Critical thinking instruction for the post-truth era

Abstract

Several recent political outcomes in the West have turned on factually incorrect claims, which some authors take to signal a “post-truth” era. From a perspective that defines argument as linguistic attempts at rational persuasion using dialectical processes, we ask how argumentation pedagogy should respond to the post-truth world. We contend that the standard approach in popular textbooks is often incomplete and this incompleteness helps to explain its apparent ineffectiveness in building resistance to propaganda, populism, and other efforts at manipulation. While current approaches emphasize inferential failures, we argue that a focus on what we call informational and pragmatic failures might better prepare students for the realities of “post-truth” style argumentative discourse.