In Defense of Informal Logic

Review Essay: A sociology of formal logic?

“…For Rosental, this illustrates that students 'did not share the instructors' understanding of the dichotomy between formal and informal knowledge [since] the students found the expression of a unicity clause superfluous' (p. 63). In turn, this points to the 'tacit knowledge' that has to be in place before a formal, symbolic expression can be understood as a 'correct' translation of an informal one (cf., Levi, 2000). Rosental concludes from this that doing logic is a skill, echoing Warwick's (2003) point that learning a theoretical practice involves both material and manual aspects.…”

“…Rosental argues that although there is much to be learned from previous investigations of mathematics and logic in social studies of science, none of them have responded to Latour's (1987: 246) call for an anthropological study of formalism that captures the numerous and various elements going into formalization in the students found the expression of a unicity clause superfluous' (p. 63). In turn, this points to the 'tacit knowledge' that has to be in place before a formal, symbolic expression can be understood as a 'correct' translation of an informal one (cf., Levi, 2000). Rosental concludes from this that doing logic is a skill, was not so much 'polyphonic' as 'cacophonous ' (p. 78 But often the checking of an ordinary (informal) proof is a very delicate enterprise, and to hit on a 'mistake' requires as much insight and luck as to hit on a proof: the discovery of 'mistakes' in informal proofs may sometimes take decades -if not centuries.…”

Learning How to Learn: A Critique

“…Personal experience of postgraduate teaching at M and D level at a variety of institutions suggests this to be the case, together with the fact that study skills texts are used in ESRC training programmes, not to mention the popularity of study skill material at undergraduate level. These problems, remarkable in a country that prides itself on having aspirations to take part in the ‘knowledge economy’ are odd, and attest to a deep‐seated failure to successfully teach, not only basic literacy, but also those literary abilities that allow for the understanding of supra‐sentential and meta‐structural features of text in a range of non‐narrative, non‐fictional genres and that involve, in particular, the identification and evaluation of structures of argumentation in the most general sense of transitions from premise to conclusion (‘pc structures’ in Levi's (2000) terms). Such failures are quite fundamental whatever position one takes on the question of whether ‘thinking skills’ are context‐dependent or context‐independent, since it is a presupposition of either position that one has the ability to identify and evaluate a pc structure (Toulmin, 1957; Fisher, 2001).…”

Enunciação falaciosa na entrevista política eleitoral

“…Nos estudos enunciativos, consideramos as noções de pontos de vista narrado e assertado, a imputação e a assunção da responsabilidade enunciativa, assim como a responsabilidade coletiva da imprensa (RABATEL, 2005(RABATEL, , 2008(RABATEL, , 2009(RABATEL, , 2016(RABATEL, , 2021KOREN, 2008;MONTE, 2017). Nos estudos sobre argumentação informal, fundamentamo-nos, particularmente, na noção de argumentação paralógica, amplamente difundida como falácias informais (HAMBLIN, 1970;WALTON, 1987;GROTENDORST, 2016GROTENDORST, [1992; LEVI, 2000;PINEAU, 2013;VLEET, 2021).…”