Welcome!
This site offers VIDEO TUTORIALS on a wide range of topics on logic, argumentation, critical reasoning and essay writing. They were developed by a philosophy professor with over 14 years of teaching experience. The site also offers a BLOG and hosts “The Critical Thinker” PODCAST.
The tutorials were originally designed with high school and university students in mind, but they’re really for anyone who cares about critical thinking and wants to improve their reasoning and communication skills.
Read MoreRoad Map: Plans for the Near Future
I’ve recently made some behind-the-scenes changes to the site hosting service and the membership management software. These changes will help to improve the usability of the site as it grows.
In no particular order, here is a list of planned updates to the site:
1. Change the tutorial video pages. Right now the tutorial videos play in this cool pop-up player. But I’ve had folks ask me if I can add some summary notes for each video, and that’s hard to implement with the pop-up. So I’m going change things around so that each tutorial video plays on its own webpage, with room to write some text notes below the video, including a link to a downloadable pdf version of the notes. Members will also be able to add comments and questions below each video in the standard WordPress comment box. The changeover is a little tedious to implement and will take some time to complete, but it’ll be worth it.
2. Book reviews and recommendations. I consume a lot of books on critical thinking-related topics, and I get lots of requests for book recommendations, so I’m going to start a book review section on the blog. These will be viewable to anyone.
3. New video tutorial courses. Getting the podcast off the ground has taken some time, but I think I’m getting the hang of it 
(3000 iTunes subscribers at the time of this posting). Time to get back to developing content for new tutorial courses. The next set of courses I want to work on involves reasoning with probabilities and uncertainty, and I’ll be exploring a range of fallacies associated with reasoning about odds, risk and decision-making. This material will really open your eyes, trust me!
4. Exploring the relationships between argumentation, persuasion and rhetoric. I’ve recently gotten into the literature on the 3000 year history of rhetoric, and it’s absolutely fascinating. Philosophers tend to approach issues in critical thinking and argumentation from a logic-based perspective (my own tutorial courses betray this orientation), but argumentation is also central to the field of rhetoric, “the art of persuasive speech”, and the rhetorical approach to argumentation is in many ways quite different from the logic-based approach. I’m convinced that effective critical thinking requires a good understanding of BOTH approaches, but traditional instruction in critical thinking tends to focus on one or the other, and that’s a problem. I’m going to explore this more on the podcast, but you can expect more discussions in the future on these issues.
This will all take time of course. I still work at least 50 hours a week at my normal day job, but you’d be surprised what you can get done between 11 PM and 1 AM with Jimmy Kimmel and Mad Men playing in the background .
Simultaneous Causation and the Kalam Cosmological Argument
YouTube friend “Theophage” asked me a question about simultaneous causation and its relationship to the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God. I was thinking of addressing the question in a special podcast episode but decided it would be too long and off-topic for the podcast, so here it is as a “video blog” post.
Read MoreCheckpoints of a rational argument
One of the cool things about social media is how it allows people with a specific passion to connect with others. My YouTube channel tends to attract people who care about reasoning and critical thinking. Few are more passionate than this young man whose YouTube channel id is WarThemedRevolution. He recently sent me this message:
I recently uploaded a video discussing the three basic checkpoints any good/valid rational argument is expected to pass. Solidly defined and properly employed terms, a valid premise, and a demonstration that the conclusion necessarily follows the premise. I would be flattered and grateful to have you critique/discuss the content/presentation of my video.
It would be my pleasure! (I wish I had more students who cared half as much about these issues as you do )
Click “Read more” to view WarThemedRevolution’s video and my comments.
Read MoreIf the brain is a computer, does that mean it's designed?
A friendly YouTuber (thesparitan) asked the following question in a comment on my Red Herring Fallacy video:
I have received this argument in a debate with a creationist. It is a fallacy but I want to know which one. I called it a use-mention error because I couldn’t think of anything else. I want to know if there is a better explanation. “A computer was created by an intelligent designer, the brain is a computer, therefore it had an intelligent designer” What do you think?
I wouldn’t call this a “use-mention” fallacy, but I would call it a fallacy of equivocation, and the use-mention fallacy can be viewed as a type of equivocation fallacy.
Read MoreGuess what, employers want graduates with critical thinking and communication skills
Hart Research Associates recently released a study titled “Raising the Bar: Employers’ Views on College Learning in the Wake of the Economic Downturn”. They interviewed 302 employers about the skills they thought were most valuable in their business environment, and whether colleges and universities were succeeding in producing graduates with those skills. The respondents were executives at private sector and non-profit organizations, including owners, CEOs, presidents, C-suite level executives, and vice presidents.
It comes as no surprise to me that communication and critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills are at the top of this list.
Read MoreWill your tutorials help me on the LSAT?
One of the most common email questions I get is “do I cover LSAT question types in the Basic Concepts in Logic and Argumentation tutorial bundle?”, or if not that, “will this material help to prepare me for the LSAT (the Law School Admission Test)?”
The short answer is “no” and “yes”.
Read MoreDoes critical thinking demand skepticism about religion?
jhorner95 sent me the following comment:
“I found your videos on YouTube and was quite impressed. As I do with most videos on logic and critical thinking you see on YouTube, I kept waiting for the inevitable pro-skepticism, anti-religion, anti-belief-in-the-supernatural diatribe, and was surprised when it never came. As a man of faith who also values logic and rationality, let me just say thank you for keeping whatever ideological biases you may have separate from your tutorials. Today it seems like advocating for critical thinking is almost synonymous with advocating for scientific materialism and atheism. I’m grateful for the chance to learn more about logic and argumentation without being told over and over that I’m either irrational or ignorant for holding the beliefs I do.”
I confess I don’t do a lot of YouTube browsing intentionally looking for logic or critical thinking tutorials, but jhorner95’s comment inspired me to take a closer look. And you know what? He’s right. There are some great critical thinking tutorials out there, but most of it does push a pro-scientific rationality, anti-religion message.
So, do these necessarily go together? If you’re a religious person, are you necessarily ignorant or irrational?
Read MoreWhen I argue with you, am I violating your right to your own beliefs?
Etiquette specialists tell us to avoid discussing sex, politics or religion in mixed company, lest we offend and cause an uncomfortable scene. Why? Because these issues address deeply held personal beliefs, and many people interpret any challenge to their deeply held beliefs as a personal attack.
Fair enough. There are plenty of good reasons to be cautious about where and with whom one picks an argument.
But I also know people who believe that the very act of challenging someone’s beliefs is disrespectful.
We need to resist this conclusion. On the contrary, arguing with someone — genuinely arguing with someone, with respect and good faith — is to treat someone with the highest respect.
If all premises must be plausible, aren't we preaching to the choir?
If we argue using plausible premises for a target audience, isn’t this preaching to the choir? Wouldn’t we want to use premises that are not necessarily accepted by the targeted audience (the audience we want to persuade), then add additional support to the premises?
The worry seems to be that if an audience is a presented with an argument where all the premises are already plausible to that audience from the outset, then it’s very likely that they would already accept the conclusion. Consequently there would be no need to try to persuade them of the conclusion; you’d be “preaching to the choir”. Shouldn’t at least some of the premises be implausible to the target audience, at least initially?
There are two things to say about this objection.
Read MoreTools and Services I Use
A friendly YouTube commenter asked the following question about one of the tutorial videos in the “Basic Concepts in Logic and Argumentation” tutorial series.
The tutorial summarized two necessary conditions for an argument to qualify as “good”: (1) the argument must have all plausible premises (what I called the “Truth Condition”) and (2) the argument must be valid or strong (what I called the “Logic Condition”). gjsterp asks: