Intelligence Augmentation, Rationale, Reasoning | Leave a Comment »

Rationale: Making People Smarter

May 7, 2007 by Tim van Gelder

Last weekend I finally managed to finish off the paper, chunks of which were appearing in previous posts.

It is being submitted for possible inclusion in a special issue of the journal Law, Probability and Risk, which will include papers coming out of the Graphic and Visual Representations of Evidence and Inference in Legal Settings conference held back in January.

Here’s the abstract:

Rationale: Making People Smarter Through Argument Mapping

Abstract. Complex reasoning and argumentation are central to legal practice. Software-supported argument mapping may be able to help lawyers reason and argue more effectively. This article describes Rationale, a generic argument mapping software package, and reviews some evidence that using it can help improve reasoning, i.e., make people smarter. It then explores three different explanations for this potential benefit: usability, complementation, and semi-formality. First, argument mapping software can be more usable for reasoning activities than traditional methods because it can inherit the wisdom gained through decades of research and experience into usability; can exploit a wider range of representational resources; and is designed specifically to support reasoning activities. Second, such software works by complementing the strengths and weaknesses of our natural or inbuilt cognitive capacities. Third, it helps shift reasoning and argumentation into a semi-formal mode, a kind of “sweet spot” between the laxness of everyday reasoning and the straightjacket of formal logic.

The paper can be downloaded here. Comments welcome.

Posted in Argument Mapping, Intelligence Augmentation, Rationale, Reasoning | Leave a Comment »

Rationale – Why does it work? – Semi-formality

May 2, 2007 by Tim van Gelder

A third chunk of the work-in-progress paper.

Draft only. As always, comments welcome.

3.3 Semiformality

A third theme in explaining how using an argument mapping package such as Rationale can improve reasoning centres on the notion of semiformality. In a nutshell, the idea is this: human thinking is typically informal. In certain areas, such as general reasoning and argumentation, it can be improved by moving into a semiformal, rather than formal, mode. Argument mapping is reasoning conducted in a semi-formal mode.

The contrast between formality and informality, in the sense relevant here, is familiar enough. Modes, domains, systems, languages or whatever count as formal to the extent they have characteristics such as:

a finite set of basic symbols or primitives

are digital (Haugeland)

are governed by strict rules or algorithms

have well-defined concepts or “semantics”

achieve complexity through combination

support effective procedures

Mathematics, formal logic, programming languages, artificial intelligence, and many games such as chess are all formal. Natural language, conversation, politics, and humour on the other hand are informal, even if they exhibit a few of the features of formality to some extent.

Now human reasoning and argumentation are standardly informal. There are primitives (words, or propositions), meanings, and principles or norms, but these are not defined with the kind of precision, rigour or reliability one finds in formal modes such as mathematics or chess. In this respect, human reasoning is often reflecting the nature of the domains or issues about which the reasoning is being conducted. For example, politics is an inherently informal domain, and this informality is reflected in the nature of our default intellectual tools for thinking about and debating over political topics.

Noting on one hand the problems associated with ordinary human reasoning and argumentation, and on the other the often impressive achievements of their formal counterparts, the temptation has often been to recommend shifting human reasoning into a formal gear. Thus introductory logic textbooks are usually dominated by elementary formal logic (Aristotelian syllogisms, propositional logic, predicate calculus), making the assumption that people would reason more effectively if they replaced their instinctually informal thinking habits with logical formulae and proofs. This tendency culminates in the aspiration of mainstream artificial intelligence to recreate human-grade intelligence in the formal medium of digital computation.

Unfortunately this generally doesn’t work. AI research has discovered that it is extremely difficult, and perhaps impossible, to engineer formal systems capable of reliably making the mundane inferences underlying everyday conversation or humour, let alone engaging complex argumentation of the kind found, for example, in legal practice. Conversely, when people struggle with everyday reasoning and argumentation, they are not helped by attempting to translate their premises into some logical calculus and draw inferences by reference to its official rules. Indeed for innumerable commonplace reasoning challenges, formal techniques are so hopelessly impractical that recommending their use seems like a kind of sophistical sadism, another sad manifestation of Bacon’s Idols of the Theater.*

There are of course notable exceptions to the claim that human reasoning is not improved through the adoption of formal techniques. Clearly, for example, the proper use of statistical methods can help us draw better conclusions about subtle correlations and causal relationships. Formal modes of thought certainly have broad and important areas of application. The point being made here is that in general our practices of informal reasoning and argumentation cannot be enhanced by transposing into a formal key.

It may be, however, that some degree of formality can be helpful even where full-blown formal modes such as mathematics, formal logic and computation get no useful traction. The distinction between formality and informality is not a binary opposition. Rather, there is a spectrum of cases depending on which of the characteristics of formality are adopted and how those characteristics are manifested.

