Performance of Critical Thinking and Existence of Logical Fallacies in Indonesian Varsity English Debate 2020 in Jakarta

Abstract

This study is to analyze the types of critical thinking skills are performed by the debaters, logical fallacies are made by the debaters, and the debaters’ responses using critical thinking skills to the opponents’ logical fallacies in debate. The writer chose the topic of the study because debate contains critical thinking and logical fallacies. This study used spoken discourse analysis especially speech act theory proposed by Schifrin (1994) for data analysis. The object of this study is college students in IVED 2020. The result of this study shows that there are six types of critical thinking skills were used in the debate (Fisher, 2001). The finding shows that most of the critical thinking skills performed in debate competition by debaters. The findings showed debaters fulfil all components of critical thinking skills. The analysis on the logical fallacies result showed that appeal to fear, word ambiguity, appeal to prejudice, hasty generalization, false cause, appeal to pity, red hearing, and false analogy existed in debate. However, the debaters only respond to a few logical fallacies. The logical fallacies that are responded by debaters are appeal to fear, false cause, appeal to prejudice, and hasty generalization. Moreover, debaters respond fallacies used critical thinking skills. Critical thinking skills that are used by debaters are, 1) identifying and evaluating assumptions, 2) identifying the elements in a reasoned case, especially reasons and conclusions, 3) clarifies and interprets expressions and ideas, and 4) analyze, evaluate, and produce explanations. 5) drawing inferences. 6) evaluating arguments of different kinds