from the editors 
Editorial Board Addition 

We are honoured to welcome Profes -
sor Merrilee H . Salmon from the 
program in History and Philosophy of 
Science at the University of Pittsburgh, 
and author of Introduction to Logic 
and Critical Thinking (New York : 
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 
1984) to the editorial board of this 
journal. 

Subscription Increase 
Subscribers will be receiving renewal 

notices with this issue, and will find 
that we have had to raise the rate for 
Vol. IX to $25 .00 That is quite a jump 
above past rates. We owe an expla-
nation. Informal logic is almost com-
pletely supported by subscribers. 
We do receive a yearly subvention from 
the Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the 
University of Windsor and we also 
receive donations from friends of the 
journal. For these we are grateful . 
(By the way, such donations, with writ-
ten instructions earmarking them for 
Informal logic, and made out to the 
University of Windsor, are tax deduc-
table in Canada). But the bulk of our 
revenue comes from subscribers-mostly 
individuals . Our costs have risen 
significantly . Each copy of the journal 
now costs us about $9 .00 altogether 
for typesetting, paste-up, printing, 
mailing, etc. At three issues a year, 
that means each subscription costs 
us $27.00. We cannot afford to maintain 
the current difference between our 
costs and s ubscri ption rates. 

We hope soon to become a "desk-
top" operation, and that our costs will 
then drop. We are also seeking a 
subsidy from the Social Sciences 
and Humanities Research Council of 
Canada . And if we can increase the 
number of subscribers, the per-copy 
cost will decrease. Should costs go 
down and income go up, we will make 
history and reduce our rates for future 
volumes. In the meantime we ask for 
your continued support in this next 
year as we seek to maintain standards 
and cut costs . 

Standards 
In papers submitted for publication 

in this journal, as well as in articles 
published in other philosophy journals, 
we have noticed the occurrence of 
problematic undocumented empirical 
claims. (We cannot document this 
claim without embarrassing individuals 
or journals.) We have in mind claims 
which run like this : "most informal 
logic texts," "the critical thinking 
movement," or "the standard treate-
ments of this fallacy." We have no 
objection to such claims as long as 
they are backed up by citations-and 
citations sufficiently exact to permit 
readers (not to mention editors and 
referees) readily to verify for themsel-
ves the truth of the claim . Contributors 
are forewarned that this journal will 
continue to insist on documentation for 
such empirical claims , and we invite 
readers to draw our attention to any 
which slip past our scrutiny . 

Another problem we want to call to 
our potential contributors ' attention is 
papers which do not make reference to 
the appropriate literature on the 
topics they address . Particularly on 
fallacies, but increasingly on all topics 
in the field, there is a body of respecta-
ble work already published, in this 
journal and elsewhere . We remind 
contributors that it is the standing 
editorial policy of this journal that to be 
accepted for publ ication papers must 
make reference to the literature on their 
topics, including but not limited to 
papers published in this journal. 

In this Issue 
In this issue three new contributors 

appear on these pages. Richard Mil-
ler's article deals with a timely topic-
the problem of defining and testing 
thinking skills. Wayne Grennan 
presents a scheme for assessing the 
plausibility of two-premise arguments. 
Brian Kirby presents an argument that 
amounts to a plea for accepting the 
argument form known as "affirming 
the consequent." John Hoaglund, 
whose work has appeared previously, 
provides some ideas about how to 
handle conditional propositions . 0