From the Editors 

John Woods and Douglas Walton have 
produced, in tandem and individually, a 
large and important body of literature on 
various individual informal fallacies. Yet 
they have not yet attempted to formulate a 
theory of fallacy, at least not a single, uni-
fied theory of the informal fallacies. Such 
a theory is exactly what the founders of 
the Amsterdam pragma-dialectical theory 
of argumentation, Frans van Eemeren and 
Rob Grootendorst, have attempted to pro-
vide, both in the 1984 elaboration of their 
theory and also in their 1992 book focus-
ing primarily on fallacies. Van Eemeren and 
Grootendorst have explicitly criticized 
Woods and Walton (among others) for fail-
ing to produce a unified theory of the fal-
lacies. John Woods' paper opening this is-
sue is a reply to that challenge. 

Back in 1989 this journal sponsored an 
"Argument Evaluation Contest," in which 
readers were presented with the text of an 
actual extended argument and invited to 
evaluate it. In 1991 (Vol. XIII, No.3, Fall) 
we published the four entries, the judges' 
reports, and the editors' ruling, in which 
we declared a four-way draw. At that time 
we also invited readers' inferences or les-
sons to be drawn from the exercise. Don S. 
Levi's article gives us his reflections on the 
results. 

The feminist critique has found its way 
to informal logic, and this journal has pub-
lished several papers articulating or re-
sponding to that discussion. Michael 
Gilbert's article is a further contribution to 
that particular conversation. This dialec-
tic is especially interesting when it proposes 
a conceptual revision of the enterprise, as 
Gilbert does in his recommendation for a 
rethinking of critical reasoning. 

The editorial policy of this journal 
makes it clear that interdisciplinary and 
cross-disciplinary contributions are wel-

come. In "What is an Assumption?" Delin, 
Chittleborough and Delin supply a read on 
assumptions from the point of view of psy-
chology - or more precisely, not to gen-
eralize hastily, of three psychologists. 

In 1988 the Wadsworth Publishing Com-
pany issued Selected Issues in Logic and 
Communication, a group of papers in the 
general area of informal logic, collected, 
organized and introduced by Trudy Govier, 
and intended as a set of readings for courses 
in communications, critical thinking or in-
formal logic. One of the chapters is an in-
terview conducted by Dennis Rohatyn of 
the University of San Diego with Dr. Uve 
Binad, "the world's foremost authority on 
propaganda and the director of the Minis-
try of Truth." In his discussion of that in-
terview, Stanley Cunningham, a propa-
ganda theorist, takes issue with Rohatyn's 
contention that propaganda theorists are 
themselves unavoidably propagandists. 

Books reviewed in this issue include 
Thinking in Education (1991), Matthew 
Lipman's theoretical account of the role of 
his famous Philosophy for Children pro-
gram in the teaching of thinking and criti-
cal thinking; Steven Stich's general theo-
retical work on the theory of cognitive 
evaluation, The Fragmentation of Reason 
(1990); and a textbook by William Hughes, 
Critical Thinking: An Introduction to the 
Basic Skills (1992). 

Readers will be receiving with this is-
sue a promotional flyer for New Essays in 
Informal Logic, a collection edited by 
Johnson and Blair and published by this 
journal. We hope you will order a copy: as 
you can see the articles in the book are 
highly relevant to this journal's mandate. 
(By the way, enclosing the flyer does not 
add to the journal's postage, and the book 
is being sold at a price pegged to recover 
costs. There are no royalties.) 

@ 
INFoRMAL LOGIC is published with the support and generous financial assistance of the Dean of Arts and 
the University of Windsor, Canada.