Key terms and concepts

When the first Higher Philosophy Course was launched twenty years ago it contained a choice between doing logic or moral philosophy. The contents of that logic unit will have been familiar to anyone who had taken a first year logic course at university. When the course was revised in 2006 much of the optionality was removed but there was a desire for some formal reasoning to be kept. The new course contained a half-unit called ‘Critical Thinking’. In practice this didn’t really incorporate many of the principles of the critical thinking movement and was essentially a cut down version of the old logic unit. With the advent of CfE there was an emphasis on skills and there was another attempt to link the contents of the new Arguments in Action unit with aspects of the critical thinking and informal logic. This change saw the introduction of argument diagrams. The first version of this unit lacked structure and at the first opportunity the contents were reordered and this saw the introduction of the organising principles of ‘acceptability’, ‘relevance’ and ‘sufficiency’. The most recent changes have seen the introduction of conductive arguments. There is now much in the unit that will be unfamiliar to those who have taken an introductory logic course at university for most university courses concentrate on formal logic whereas the Arguments in Action unit is more closely aligned with informal logic. Writing in 2015 Walton and Gordon identified ten characteristics of informal logic:

"We take the following ten characteristics of informal logic as our guide. (1) Informal logic recognizes the linked-convergent distinction, (2) serial arguments and (3) divergent arguments. Informal logic includes three postulates of good argument in the RSA triangle: (4) relevance, (5) premise acceptability and (6) sufficiency. (7) Informal logic has recognized the importance of pro-contra (conductive) arguments. (8) Informal logic is concerned with analyzing real arguments... There is also a ninth characteristic, (9) the appreciation of the importance of argument construction... (10) There is also a tenth characteristic, one that is very important for rhetoric, the notion of audience..."

Others have produced slightly different lists, e.g. Johnson and Blair (1980), but the essential idea is the same, whereas formal logic has given primacy to deductively valid arguments and induction has tended to be relegated as a 'problem' or something to be dealt with in the philosophy of science, informal logic is concerned with the various kinds of arguments people actually use.