A big welcome to Inside Higher Education readers who have been joining the LogicCheck site/community today.
Just to orient you, this site was designed to accomplish two missions: (1) help readers learn and develop a set of critical-thinking skills vital to better understanding the world; (2) apply those techniques to current events. Just as fact-checkers provide quality control over the truth and falsehood of statements made by politicians, journalists and others, logic-checking will help you check the quality of the arguments into which those facts fit.
The first round of posts to the site introduced a sequence of steps needed to become a logic checker (basics, argumentation, language skills, etc.) and used a current event to illustrate how to put each skill to use. Now that enough of that sequence is in place, I’ve organized postings into a curriculum for those who want to learn how to do their own logic-checking of the news (and anything else).
With that done, I am going to switch gears slightly and alternate between postings that introduce new critical-thinking topics (continuing to use the current events to illustrate each concept) with pure “Logic Checks” that apply techniques which have already been covered to stories in the news. Just as fact-check sites rate their analyses based on some scale between very true and very false, I’ll be doing the same with arguments, rating them on a scale of very strong to very weak.
If anyone has a particular story they’d like the lens trained on, send me a note via the contact form.
Have a reasonable day!