I have an awesome idea. I give my students argument extraction exercises so they can master presenting arguments in numbered-premise form. It’s tough because I like to rotate them out so that students who have had me for four years don’t see the same set of exercises.
How about we pool our resources and create a massive database of argument extraction exercises? If every philosopher who had their students do argument extraction exercises contributed 3 passages (2-10 sentences long) that each contain an argument along with the extracted argument for each passage, we would all have plenty of different arguments for students to practice extracting.
If 20+ philosophers post in the comments that they would contribute 3 – I’ll get the ball rolling and set up a submission form.
Please spread the word. I know we can get 20+ philosophers who (a) give argument extraction exercises and (b) would contribute 3 of them in order to get a huge database of them.
I will contribute
I will!
This has been going on for a little while – you might be interested in Araucaria — (free) software for analysis which saves to a DB. The corpus there has something like 700 arguments, some analysed by students, some by research assistants. New versions of the software are being released as a part of the ‘Argument Web’ initiative. Loads more info on our research group’s web page: http://www.arg.dundee.ac.uk. (And thanks for your excellent journal surveys initiative. Very useful)