In the case of reasoning and argumentation, there have been many contexts in which these practices have been made more formal than they would normally be. Consider for example the medieval theory of disputation, which presented a sophisticated framework of rules governing moves in argumentation. Or consider contemporary high-school debating or “forensics;” etc. These sorts of elaborations of our ordinary practices are aimed, at least in part, at improving those practices; i.e., at enabling us to reason and argue more effectively. Implicitly they are proposing that the optimal mode for human reasoning is not the informal or the formal, but rather something intermediate, a “best of both worlds” scenario.

The conjecture, then, is that for general reasoning and argumentation there is a “sweet spot” somewhere on the spectrum between ordinary informal practices at one end, with their sloppiness and disorder, and purely formal techniques at the other, with their rigidity and limited range of application.
Argument mapping pushes reasoning in a formal direction by forcing relatively high level of explicitness and rigour in articulation. It generally requires that:

The claims involved be rendered discretely in full grammatical sentences

Material not directly involved in the reasoning be stripped away

The central contention or point in dispute be identified as such

All direct evidential links between claims be specified

Unstated claims or “assumptions” be identified and explicitly stated

In Rationale, these activities are scaffolded by providing a graphical format or “syntax” for the articulation of reasoning, with a limited set of “primitives” (claims, reasons, objections etc.) and strict rules about how those primitives can be combined.

Beyond the basic constraints, there are a number of principles of good mapping which cannot be specified as strict, universally-applicable rules. For example there is the principle of abstraction: generally, in a well-developed argument map, claims “higher” in the map (i.e., closer to the main contention) should be more abstract, and claims lower down should be more particular or concrete; and claims at a given level should be approximately the same in their degree of abstraction. While this principle is easy enough to state and understand, and with some practice is easy enough to apply in most cases, it involves inherently vague notions and is subject to a wide variety of exceptions, such that any attempt to articulate in a fully precise way what the principle is and how it applies ends up floundering in a quagmire of uncertainties and exceptions.

The principle of abstraction its ilk depend fundamentally for their successful application on intuitive human judgments based on experience and practice. To the best of our knowledge it is impossible to cash them out as formal rules capable of mechanistic implementation. Thus, argument mapping has irreducibly informal dimensions even as it makes reasoning activities more formal than they would normally be.

So argument mapping is semi-formal; it introduces aspects of formality while acknowledging its limits and retaining essentially informal dimensions.The idea is that disciplining reasoning practices to observe this degree of formality is the most feasible way to, if not eliminate, at least substantially mitigate the typical failures or difficulties standing in the way of good reasoning, argumentation and deliberation, such as:

not making reasoning fully explicit, including in particular the failure to articulate key assumptions

not applying relevant principles of good reasoning

not coping with the complexity of “real world” debates

not achieving common understanding among participants in argumentation

From what has already been said it should be clear that argument mapping confronts these failures head-on, which is why we can be optimistic that argument mapping practices, if widely and properly adopted, can lead to better reasoning.

What is the optimal level of formality to introduce into our reasoning practices? Where precisely is the “semi-formal sweet spot”? We don’t yet have definitive answers to these questions. Argument mapping as supported by a package such as Rationale constitutes one take on where the sweet spot is. It may have erred in one direction or the other. However evidence of the kind discussed in section X above suggest that Rationale’s take could well be approximately correct.

Footnote

* “Lastly, there are idols which have immigrated into men’s minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration. These I call Idols of the Theater; because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion.” From Novum Organum

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Rationale – Why does it work? – Complementation

May 2, 2007 by Tim van Gelder

Another installment of the in-progress paper.

Draft only. Comments welcome

3.2 Complementation

A second theme in understanding how a tool such as Rationale can make us smarter is complementation: the tool complements our minds’ natural strengths and weaknesses.

Our reasoning abilities are a function of our basic cognitive capacities, which depend in turn on our brains. Those brains are the result of a long, accidental, accretive and incomplete process of evolution. They were “designed” not for the sublime arts of logic and disputation but to enable us to survive and propagate in the physical and social environments of our ancestors going back long before the emergence of homo sapiens. Our reasoning abilities are a late acquisition, due not to any newly-crafted reasoning module but rather to our learning how to exploit in a new way cognitive capacities which had already been wired in for other purposes. That pre-given set of capacities includes some remarkably powerful and useful functions, but does not provide everything that might be needed for flawless, general-purpose reasoning.

In light of this, a sensible strategy for improving human reasoning is to provide tools which, on one hand, provide ways to bypass or make up for the deficiencies or limitations of our innate capacities, while on the other, taking advantage of their distinctive strengths. Rationale makes use of both these strategies.

The most important respect in which a tool like Rationale compensates for inherent cognitive limitations is by augmenting our short-term memory (STM). The need for such augmentation can be summarised in three points. First, reasoning and argumentation can become very complex. Second, as we standardly do things, that complexity places huge obligations on memories. However, third, our innate STM is quite limited – much more so than people usually realise.

