Critical thinking as a modern educational concept arguably began with John Dewey’s How We Think (1910), in which he characterized critical thought as reflective, evaluative and directed consideration of our beliefs. Since then, academic conceptualisation of critical thinking has been enriched by rapidly expanding contexts and discipline area growth. But this expansion of breadth has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the depth of our understanding of critical thinking or how it is to be developed. Nothing manifests this phenomenon more obviously than the broad range of definitions of critical thinking and the lack of consequent agreement about what it is and how it is best taught. This paper offers a solution to this problem that is both inclusive of existing definitions of critical thinking and more actionable than most in terms of its teaching and development. Using an analogy between science and thinking scientifically, it positions critical thinking as an area of study and thinking critically as a mode of thinking attuned to the quality of inferences.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3093 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
As the understanding literature continues to evolve, the notion of group understanding has become increasingly important. With the rise of conversational artificial intelligence (CAI), we may say that AI systems can contribute to group knowledge, but it is an open question as to whether or not they can contribute to group understanding. In what follows, I argue that CAI agents can be contributing members of group understanding in inflationary cases. In the next section, I lay out Kenneth Boyd’s (2019) account of deflationary and inflationary group understanding. In section three, I consider what it means to call a CAI an agent. In section four, I look at CAI agents in deflationary group understanding cases and conclude that the obstacles are too much to overcome. In section five, I look at AI agents in inflationary group understanding cases and argue that we can decouple trust relations from group grasping. In section six, I consider objections to my view.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST GCI-273 HYBRID
At least since Francis Bacon, the slogan “knowledge is power” has been used to capture the relationship between decision-making at a group level and information. We know that being able to shape the informational environment for a group is a way to shape their decisions; it is essentially a way to make decisions for them. This paper focuses on strategies that are intentionally, by design, impactful on the decision-making capacities of groups, effectively shaping their ability to take advantage of information in their environment. Among these, the best known are political rhetoric, propaganda, and misinformation. The phenomenon this paper brings out from these is a relatively new strategy, which we call slopaganda. According to The Guardian, News Corp Australia is currently churning out 3000 “local” generative AI (GAI) stories each week. In the coming years, such “generative AI slop” will present multiple knowledge-related (epistemic) challenges. We draw on contemporary research in cognitive science and artificial intelligence to diagnose the problem of slopaganda, describe some recent troubling cases, then suggest several interventions that may help to counter slopaganda.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-3093 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
