Critical Thinking at Work
  

Austhink is a critical thinking research, training and consulting group specializing in complex reasoning and argumentation. 

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Argument Mapping

Austhink are leaders in argument mapping, the use of software-supported graphical techniques for handling complex argumentation.  Argument maps help us comprehend, evaluate, produce and communicate complex reasoning on any topic.

Tutorials

Austhink has developed a set of six online Argument Mapping Tutorials
 


Enhancing our Grasp of Complex Arguments (Paul Monk with Tim van Gelder)
An overview of the use of argument mapping to augment our capacity to handle complex reasoning and argumentation, and to improve deliberative judgment. This paper was presented by Paul Monk as a plenary address to the 2004 Fenner Conference on the Environment, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, 24 May 2004.

Courses and Workshops

Austhink provides courses and workshops designed to enhance performance in situations demanding high levels of critical thinking.  This training is delivered to professional firms, businesses and government organizations.  

Now open for enrolment:

Advanced Reasoning and Analysis

2005 Dates: 2-4 Mar, 27-29 July, 9-11 Nov.

"Excellent... It gave me insights into why analyses are flawed when previously I merely suspected that poor analyses were of that standard without always being able to say why. I think every professional consultant needs the skills taught in the workshop and needs to be able to apply these skills in daily working life... These guys know what they are doing." - senior partner, major law firm

Argument Mapping
A one-day intensive introduction to argument mapping, provided by Melbourne University Private.

 

Monk Writings

Children of the Revolution
Paul Monk reflects on the death of Zhao Ziyang and the future of China.  AFR 11 Feb 05

John Carroll's Irrational Anti-Humanism
John Carroll thinks that Western culture has wrecked itself over the past five hundred years, by embracing reason in place of ‘the darkness of faith’. Seeing the past 500 years as an era of failure and decline in Western culture requires an heroic inversion of reality and Carroll’s argument is unconvincing. But his problem is not just that he gets his history confused. It is that he rejects reason itself as, in Luther’s words, ‘the Devil’s whore’ and knowledge as futile. That being so, he has no business trying to reason with us, or use the fruits of a liberal education to do so. He is lost in the labyrinth of the past and we need not chase him there. (AFR, 17 Dec 04)

Abrupt Climate Change
We normally think of history as something that began around 5,000 years ago in the early Bronze Age, but 'really' got going only about 2,000 years ago, with the rise of the Roman and Chinese empires. Natural history gives us an utterly different perspective on the history of our species and of our world. But we have had almost no understanding of it until very recent times. One of the most remarkable things we have learned, just in the past ten to twenty years, is that, over the past few million years, the Earth's climate has been doing great flip flops every few thousand years, at breathtaking speed and with awesome consequences. It's time we started to integrate this into our common understanding - to achieve what Edward O. Wilson calls 'consilience': an intelligent integration of the humanities with the natural sciences.

Dangers Just As Great
In a national summit in Canberra, on 13 August, Paul Dibb stated that al Qaeda-style terrorism has not transformed the strategic environment and is nothing like the kind of danger that the old Soviet Union was. Philip Bobbitt, a scholar of formidable erudition and practical experience in international security affairs, disagrees. In his magnum opus, The Shield of Achilles, published in 2002, Bobbitt argues that we have entered a whole new epoch of war. In this talk, delivered at the Land Warfare Development Centre, Puckapunyal, on 8 September, Dr Monk looked at the Australian strategic policy debate through the lens of Bobbitt's work.

More Writings by Dr. Paul Monk

Email for Paul Monk:

Austhink
Level 50, 120 Collins St
Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia
Telephone +61 3 9225 5218
Fax +61 3 9347 1504

 


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