From the Editors 

John McPeck's view that critical think-
ing is discipline specific is well known. 
McPeck has recently written another book 
on matters related to critical thinking-
Teaching Critical Thinking: Dialogue and 
Dialectic. In his article, Jonathan Adler 
examines this latest installment of 
McPeck's position. Adler concedes 
McPeck's premise that there is no unitary 
skill called thinking but argues that 
McPeck's strictures about critical thinking 
courses and programs do not follow from 
this premise. Adler sets forth what he calls a 
"deflated justification" which he believes is 
reasonable, and argues both that McPeck's 
demands exceed this and that this deflated 
justification can be met. 

In "Dominance and Aftlliation: Para-
digms in Connict", Maryann Ayim argues 
that the dominant confrontational style of 
speaking generates serious problems in 
speech as well as behaviour, whereas the 
aftlliative nurturant style supplies a model 
which can be generalized without contra-
diction. She concludes by addressing the 
question of how our classrooms might be 
used to teach affiliative nurturant styles of 
speaking and living. 

In "Argument-Appreciation! Argument-
Criticism", Joel Rudinow argues that the 
analogy between art criticism and argument 
criticism promises not only to illuminate 
the nature of argument criticism and capture 
the central goals of instruction in informal 
logic, but also to resolve fundamental prob-

lems in the normative theory of argument. 
Anyone who has worked in informal 

logic for any length of time knows of the 
seminal work done over a period of ten 
years by Douglas Walton and John Woods. 
Those ground-breaking papers have now 
been collected in one cover. That volume 
has been reviewed for us here by Leo 
Groarke. 

As important as the work of Walton and 
Woods has been for informal logic, so has 
the work of Richard Paul been for those 
interested in critical thinking, both from a 
theoretical and a pedagogical point of view. 
Many of his papers have been collected in 
one volume, and we are pleased to offer a 
review by Alec Fisher. 

Authors and the Burden of Proof 

We take this opportunity to reaftlrm 
our intention to hold authors submitting 
papers to this journal to the standards 
announced for articles submitted: the article 
must advance the dialectic, and it must 
make appropriate reference to the scholarly 
literature. In that connection, we remind 
readers that we recently published a wide-
ranging and helpful bibliography. We 
expect that, ceteris paribus, authors would, 
in any article they submit, have made 
contact with the relevant works cited in that 
bibliography. 0