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Record W2153673726 · doi:10.7202/1071573ar

Libri ad Nauseam: The Critical Thinking Textbook Glut

2020· article· en· W2153673726 on OpenAlex
Benjamin Hamby

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.

Bibliographic record

VenuePaideusis · 2020
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicEducation and Critical Thinking Development
Canadian institutionsMcMaster University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCritical thinkingArgument (complex analysis)ScholarshipEpistemologyScope (computer science)DialecticParallel thinkingLateral thinkingInformal logicSociologyInferenceCritical systems thinkingMathematics educationPsychologyArgumentation theoryPhilosophyComputer sciencePolitical scienceSocial psychologyMedicine

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Critical thinking instructors are faced with an overwhelming number of textbooks to choose from for their courses. Many of these texts do not reflect an awareness of current scholarship in critical thinking and informal logic. I argue that instructors should only adopt textbooks that reflect a sound theoretical understanding of the topic by acknowledging the central role of critical thinking dispositions, offering a more nuanced approach to the teaching of fallacies and of inference, stressing dialectic and argument revision, focusing on the analysis and evaluation of real arguments, and broadening the scope of critical thinking beyond argument analysis and evaluation. To support instructors in this regard, I critique one popular textbook now in its sixth edition that does not satisfy many of these criteria, Munson and Black (2012), and applaud one new textbook that I find does succeed on many of these fronts, Bailin and Battersby (2010).

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.931
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.062
GPT teacher head0.356
Teacher spread0.293 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it