Videos from the Conference on Computing and Philosophy 2003

[gustavolacerda]

Videos from the Conference on Computing and Philosophy 2003

I can't see them yet, but will when I get home.

Tim Van Gelder's "Reason!Able: Computer Assisted Critical Thinking" looks particularly interesting.
Here is his project's website.

Comments

[thepublicguy]

I have a £40 copy of his software from www.goreason.com.

The thing with Reason!Able is that making the argument maps is very time-consuming. If you just have an undergraduate essay to write then it's quicker just to knock out a summary of popular positions without getting to grips with the structure of the arguments, although it can be interesting to take an extended essay you've written and try to structure the argument using the mapping software. It tends to reveal unexpected flaws in the arguments of other people that you are reconstructing but you ahve to be carefully you haven't interpreted them uncharitably.

[gustavolacerda]

Did you have any particular reason to buy this software?

[learningtophi]

I thought it would be useful for answering questions set as philosophy essays.

Basically, you could just turn the question into a proposition and map reasons for and against it (unless the question is open-ended in which case you might need several maps for several different answers to the question).

Before I read about it I'd been looking for a program which would let me do logic trees and this seemed the nearest thing to it - a kind of natural-language version of it.

I can probably ship you a copy of it, if I can find the disks.

[gustavolacerda]

That would be great. So it came in disks instead of a CD??