Like the GOP candidates discussing climate change, I readily admit I am not a scientist. I understand entropy to mean the dispersal of energy, and that’s exactly what we saw in Saturday’s GOP debate. Just when I thought the Republicans may have learned something about argument in the last debate, Saturday’s GOP matchup proved me wrong. [...]
Perhaps it's the somewhat civil nature of the campaign, or perhaps there really isn't much of a difference. Last night’s Democratic Town Hall debate provided some excellent opportunities for the Democratic candidates to make clearer the distinctions between their plans, their visions and their fight for the soul of the party. Unfortunately, both of the [...]
CNN has been promoting the 5th Republican primary debate as if we’re about to watch The Hunger Games [watch the CNN trailer]. While we won’t hear a cannon shot and see pictures of the candidates afterwards because they’ve been figuratively killed during the debate, we might see certain elephants make a big splat after falling [...]
Remember that one of Aristotle’s “available means of persuasion was logic, or what I refer to as “argument” in blog postings. To better understand how to judge the strength of an argument, it helps to have some tools at hand, so in this post I look at the structure and constituent parts. To effectively analyze [...]
I begin with a caveat: If you ever read a book on argumentation or take a course in argument, you’ll likely see more distinctions among the different types of evidence than what I’m about to present. I’ve condensed the many different types into three general categories: 1) examples 2) statistics and 3) expertise. I chose [...]