Argument, logic, and reasoning in composition: Implications within Toulmin's model and feminist understandings

Most student handbooks and rhetorics simply give lip-service to syllogistic logic without really exploring how people reason and why people argue as they do. Two alternatives to syllogistic logic, Stephen Toulmin's informal logic and feminist alternate logics, seem to offer ways for teachers better to understand and explain reasoning processes. These models open the composition classroom to more contextual, multi-disciplinary models of logic, and also help the teacher to understand student logics more fully. The dissertation focuses upon valuing and applying these alternatives within the composition classroom, exploring how they interact with traditional logic, and proposing an alternative model of reasoning that incorporates Toulmin's model, feminist alternatives, and traditional logic. The dissertation throughout applies the theory to the composition classroom and offers models, examples, and suggestions for using a combined Toulmin/Feminist model of logic.