What is the Argument Clinic?
The Argument Clinic is a website where you work on arguments by talking them through with one of three guides. As you chat, your guide draws an argument map: a picture of your conclusion, the reasons that support it, and how those reasons fit together.
- The Argument Mapper helps you map an argument you already have, your own or someone else’s, faithfully and charitably, one step at a time.
- The Argument Builder helps you build your own argument for a claim, step by step. When you’re done, it can look your argument over with you for gaps and weak spots.
- The Skeptic asks what supports your belief. When your justification runs out, goes in a circle, or is seen to go on forever, you reach the suspension of judgment and can be tranquil at last.
Why argument maps?
An argument map is a graphical depiction of an argument: its conclusion, the reasons that support it, and how those reasons fit together. Drawing one helps you see the structure of an argument, notice the assumptions it relies on, and identify ways in which it can be made stronger. Research shows that practice in argument mapping can improve critical thinking and argument analysis (Twardy 2004; Harrell 2011; van Gelder 2015).
How does it work?
Under the hood, hard-coded rules constrain the permissible moves and manage the argument map, while AI (Anthropic’s Claude) interprets visitors’ contributions, selects among permitted moves, and generates the guides’ natural-language replies. The end result is a regimented discussion driven by flexible and forgiving natural-language dialogue.
The Library
The Library is a public collection of argument maps saved by visitors. When you finish a session with any of the guides, you can save your map there with your name (optional) and links to texts that make or discuss the argument (also optional).
In the Library, visitors can search and browse the maps, rate them, submit other versions of an argument, link maps to related maps, and link maps to the literature. The aim is a crowd-sourced library of argument maps.
Who made it?
Angela Mendelovici, Professor of Philosophy at Western University, Canada, designed and maintains the site. The site is improving all the time, thanks partly to visitors’ feedback.
Your privacy
Sessions are saved and may be read by the site’s maintainer for quality assurance and to improve the site. To remain anonymous, use a fake name and don’t share anything private.
The site does not use cookies. Usage limits use a one-way scrambled code derived from your internet address, not the address itself. See the FAQ.
Maps you save to the Library are public. Only the map and what you type in the save form are saved there; your conversation with the guide is not. If you provide your email address, it is only used to confirm your submission if you ask us to retract your map; it is never publicly displayed.
Support
Each session costs a few cents to run. Usage limits keep costs in check while the project seeks long-term support. To help support the project, contact Angela Mendelovici.
The Argument Clinic is sponsored with AI support by MATCHA Writer: see our sponsors.
Pedagogical applications
The Argument Clinic provides a fun and accessible interface for argument mapping, which has been shown to improve critical thinking skills (Twardy 2004; Harrell 2011; van Gelder 2015). Visitors practice identifying reasons for beliefs, expressing premises and conclusions clearly, clarifying the structure of arguments, and revising their beliefs and arguments in light of feedback. Visitors learn to appreciate the value of clear argumentation for advancing knowledge and deciding what to belief.
In a classroom setting, the Mapper can be used by students to interpret the arguments of others (e.g., in target readings) or to express their own arguments (e.g., that they have expressed in an essay). They can submit argument maps along with assignments. The Mapper can hand a student's own argument off to the Builder, who can help the student strengthen it as part of a scaffolded assignment.
The Builder can help students devise arguments that can form the basis of their papers, providing argument maps that can guide their writing and be submitted alongside their assignment.
In addition to teaching argument mapping, the Skeptic teaching students to reflect about epistemology, showing them that all justification must end in an undefended assumption, go around in a circle, or go on forever. Along the way, the Skeptic shows students that for any argument there is a counterargument, helping students recognize the value of intellectual humility. In doing all this, the Skeptic shows us that Ancient philosophy, and, in particular, Pyrrhonian skepticism, is still relevant today.
Debate the Skeptic
The Skeptic is the original argument guide, originally revived in digital form in 2017.
The Skeptic is an ancient Pyrrhonian skeptic (modeled after Sextus Empiricus), who employs the modes of Pyrrhonian skepticism to debate visitors until they reach the suspension of judgment.
It turns out, though, that the Skeptic can't really do all that effectively without figuring out visitors' reasons for their beliefs and how those reasons fit together. In short, in order to be able to debate visitors, the Skeptic needed to represent the structure of their arguments. Thus, the Skeptic became an argument mapper, and two more guides joined forces with him to create the Argument Clinic.
References
- Harrell, Maralee. 2011. Argument Diagramming and Critical Thinking in Introductory Philosophy. Higher Education Research & Development 30 (3): 371–385.
- Sextus Empiricus. 2000. Outlines of Scepticism. Translated by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Twardy, Charles R. 2004. Argument Maps Improve Critical Thinking. Teaching Philosophy 27 (2): 95–116.
- van Gelder, Tim. 2015. Using Argument Mapping to Improve Critical Thinking Skills. In The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education, edited by Martin Davies and Ronald Barnett, 183–192. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.