David L Hitchcock
Professor Emeritus, Philosophy

I work mainly on the theory of argument and reasoning. My "On Reasoning and Argument: Essays in Informal Logic and on Critical Thinking" (Springer, 2017) collects my 25 most important sole-authored articles in that field and updates my views on their topics in seven new chapters. More recently, I have published "Definition: A Practical Gude to Constructing and Evaluating Definitions of Terms" (Windsor Studies in Argumentation, 2021, open access). I am the author of the entry on critical thinking in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2018, substantive revision 2022, open access). Recently I have been exploring the application of my conception of when a conclusion follows from given premiss(es) ("Inference claims", in the journal "Informal Logic", 2011, open access), to arguments conceived as complexes of tyoes of illouctionary acts ("The concept of an argument", 2021, open access). People argue for (or against) posing or asking a question, adopting a policy or making a decision, expressing an emotion, giving an order or making a request, and so on. Under what conditions are such conclusions well supported by the reasons given for them (or well refuted by the reasons given against them)?