Introduction to the workshop: Thinking as a Tool

When school children (and other more mature people!) write sentences like: "I really loved the play Othello, by William Shakespeare, therefore, it is a very good play" and "HIV is a virus which people get because they have a low immune system" we know that some attention is called for.

I designed this workshop having studied and taught philosophy for quite a few years now. It becomes very apparent, when logic and the rules for reasoning are the primary tools with which to do ones work, how things can go horribly wrong when these tools are absent.

Reasoning is a function of language use. In the end an ability to reason well will depend entirely on the ability to pay attention to various aspects of sentences: grammar, meaningful referencing, logical connections between words and further entailment. Good reasoning will also depend on an ability to pay attention to how sentences are situated in larger texts: how they support each other, whether they contradict each other and how they contribute to the objectives of an overall text.

"Critical Reasoning as an Academic Aid in Schools" is a workshop which is presented to small groups of scholars (no more than 10 per workshop) over the same time period as a school day in the class room. It consists less of theoretical explanations of the concepts and rules in reasoning and more of directed class discussions, group and individual work.