CFP: OSSA 2020

OSSA 12

The Twelfth Conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation

EVIDENCE, PERSUASION & DIVERSITY

University of Windsor – June 3 – 6, 2020

Keynote Speakers:

2018 AILACT Prize

Submissions are invited for the 2018 AILACT Essay Prize in informal logic/critical thinking/argumentation theory. This will be the 14th year in which the prize ($500 U.S.) has been offered. Submissions are due by September 1, 2018. For details, see below. The details are also available at: https://ailact.wordpress.com and in the attached flyer.

Eligibility Requirements

Second CFP: Topoi Special Issue on Evidence, Expertise and Argumentation in Evidence-Based Medicine

Guest Editors: Fabrizio Macagno and Carlo Martini

This special issue will focus on the relationship between argumentation and the critical use of evidence in medical decision-making. In particular, the research question is whether the current concepts and accounts of evidence and expertise are adequate for capturing the subjective, reason-based and argumentative component of evidence-based medical science, as well as the role of experts as mediators and communicators.

Volunteers Needed for Research Program in Analytical Reasoning

Via Tim van Gelder:

IARPA is currently recruiting thousands of participants to test the analytic methods developed for its CREATE (Crowdsourcing Evidence, Argumentation, Thinking and Evaluation) program.  IARPA is the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity.  CREATE is a multi-million-dollar, multi-year R&D effort to improve the core process of intelligence analysis: making well-reasoned inferences from incomplete information. If effective, CREATE analytic tools could greatly assist many other disciplines that depend on good reasoning, including, law, medicine, and public policy. CREATE is a basic research program; it does not involve any security restrictions, and its research outputs will be freely available.

Participating might be interesting for anyone working in applied epistemology, critical thinking, informal reasoning, or probabilistic reasoning.  It might also be helpful for students wishing to develop their analytical reasoning skills.

For more information see: Frequently Asked Questions about CREATE

Here is the sign-up page: join.createbetterreasoning.com

Changes at RAIL

A lot has changed since RAIL was launched in December of 2009. I can’t believe it has

Review, revise, keep rolling!

been almost a decade! With a little extra time on my hands I’ve been doing some thinking about how RAIL can best serve the argumentation and critical thinking research communities going forward.

One of the most important changes is that I’m working on strengthening the critical thinking side of RAIL. To that end I’ve recently launched the Critical Thinking Research Gateway, a page of links and research starters to help researchers find current work on critical thinking across the disciplines. I will also be looking to run more critical thinking-oriented content. That doesn’t mean that argumentation will no longer be featured on RAIL, however. The RAIL Resources page, as well as the Study Argumentation and People pages are still active and will remain so. (If you or your program is listed there, you could help by reviewing the information that’s there and making sure it’s accurate.)

What’s not there anymore is the ArgEvents Calendar. In the early days of RAIL there weren’t many other common places online where it was easy to get the word out about conferences and symposia in argumentation, apart from a couple of listservs. There are now thriving communities for argumentation across the web, including LinkedIn and Facebook, where this information is shared–more often than not by the organizers themselves.  The number of events–especially regularly recurring events–has grown exponentially too. This is an awesome development! It is however, also one that makes it hard for one person to keep up with. For this reason, although CFPs are most welcome and will still be posted at RAIL, I’m letting go of the attempt to keep a comprehensive calendar of argumentation-related events going.

One thing I’m considering adding is a page devoted to job postings (PhD studentships, research positions, and faculty positions) where critical thinking or argumentation are central to the work to be done. I’m curious to know what the community thinks. Is this a good idea or are folks happy to use other means to find candidates/positions for academic work in argumentation and critical thinking? Post here in the comments or drop me a line at railargumentation[at]gmail.com and let me know. As always, comments and suggestions for how to improve RAIL are more than welcome!

