CHAPTER 2: APPRAISING ARGUMENTATION
Once students have learned the key terms they are ready to look more carefully at the personal and social
ways that arguments are critically appraised. Chapter 2 investigates these. The chapter takes a good deal
of time talking about how people make unreasonable decisions. This is difficult material to teach, because
most of us are able to see how unreasonable others are, but not ourselves. Encourage students to share
some of their worldviews with the assurance that they will not be laughed at, so that they can begin to see
how different people hold different worldviews. Then, suggest they do an Internet search on some of the
worldviews that come up in class, and report back on the variations that came up in the search. This can
help students see that worldviews do not necessarily rest on clearly stated criteria.
MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS
1. A critical decision implies
2. What you perceive as commonsense on any occasion is determined by your
3. For many years, cognitive scientists have been aware of a broad human tendency to reinterpret
experience
in conformity with
4. A “group of interrelated convictions of truth or statements of perceived reality” is a definition of
5. Empirical knowledge derived from observation or experience, when used as starting points for
argument
is called
6. Commonly held beliefs about what is likely to happen, what is ordinary and to be expected, when used
as
starting points for argument, are called
7. Commonplaces, as powerful concepts that work as socially generated starting points for argument,
include
8. The “critical tests arguments and decisions must satisfy are themselves rooted in what people want
now,
constructed from our sense of what we are here for” characterizes
9. At the racetrack, when the odds that one horse will win change frequently right up to the start of the
race,
ESSAY QUESTIONS
1. Discuss the concept of belief systems and how they influence decisions either toward or away from
2. Discuss the concept of reasonable arguments and show how they can be compared and contrasted with
3. Discuss how social influences can both help and hinder the critical appraisal of argumentation.
4. Identify and discuss at least two concepts that provide the necessary common bonding for reasoned
interaction to take place.
EXERCISES/PROJECTS
1. Using a popular issue such as gay/lesbian marriage, globalization, or ethics in business, ask students to
engage in dialectic within teams to locate starting points on which the arguments could rest. Particularly,
2. Using academic disciplines as standing for spheres, ask students to review other courses that have taken
3. Invite students to develop narratives from their own experience that help other understand their concept
of commonsense. Ask them to share narratives in which their commonsense was helpful and when it was
4. Ask students to identify what they believe to be unreasonable decisions they or others have made. Ask
them to be specific about why they believe the decisions to be unreasonable, and how the decisions might