In 2001 I was given a three-month fellowship to work in Australia at the University of Melbourne with Tim van Gelder, this not on the basis of my work in online learning, but because I had posted my Guide to the Logical Fallacies online. His project at the time was to create and market argument-mapping technology. I helped with that a bit, created some web applications for him, and came home ready to launch my OLDaily newsletter. It was a good three months. The appeal of argument mapping has never waned. It seemed like a natural to me and to anyone who had been working in network-based approaches to thinking, as van Gelder certainly was. The idea is that there is a flow of logic (or truth, or inference) across a set of interconnected statements; the truth of one has an impact on the truth of the others. Logic (and critical reasoning generally) just is a way of working out that mapping.
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