CFP: Warsaw Argumentation Week

Warsaw Argumentation Week, WAW 2018
6-16 September 2018, Warsaw, Poland
Polish School of Argumentation
http://waw2018.argdiap.pl/
CALL FOR PAPERS AND PARTICIPATION IN SEVERAL WAW EVENTS
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The Warsaw Argumentation Week (WAW) is a series of events organised by the Polish Academy of Sciences in collaboration with University of Warsaw, Warsaw Institute of Technology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Bialystok University of Technology, Centre for Formal Ontology, Graduate School for Social Research and several businesses and NGOs. The WAW 2018 consists of eight events:

CFP: ECA | European Conference on Argumentation

1st CALL FOR PAPERS 3rd European Conference on Argumentation – ECA 2019

Reason to Dissent

Monday, June 24 – Thursday, June 27 2019, Groningen, The Netherlands

The European Conference on Argumentation (ECA) is a pan-European biennial initiative aiming to consolidate and advance research on argumentation. After two successful editions, in Lisbon in 2015 and in Fribourg in 2017, ECA will be hosted in 2019 by the University of Groningen, in Groningen, The Netherlands.

We aim to attract scholars on argumentation world-wide from various disciplines, dealing with various themes and adopting various approaches.

More details, including deadlines and proposal submission guidelines can be found in the attached CFP: 1st-CALL-FOR-PAPERS.

For more information see the conference website: ECA | European Conference on Argumentation, join the ECA group on Facebook or email ecargument2019@rug.nl.

Please note that as in previous years there will also be a Summer School in Argumentation prior to the conference!

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Post-Doc Opportunity at the Free University of Amsterdam

The Department of Philosophy, which is one of three departments of the Faculty of Humanities, is a vibrant and international community of philosophers committed to high-quality teaching and research in diverse areas of philosophy. The Theoretical Philosophy group, where the current position is based, was evaluated as the best group in theoretical philosophy among all participating groups during the last QANU research visitation.

The position is part of Dr. Catarina Dutilh Novaes’ ERC Consolidator project ‘The Social Epistemology of Argumentation’, which is devoted to investigating the role(s) of argumentation in social processes of sharing and producing epistemic resources such as knowledge, justification, defeaters etc. This postdoc project focuses specifically on formal theories of argumentation, in different disciplines: argumentation theory, logic, artificial intelligence, game theory, formal social epistemology. The postdoc will survey a number of prominent formal accounts of argumentation in order to determine how best to capture the key idea of the project, namely that argumentation is best conceived of as social epistemic exchange, within a formal framework. The postdoc project will be carried out in collaboration with the principal investigator, Catarina Dutilh Novaes, and PhD students and another postdoc to be appointed at later stages. The position includes ample funding for research and travel. A full description of the ERC project is available upon request; candidates are encouraged to familiarize themselves with the project when writing their letter of application.

Tasks

Read the latest issue of Informal Logic

Naturally I believe every issue of Informal Logic should be read cover to cover, but the most recent issue is particularly timely and deserves special mention here. Informal Logic Vol 38, No 1 (2018): Special Issue: Reason and Rhetoric in the Time of Alternative Facts is everything it’s title promises. Hats off to special editors Katharina Stevens and Michael Baumtrog for giving us the perfect antidote to the narcotic of fake news: a collection of articles that demystify and respond to it with clear, careful and informed thought.  It’s got Trump. It’s got snakes. It’s got everything you need to get started with your Defense Against the Dark Arts homework. Do check it out!

Poznań Reasoning Week 2018

Deadline for submissions: 1 JUNE 2018

 

https://poznanreasoningweek.wordpress.com/

Poznań Reasoning Week 2018, which is the third edition of PRW, consists of three conferences, aimed at bringing together experts whose research offers a broad range of perspectives on systematic analyses of reasoning processes and their formal modelling. PRW 2018 is co-organised by the Institute of Psychology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, and Institute of Philosophy, University of Zielona Góra, Poland.

In 2018 we will address: