When students come into contact with conflicting claims, they can react in several fashions; my task is to enable them to evaluate these persuasive attempts. I try to provide them with a broad range of criteria and attitudes that reasonable people tend to use as they think their way through a conversation. In addition, I urge them to use productive questions as a stimulus to deep discussion, a looking below the surface of an argument for the assumptions underlying the visible component of the reasoning. The eventual objectives are to enable them to be highly selective in their choice of beliefs and to provide them with the greater sense of meaning that stems from knowing that they have used their own minds to separate sense from relative nonsense.

当学生接触到相互冲突的主张时，他们可以以几种方式作出反应；我的任务是让他们能够评估这些说服性的尝试。我试着为他们提供一系列的标准和态度，理性的人在思考谈话时往往会使用这些标准和态度。此外，我敦促他们用富有成效的问题作为深入讨论的动力，一种在论点表面下寻找推理可见部分的假设的方法。最终的目标是使他们在信仰的选择上具有高度的选择性，并为他们提供更大的意义感，这种意义感源于他们知道他们用自己的头脑将意义与相对的无稽之谈区分开来。