Maralee Harrell

The word “philosophy” comes from the Greek “philos” (meaning love) and “sophia” (meaning wisdom); thus philosophy literally is the “love of wisdom.” Whatever else philosophy may be, most people agree that it still retains this spirit of its etymological roots, and that when we are engaged in philosophy we are pursuing wisdom for the sake of itself. Wisdom, however, is not the same thing as knowledge or information. We aren’t merely trying to amass list of interesting ideas, or believe anything that sounds good. Wisdom is, at least in part, the reflection on and critical evaluation of what we ourselves and others around us believe about some very heady topics

After determining one set of skills that we hoped our students were learning in the introductory philosophy class at Carnegie Mellon University, we designed an experiment, performed twice over the course of two semesters, to test whether they were actually learning these skills. In addition, there were four different lectures of this course in the Spring of 2004, and five in the Fall of 2004; and the students of Lecturer I were taught the material using argument diagrams as a tool to aid understanding and critical evaluation, while the other students were taught using more traditional methods. We were interested in whether this tool would help the students develop the skills we hoped they would master in this course. In each lecture, the students were given a pre-test at the beginning of the semester, and a structurally identical post-test at the end. We determined that the students did develop the skills in which we were interested over the course of the semester. We also determined that the students who were able to construct argument diagrams gained significantly more than the other students. We conclude that learning how to construct argument diagrams improves a student's ability to analyze, comprehend, and evaluate arguments

Argument-mapping software abounds, and one of the reasons is that using the software has been shown to teach/promote/improve critical thinking skills. These positive results are very encouraging, but they also raise the question of whether the computer tutorial environment is producing these results, or whether learning argument mapping, even with just paper and pencil, is sufficient. Based on the results of two empirical studies, I argue that the basic skill of being able to represent an argument diagrammatically plays an important role in the improvement of critical-thinking skills. While these studies do not offer a direct comparison between the two methods, it is important for anyone wishing to employ argument mapping in the classroom to know that significant results can be obtained even with the most rudimentary of tools.

Many undergraduates, philosophy majors included, read philosophical texts similar to the way they read stories. One method for teaching students how to discern the argumentative structure of a philosophy text is through argument diagrams (text boxes used to represent claims with arrows and lines used to represent connections between these claims). This paper provides criteria for an ideal argument diagramming software and then reviews the strengths and weaknesses of such software currently available, e.g. Araucaria, Argutect, Athena Standard, Inspiration, and Reason!Able.