astute reasoning

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This is Section 2 of a commentary project titled “astute reasoning and ‘fake news’.” But it’s independent of that project.

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The easiest way into this is the curricular notion of “critical thinking.” But I shy away from ‘critical’ because it’s commonly (in academic humanities) associated with a negative sense of being critical, which isn’t salient in curricular notions of “thinking skills,” which have become integral for the systematic educational development of reasoning.

expecting genuineness of a communicative source and discerning fakery

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This is Section 1 of a commentary project titled “astute reasoning and ‘fake news’.” But it’s independent of that project.

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The antidote to unwanted fakery by others is persons who expect genuine action and can tell the difference.

Disappointedly calling something or someone a fake is a folkism for discerning extreme ungenuineness. But we don’t ordinarily say “it’s ungenuine” or “you’re ungenuine” (though we do say that sometimes—particularly in formal situations of evaluation). Yet being genuine with others is usually as important for a relationship as are shared values and innocent realism.

Stanley Fish’s ‘...Mother...’ article

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This is Section 4 of a project titled “astute reasoning and ‘fake news’.”

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When I decided to do a commentary on Stanley Fish’s NYTimes article “‘Transparency’ Is the Mother of Fake News,” I indicated in a “comment” there the importance of Habermas, which linked to this posting’s first version, in terms of a short description of Habermas’s career and relevant sense of communicative rationality. That couple of paragraphs follows, for persons unfamiliar with Habermas, coming to this spot via the NYTimes article. Afterward, I have a short discussion of Fish’s article, Section 2 here.