Improving Argumentative Skills in Education: Three Online Discussion Tools

From Firenze University Press Book: Competing, cooperating, deciding: towards a model of deliberative debate

Jan Albert van Laar, University of Groningen, Netherlands

How can we foster sound argumentation and valid criticism in the classroom? How, for example, can teachers help students to avoid fallacies, or withstand peer pressure, and how can they assist students in producing arguments that are responsive to relevant criticisms? In this paper, I present a set of educational tools for online discussion, provide a philosophical motivation for them, and try to make it plausible that they are useful when training skills in critical thinking and argumentation. More in particular, this paper deals with software applications that enable students to engage in quite different forms of argumentative discussion, to gain experience with analysing, evaluating and producing argumentation within these different settings, and to provide them with opportunities to create awareness of the advantages and disadvantages of engaging in the various kinds of discussion.

With the software application for Deliberative Debate, students exchange arguments with the aim of supporting their standpoints. With the software application Middle Ground, students develop compromise solutions, and the reasons for settling on a policy that matches nobody’s standpoint but that is for each at best a second preference. The software Design a Discussion Yourself enables advanced students and teachers to themselves design a discussion procedure, to invite students to engage in a session of this type of discussion, and to assess process, procedure and outcome of the discussion session. There’s no question that discussions provide natural habitats for arguments and criticisms. But here, I start from three further assumptions. First, that any argument is dialogical in nature, and can best be understood as a dialogical sequence made up from thesis from a proponent, one or more challenges from one or more opponents, and a response from the proponent that answers these challenges.

From this stance, each argument, also when voiced by one person, can be seen as a critical exchange that responds to or anticipates critical moves. Second, that the appropriate norms with which to evaluate arguments and criticisms are conversational norms, rather than, for example, intrapersonal epistemic norms or impersonal metaphysical norms. Third, that some well-known problems of group deliberation, such as the tendency to polarize, can be countered by incorporating argumentative exchanges within the design of the deliberation. From this dialogical viewpoint, it is natural to expect that students will best learn to analyse, evaluate and produce arguments by engaging in argumentative discussions.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/978–88–5518–329–1.09

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