Argument Maps Improve Critical Thinking

Thanks for the vote of confidence. I should say that while I think my paper presents things well, I cannot take credit for the statistics or experimental design. Tim van Gelder already had the machinery in place to measure pre-post gains, and had done so for several semesters. The results were published in Donohue et al. 2002. The difference here was that I took over teaching, and we continued the pre-post tests.

Although argument maps are usually used to map existing natural language arguments, one could start with the map. I like to think that the more people use these maps, the more their thinking naturally follows such a structure. I'm sure I could use more practice myself.

Just a note on terminology: the tree does have two kinds of nodes, but by virtue of being a tree, it is not a bipartite graph.

I think arguments in argument maps can be made probabilistic and converted to Bayesian networks. But as it is, it takes long enough just to make an argument map. I've recently discovered Gheorghe Tecuci's work. He's just down the hall from me, but I didn't know his work until I heard him give a talk recently. He has an elaborate system that helps analysts create structures very much like argument maps by filling in schemas, and then reasons quantitatively with them. The tree structure and the simplicity of the combination rules (min, max, average, etc.) are more limited than a full Bayesian network, but it seems to be a very nice extension of argument maps.

Here is a tool that will help figure out whether you are overconfident, underconfident, or neither.

Here is a good puzzle involving rationality. See the discussion here on Less Wrong once you've completed it.

This looks like a formalised general version of an Intervention Logic, a tool used in government to explain how a proposed policy will achieve a desired policy goal.

Semi-OT: what about software for drawing Pearlean causal graphs that permit counterfactual surgery?

I've heard of the game WFF'n'Proof ever since it was invented, but I've never had any closer knowledge of it. However, the publisher's website claims dramatic improvements in IQ and mathematical performance from playing that and their other games.

Here's an absolutely phenomenal tool for creating diagrams of whatever level complexity. yEd Graph Editor even has auto-layout which creates graphs with least overlap. http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yed_about.html

I think focusing on the tool here is misleading. It is the process of creating something like a dependency graph representing the entire argument (and knowing how to analyze that graph) that is the important point, and people have been doing that for almost as long as philosophy has been around. Every critical thinking class teaches such techniques.