The standard cliche about human STM is that it can hold “7+/-2″ items. Thus 8 digit phone numbers are quite a bit harder to remember than 7 digit ones. The 7+/-2 figure originated in famous research in the 1950s (Miller ref). However the figure should be treated with caution. The original research concerned our capacity to recall random sequences of meaningless items. Recent research suggests that for such sequences, Miller’s figure may be an overestimate. At the same time, STM can be increased when items are “chunked” or meaningfully grouped. And with intense training, people are able to perform remarkable feats of short-term memorization, such as remembering dozens of random digits.

Nevertheless, it is clear that, in normal circumstances, human STM has quite a low ceiling. This can be easily illustrated by asking two people to play tic-tac-toe without using pen and paper or any equivalent – i.e., to record moves in their “mind’s eye” rather than on a board. Most people find that completing the game is a fun challenge, in part because it is hard enough just keeping track of the state of the game, let alone making moves.

Meanwhile it is obvious that arguments can be very complex – far more so than a mere game of tic-tac-toe. For example the case put forward by Jim Garrison in the trial scene of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK consists of dozens of pieces of evidence woven into an intricate web. Even this case (let alone the galaxies of arguments and responses in the larger “Who killed JFK?” debate) is more complex than can be held, organised and evaluated purely in the head by anyone other than, perhaps, an idiot savant.

This point holds true even in the mundane territory of our everyday disputes or academic altercations. The issues and arguments are often if not always larger than our unaided minds alone can easily embrace; and retaining even some of that material is effortful and prone to loss, confusion and confabulation.

Yet we do presume to think through such complex cases, and so by practical necessity we make use of external aides de memoir; for example, recording and organising our thoughts in notes, essays or books – i.e., in some form or other of prose. Similarly, a central function of an argument mapping program such as Rationale is to function as an external “memory”, or memory-extension, for reasoning. Maintaining stable structured representions of arguments or debates of effectively unlimited complexity is trivial for an appropriately-programmed computer. Thus, when using such a package to help us think our way through a set of arguments, we are taking advantage of a great strength of computers to compensate for an inherent weakness in our own capacities.

For external representations of reasoning to be useful in our thinking, they must be such that we can interact with them fluidly. On one hand, we must be able to create and modify the representations easily; this was touched upon above in the discussion of usability. On the other, we need high-bandwidth access to the information contained in those representations. Ideally, we’d be able to “read” the representations faster than we could think about what they are representing. Here, argument maps are designed to exploit some remarkable strengths of our standard cognitive equipment. I claimed above that an argument mapping software package can be more usable as a tool for reasoning because they exploit representational resources which are neglected by typical argumentative prose – resources such as colour, shape, line, and position in space.

The use of these resources is a great advantage because our “hard wired” mechanisms for visual cognition are designed to process information coded in these basic dimensions with extraordinary efficiency. When you look outside the window and see a tree, your perceptual system accepts and processes a vast amount of basic visual information and reliably delivers a correct high-level interpretation in a fraction of a second and with no perceptible effort on your part. This is an example of what psychologists often call “pre-attentive processing” – information being taken up and utilised so fast that you didn’t even have time to shift your attention to it.

Colour, shape, line, and position in space are all aspects of a scene which are, or can be, pre-attentively processed. Any tool for reasoning which wants to optimize the transfer of information from external representations to central cognitive processes ought to exploit pre-attentive processing as much as it is effectively able. Argument mapping software does exactly this, with the result that representations of complex reasoning can be accessed, and hence utilized in thinking, much more quickly and easily than in standard prose formats.

The most obvious example of this is the use of colour to code for “polarity,” i.e., whether one proposition is (taken to be) supporting or opposing another. In standard argumentative prose, polarity is something which must be “computed” through slow, effortful and error-prone high-level interpretative process. Consider for example this passage:

Like us, dogs, wolves, chimps, and macaques are all social animals. They show that we are not unique inventors of empathy and morality.

It contains two propositions. Assuming that together they constitute a simple argument, which one is evidence in relation to the other? And is it supporting or opposing? Answering these questions requires a bit of careful attention. We must understand the sentences, and think about how they relate to each other. If however the argument is presented in a standard argument mapping format:

then, assuming you are well-versed in the relevant conventions, you will pre-attentively process the green on the lower claim, and know that the lower claim is being presented as a reason for the upper one, even before you’ve actually read and understood those claims. In other words information about evidential structure is being conveyed in manner which is extremely fast, requires almost no effort, and unambiguous – much like seeing the tree outside the window.
This example focused on the use of colour to indicate polarity, but shape, line and position in space are working here in much the same way. Indeed, the visual design exploits all four of these dimensions simultaneously, with each reinforcing the message conveyed by others.

Thus, an argument mapping software package is exploiting an impressive strength of the human mind, namely its ability to process and interpret certain kinds of basic visual information very rapidly, effortlessly and reliably.

More profoundly, the greatest strengths of the human mind are its abilities to comprehend natural language and evidential relationships. Despite the valiant efforts of computer scientists over many decades, computers still lack anything seriously resembling human intelligence (notwithstanding world-champion chess programs and the like, which are at best electronic idiot-savants). Thus a software package designed to improve human reasoning must still rely on our minds to do core “heavy lifting” involved in the performing and evaluating reasoning.