A Question Of Commitment

A Question of Commitment

In 1991, the Government of Canada ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, requiring governments at all levels to ensure that Canadian laws and practices safeguard the rights of children. A Question of Commitment: Children’s Rights in Canada is the first book to assess the extent to which Canada has fulfilled this commitment. The editors, R. Brian Howe and Katherine Covell, contend that Canada has wavered in its commitment to the rights of children and is ambivalent in the political culture about the principle of children’s rights. A Question of Commitment expands the scope of the editors’ earlier book, The Challenge of Children’s Rights for Canada, by including the voices of specialists in particular fields of children’s rights and by incorporating recent developments.

Commitment in Dialogue

This book develops a logical analysis of dialogue in which two or more parties attempt to advance their own interests. It includes a classification of the major types of dialogues and a discussion of several important informal fallacies. The authors define the concept of commitment in a way that makes it useful in evaluating arguments. In traditional logic, a proposition is either true or false, and that is the end of it. In this new framework, an arguer can be held to his or her commitments in some cases, but in other cases, he or she can retract them without violating any rule of the dialogue. Commitment in Dialogue studies the conditions under which commitments should be held or may be retracted within an argument. An extensive case study of a discussion in medical ethics is used to bring together two traditions or schools of thought that had not been integrated previously—the rigorous Lorenzen school of formal logic, and the more permissive Hamblin-style dialogue. It introduces these methods of evaluation and offers guidelines for analyzing the text of discourse. The book could be used in both intermediate and advanced courses in informal logic, argumentation, and critical thinking, but it is accessible to the reader with no background in these fields as well. Each chapter is summarized, and additional problems to be solved are presented.

A Question of Commitment