The distant origins of Studies in Critical Thinking lie in the recommendation of a committee of the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking (AILACT) that an authoritative anthology on critical thinking should be prepared with two ends in view. One was to be of service to new instructors of critical thinking courses. The other was to demonstrate to the scholarly community that critical thinking is a field that calls for serious and respectable academic attention.
More proximately, at the 2016 conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation at the University of Windsor, Michael Scriven, who had been a member of that AILACT committee, convened a meeting to promote the idea of such a book and see what support there was for it. Somehow my long-time collaborator Ralph Johnson and I agreed to co-edit the book, with Scriven’s guidance, if AILACT would give us a free hand, and, having no other offers, AILACT agreed.
The idea of dividing the book into a section (Part II) with teaching material and one section (Parts III & IV) with material related to the theoretical underpinning of critical thinking came from Scriven, and Johnson and I happily adopted it.
About a year into work on the book, Johnson chose to withdraw from the project for personal reasons. So while he played a role in the early planning, he cannot be held responsible for the final product.
Michael Scriven served as a consultant to the editors, and subsequently, to the editor. I cannot thank him enough for his encouragement, his always useful suggestions and for his general guidance and material support for the project.
I would like to thank the contributors, who met deadlines promptly, tolerated delays and editorial intrusion patiently, and produced either new work or suggested and adapted already-published work, both of extraordinary quality.
I am grateful to Leo Groarke and Christopher Tindale, the editors-in-chief of the Windsor Studies In Argumentation (WSIA) series for taking on the book’s publication. Many thanks to Tina Taylor, Professor Scriven’s assistant, to Tamilyn Mulvaney, assistant to the Director of the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric (CRRAR) at the University of Windsor, who provided invaluable assistance in the preparation of the manuscript, to Dave Johnston of Windsor’s Leddy Library, who shepherded the manuscript through the PressBooks protocols, and to Ellen Duckman, of The Orange Factory, for the cover.
I dedicate this book, with love, to my wife, June Blair, on whose support I constantly rely.
J. Anthony Blair
Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric
University of Windsor
