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It is unfortunate that so much turns on the practices of argument construction and critique in intelligence analysis, for example, because these practices are fraught with difficulty. However, the recently developed technique of argument mapping helps reasoners conduct these practices more thoroughly and insightfully, as can be shown in an extended illustration concerning Iraqi nuclear activities circa 2002. Argument mapping offers other benefits, as well. Its ultimate value, though, will depend on how its advantages compare to those of competitor reasoning methodologies.

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This article’s objectives are two-fold: (i) to argue for making a communication ethics course a staple of virtually every undergraduate philosophy program; and (ii) to assist in bringing this vision to fruition by offering, to the interested instructor, (a) practical guidance on how such a course might be structured as a workshop so as to prompt students to do exciting independent philosophizing that capitalizes upon their vast funds of experience with everyday communication, and (b) a reasonably rich set of specific topics, readings, and questions that the course might productively address.

Imagine advanced computers that could, by virtue merely of being programmed in the right ways, act, react, communicate, and otherwise behave like humans. Might such computers be capable of understanding, thinking, believing, and the like? The framework developed in this paper for tackling challenging questions of concept application (in any realm of discourse) answers in the affirmative, contrary to Searle’s famous ‘Chinese Room’ thought experiment, which purports to prove that ascribing such mental processes to computers like these would be necessarily incorrect. The paper begins by arguing that the core issue concerns language, specifically the discourse-community-guided mapping of phenomena onto linguistic categories. It then offers a model of how people adapt language to deal with novel states of affairs and thereby lend generality to their words, employing processes of assimilation, lexemic creation, and accommodation (in intersense and intrasense varieties). Attributions of understanding to some computers lie in the middle range on a spectrum of acceptability and are thus reasonable. Possible objections deriving from Searle’s writings require supplementing the model with distinctions between present and future acceptability, and between contemplated and uncontemplated word uses, as well as a literal-figurative distinction that is more sensitive than Searle’s to actual linguistic practice and the multiplicity of subsenses possible within a single literal sense. The paper then critiques two misleading rhetorical features of Searle’s Chinese Room presentation, and addresses a contemporary defense of Searle that seems to confront the sociolinguistic issue, but fails to allow for intrasense accommodation. It concludes with a brief consideration of the proper course for productive future discussion.