Leo Groarke

Offering an innovative approach to critical thinking, Good Reasoning Matters! identifies the essential structure of good arguments in a variety of contexts and also provides guidelines to help students construct their own effective arguments. In addition to examining the most common features of faulty reasoning--slanting, bias, propaganda, vagueness, ambiguity, and a common failure to consider opposing points of view--the book introduces a variety of argument schemes and rhetorical techniques. This edition adds material on visual arguments and more exercises.

The prodigious development of argumentation theory over the last three decades has raised many issues that challenge some of the long held assumptions that characterize the traditional study of argument. One of these issues is the role of emotion in argument and argument analysis. While rhetoric has, with its emphasis on persuasion, always recognized that emotions play some role determining which arguments we accept and reject, a long tradition sees appeals to emotion as fallacies that violate the standards of rationality and objectivity reason and argument require.

Both 'persuasion' and 'rational convincing' play a major role in argumentative discourse but only the latter is said to constitute argument and be amenable to traditional logical analysis. I argue against this assumption by showing that there are many paradigmatic instances of persuasion which are best understood as implicit arguments. So understood, acts of persuasion can conform to well recognized argument schemata and are best assessed accordingly. I shall argue that the attempt to distinguish arg ument and persuasion is fraught with difficulties. I contrast my conclusions with those of authors like Gilbert, Johnson, and Johnson and Blair.

Informal logic is an attempt to develop a logic that can assess and analyze the arguments that occur in natural language discourse. Discussions in the field may address instances of scientific, legal, and other technical forms of reasoning, but the overriding aim has been a comprehensive account of argument that can explain and evaluate the arguments found in discussion, debate and disagreement as they manifest themselves in daily life — in social and political commentary; in news reports and editorials in the mass media ; in advertising and corporate and governmental communications; and in personal exchange.