Informal Logic and Critical Thinking

A forceful movement toward the study of argumentation has been created in North America by a group of philosophers who call themselves “informal logicians.” These informal logicians set out to study arguments from a point of view that is different from the formal logicians’. ¹⁸³ Although a general conception of informal logic has gradually developed that is more or less shared by most informal logicians, it is by no means universally agreed-upon. Some informal logicians have quite a different, or a more limited, conception of informal logic. ¹⁸⁴ Others understand it to be simply the nonformal treatment, without formal or symbolic apparatus, of elementary deductive logic. ¹⁸⁵ For the purposes of this chapter, we shall take the most common conception of informal logic as canonical.