are somehow regulated or regimented, which take place according to some set of rules." Barth and Krabbe say that "we do not defend formality3 of all kinds and under all circumstances." Rather "we defend the thesis that verbal dialectics must have a certain form (i.e., must proceed according to certain rules) in order that one can speak of the discussion as being won or lost" (19). In this third sense of form, informal logic can be formal, for there is nothing in the informal logic enterprise that stands opposed to the idea that argumentative discourse should be subject to norms, i.e., subject to rules, criteria, standards or procedures. Informal logic does present standards for the evaluation of argument, procedures for detecting missing premises etc. Johnson and Blair (2000) noticed a limitation of their own definition, particularly with respect to "everyday discourse", which could indicate that it does not seek to understand specialized, domain-specific arguments made in natural languages. Consequently, they have argued that the crucial divide is between arguments made in formal languages and those made in natural languages. Fisher and Scriven (1997) proposed a more encompassing definition, seeing informal logic as "the discipline which studies the practice of critical thinking and provides its intellectual spine". By "critical thinking" they understand "skilled and active interpretation and evaluation of observations and communications, information and argumentation." Criticisms Some hold the view that informal logic is not a branch or subdiscipline of logic, or even the view that there cannot be such a thing as informal logic.Woods, 1980 Massey criticizes informal logic on the grounds that it has no theory underpinning it. Informal logic, he says, requires detailed classification schemes to organize it, which in other disciplines is provided by the underlying theory. He maintains that there is no method of establishing the invalidity of an argument aside from the formal method, and that the study of fallacies may be of more interest to other disciplines, like psychology, than to philosophy and logic. Relation to critical thinking Since the 1980s, informal logic has been partnered and even equated, in the minds of many, with critical thinking. The precise definition of critical thinking is a subject of much dispute. Critical thinking, as defined by Johnson, is the evaluation of an intellectual product (an argument, an explanation, a theory) in terms of its strengths and weaknesses. While critical thinking will include evaluation of arguments and