Microsoft Word - IL. In Memoriam Richard Paul JABrev.doc


IN MEMORIAM 
 

Richard Paul (1937–2015) 
 
The Editors of Informal Logic were saddened to learn of the 
death of Richard Paul on August 30th, 2015. He had suffered 
from Parkinson’s Disease. 
 Paul was a pioneer in the movement for educational re-
form in North America. His approach was based on the premise 
of the importance of teaching students to think critically. He had 
enormous and infectious enthusiasm and energy for this project.  
 In 1980 Paul began hosting an annual conference on the 
theme Critical Thinking and Educational Reform at Sonoma 
State University. The speakers at the early Sonoma conferences 
were philosophers who had some interest in the subject of criti-
cal thinking: Michael Scriven, Richard Dreyfus, Joseph Ullian, 
Ralph Johnson, Anthony Blair, among others, but Paul also 
quickly attracted a wider range of philosophers as speakers, in-
cluding on one occasion Ruth Barcan Marcus and Nicholas 
Rescher. However, he soon became convinced that for the 
changes to teaching for CT that had to occur, the process needed 
to begin well before college. Accordingly, by 1983 he broad-
ened the conference’s scope to include teachers and educators 
from all levels (university, college, high school) who were inter-
ested in teaching students how to think critically, and he attract-
ed a broader range of prominent speakers, such as Henry Steele 
Commager and Neil Postman.  
 Paul’s view of CT is best known for (1) his distinction be-
tween “weak sense” CT (skill in critiquing the thinking of oth-
ers) and “strong sense” CT (a self-reflective attitude involving 
also subjecting one’s own thinking to critical reflection); and (2) 
for emphasizing the importance of the intellectual virtues, pre-
eminently fair-mindedness, in being a critical thinker. He estab-
lished the Foundation for Critical Thinking to develop CT mate-
rials for K-12 teachers. Paul and his associate Linda Elder pub-
lished and disseminated widely a large set of handbooks ex-
plaining his notion of critical thinking and ways to inculcate it in 
students. A collection of Paul’s early writings was published as 
Critical Thinking: What Every Person Needs to Survive In A 
Rapidly Changing World, edited by A. J. A. Binker (Rohnert 
Park, CA: Center for Critical Thinking and Moral Critique, 
1990).   
 Paul attended the Second International Symposium on In-
formal Logic at Windsor in 1983 and was active in the founding 
of the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking that 
took place at the end of that conference. A member of the edito-
rial board of Informal Logic for many years, Paul saw the im-



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portance of informal logic both as an area that contributed skills 
vital to CT and also to the teaching of these skills.  
 Richard Paul contributed papers to The Informal Logic 
Newsletter and Informal Logic, of which the most notable are: 

 (1981) Teaching critical thinking in the ‘strong’ sense: A fo-
cus on self-deception, world views and a dialectical mode 
of analysis. Informal Logic Newsletter 4(2). 

 (1985) Background logic, critical thinking, and irrational 
language games. Informal Logic 7(1). 

 (1985) McPeck’s mistakes. Informal Logic 7(1). 
 

  Ralph H. Johnson & J. Anthony Blair