Getting Started in Informal Logic

This is actually a response to an email from a commenter.


To get you started, here is a free course in beginning logic from Rick Grush of University of California
http://mind.ucsd.edu/podcasts/index.html#logic

Here is the free LSAT podcast which, believe it or not, covers what you are interested in. It is the Law School Admissions Test, but it covers informal logic and argumentation. Its a great resource for this kind of thing.
http://www.princetonreview.com/podcasts/lsat.asp

How to debate lecture series from the university of vermont
http://debate.uvm.edu/critadv.html

A good place to start poking around in the World of Critical thinking which is ultimately what all this about.
http://www.austhink.org/critical/

And there's always wikipedia to look stuff up.

I suggest you get the following books used from amazon.
To start with
- "fundamentals of critical argumentation" from Douglas Walton. It covers the formal parts of logic that you need for the informal logic that you are interested in.
next
- Stephen Toulmins "Introduction to Reasoning", it gives a more detailed treatment of the structure of arguments, and the different types or reasoning inherent in different disciplines.
- Johnson and Blairs "Logical Self-Defense", gets into critical thinking and argumentation and how it is applied in the real world, give you hints to avoid advertising marketing persuasion
- Informal Logic by douglas walton (again) it gets deeper into the concepts covered in the 'fundamentals of critical argumentation'
- The Art of Deception, is a classic book written from the perspective of 'the bad guy' showing you fallacies and how they are used in argumentation to try to take advantage of you.