Identifying paralogisms in two ethnically different contexts at university level / Identificación de paralogismos en dos contextos universitarios diferenciados étnicamente

Abstract Although educational researchers have long tried to answer the question ‘Who reasons well?’, little has been done in regards to the influence of culture on argumentative reasoning quality. Among the factors that have been related with the construction of valid arguments, counterarguments and rebuttals by adults are: explicit argument training, task instructions and prior knowledge. No clear evidence exists regarding the influence of the ethnical background on the flaws or fallacies of reasoning. The present study applies the recent theory of paraschemes as a tool to identify university students’ paralogisms in a common argument-mapping task on everyday issues in two different cultural contexts: one European (Spain) and one Middle Eastern (United Arab Emirates). Our analysis showed that the influence of ethnical background was not statistically significant regarding the type and amount of paralogisms committed. On the contrary, the participants’ study major, being business or education, was shown to influence the production of argument fallacies. Implications of these findings for higher education are discussed.

[1]  J. A. Blair,et al.  Logical Self-Defense , 1977 .

[2]  Barbara Johnstone.  Presentation as proof: The language of Arabic rhetoric , 1983 .

[3]  Parataxis in Arabic: Modification as a Model for Persuasion , 1987 .

[4]  T. Kindt.  Circular reasoning , 1988, Nature.

[5]  D. Kuhn.  THE SKILLS OF ARGUMENT , 2008, Education for Thinking.

[6]  David N. Perkins,et al.  Everyday reasoning and the roots of intelligence , 1991 .

[7]  J. F. Voss,et al.  Who Reasons Well? Two Studies of Informal Reasoning Among Children of Different Grade, Ability, and Knowledge Levels , 1996 .

[8]  D. Walton.  The new dialectic , 1998 .

[9]  Andrew S. Glassner,et al.  Circular Reasoning , 1998, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[10]  Jan Terwel,et al.  Constructivism and its implications for curriculum theory and practice , 1999 .

[11]  J. Osborne,et al.  Establishing the norms of scientific argumentation in classrooms , 2000 .

[12]  Lance J. Rips,et al.  Explanation and evidence in informal argument , 2000, Cogn. Sci..

[13]  Miika Marttunen,et al.  Learning of argumentation skills in networked and face-to-face environments , 2001 .

[14]  P. Klaczynski.  Analytic and heuristic processing influences on adolescent reasoning and decision-making. , 2001, Child development.

[15]  Beom Jun Kim,et al.  Cultural preferences for formal versus intuitive reasoning , 2002, Cogn. Sci..

[16]  M. Baker,et al.  Computer-Mediated Epistemic Dialogue: Explanation and Argumentation as Vehicles for Understanding Scientific Notions , 2002 .

[17]  Gregory J. Kelly,et al.  Epistemic levels in argument: An analysis of university oceanography students' use of evidence in writing , 2002 .

[18]  Yair Neuman.  Go ahead, prove that God does not exist! On high school students’ ability to deal with fallacious arguments , 2003 .

[19]  Gerald F. Smith.  Beyond Critical Thinking And Decision Making: Teaching Business Students How To Think , 2003 .

[20]  R. Nisbett.  The geography of thought : how Asians and Westerners think differently--and why , 2003 .

[21]  Yair Neuman,et al.  The effect of a reason's truth-value on the judgment of a fallacious argument. , 2004, Acta psychologica.

[22]  Iris Tabak,et al.  Missing the point or missing the norms? Epistemological norms as predictors of students’ ability to identify fallacious arguments , 2004 .

[23]  Stuart A. Karabenick,et al.  Culture and Personal Epistemology: U.S. and Middle Eastern Students’ beliefs about Scientific Knowledge and Knowing , 2005 .

[24]  Troy D. Sadler,et al.  The Significance of Content Knowledge for Informal Reasoning regarding Socioscientific Issues: Applying Genetics Knowledge to Genetic Engineering Issues. , 2005 .

[25]  C. Kardash,et al.  The Effects of Goal Instructions and Text on the Generation of Counterarguments During Writing. , 2005 .

[26]  Kristine Lund,et al.  Argumentation Skills as Prerequisites for Collaborative Learning among Finnish, French, and English Secondary School Students , 2005 .

[27]  Troy D. Sadler,et al.  A threshold model of content knowledge transfer for socioscientific argumentation , 2006 .

[28]  S. Schworm,et al.  Learning argumentation skills through the use of prompts for self-explaining examples. , 2007 .

[29]  Christopher Andersen,et al.  Cognitive Foundations of Learning Argumentation , 2007 .

[30]  Tim van Gelder,et al.  The rationale for Rationale , 2007 .

[31]  S. Erduran,et al.  Arguing to learn and learning to argue: Case studies of how students' argumentation relates to their scientific knowledge , 2008 .

[32]  Chris Reed,et al.  Argumentation Schemes , 2008 .

[33]  E. Michael Nussbaum,et al.  Enhancing online collaborative argumentation through question elaboration and goal instructions , 2008, J. Comput. Assist. Learn..

[34]  Douglas Walton,et al.  Defeasible reasoning and informal fallacies , 2011, Synthese.

[35]  William E. Lewis,et al.  Do Goals Affect the Structure of Students' Argumentative Writing Strategies? , 2009 .

[36]  Leema K. Berland,et al.  Making sense of argumentation and explanation , 2009 .

[37]  Mercè Garcia-Milà,et al.  Deliberation versus Dispute: The Impact of Argumentative Discourse Goals on Learning and Reasoning in the Science Classroom , 2009 .

[38]  William Goodwin.  The ‘Passes-For’ Fallacy and the Future of Critical Thinking , 2010 .

[39]  Jonathan Osborne,et al.  Students' questions and discursive interaction: Their impact on argumentation during collaborative group discussions in science , 2010 .

[40]  D. Walton.  Why Fallacies Appear to Be Better Arguments than They Are , 2010 .

[41]  S. Ismail,et al.  Arabic and English Persuasive Writing of Arabs from a Contrastive Rhetoric Perspective , 2010 .

[42]  Colleen Ward,et al.  Exploring cultural differences in critical thinking: Is it about my thinking style or the language I speak? , 2010 .

[43]  Christopher R. Wolfe,et al.  Argumentation Across the Curriculum , 2011 .

[44]  Douglas Walton,et al.  Methods of Argumentation , 2013 .

[45]  J. Hornikx,et al.  Evidence Quality and Persuasiveness: Germans Are Not Sensitive to the Quality of Statistical Evidence , 2013 .

[46]  Merce Garcia-Mila,et al.  The Effect of Task Instructions on Students’ Use of Repetition in Argumentative Discourse , 2013 .

[47]  Mercè Garcia-Milà,et al.  What Is Meant by Argumentative Competence? An Integrative Review of Methods of Analysis and Assessment in Education , 2013 .

[48]  H. Mercier.  Introduction: Recording and Explaining Cultural Differences in Argumentation , 2013 .

[49]  Dale Hample,et al.  Understandings of Arguing in India and the United States: Argument Frames, Personalization of Conflict, Argumentativeness, and Verbal Aggressiveness , 2015 .

[50]  Yun Xie,et al.  A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Argument Predispositions in China: Argumentativeness, Verbal Aggressiveness, Argument Frames, and Personalization of Conflict , 2015 .