Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide

✍ Scribed by Tracy Bowell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 329
• Series: Concise Guides
• Edition: 4
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

We are frequently confronted with arguments. Arguments are attempts to persuade us – to influence our beliefs and actions – by giving us reasons to believe this or that. Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide will equip students with the concepts and techniques used in the identification, analysis and assessment of arguments. Through precise and accessible discussion, this book provides the tools to become a successful critical thinker, one who can act and believe in accordance with good reasons, and who can articulate and make explicit those reasons.

Key topics discussed include:

• core concepts in argumentation
• how language can serve to obscure or conceal the real content of arguments; how to distinguish argumentation from rhetoric
• how to avoid common confusions surrounding words such as ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘opinion’
• how to identify and evaluate the most common types of argument
• how to distinguish good reasoning from bad in terms of deductive validly and induction.

This fourth edition has been revised and updated throughout, with a new introduction for each chapter and up-to-date topical examples. Particular revisions include: practical reasoning; understanding quantitative data, statistics, and the rhetoric used about them; scientific reasoning; the connection to formal logic and the logic of probability; conditionals; ambiguity; vagueness; slippery slope arguments; and arguments by analogy.

The dynamic Routledge Critical Thinking companion website provides thoroughly updated resources for both instructors and students including new examples and case studies, flashcards, sample questions, practice questions and answers, student activities and a testbank of questions for use in the classroom.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Preface to the fourth edition
Introduction and Preview
1 Introducing Arguments
Beginning to Think Critically: Recognising Arguments
Standard Form
Identifying Conclusions and Premises
Arguments and explanations
Intermediate Conclusions
Chapter Summary
Exercises
2 Language and Rhetoric
Linguistic Phenomena
Aspects of Meaning
Rhetorical Ploys
Chapter Summary
Exercises
3 Logic: Deductive Validity
The Principle of Charity
Truth
Deductive Validity
Prescriptive Claims vs Descriptive Claims
Conditional Propositions
The Antecedent and Consequent of a Conditional
Argument Trees
Deductive Soundness
The Connection to Formal Logic
Chapter Summary
Exercises
4 Logic: Probability and Inductive Reasoning
Implicit Quantifiers: A Reminder
Inductive Force
Inductive Soundness
Inductive Inferences
Evidence
Conversion of Induction to Deduction
A Programme for Assessment
The Connection to Probability Theory
Chapter Summary
Exercises
5 The Practice of Argument-Reconstruction
Extraneous Material
Defusing the Rhetoric
Logical Streamlining
Implicit and Explicit
Connecting Premises
Covering Generalisations
Relevance
Ambiguity and Vagueness
More on Generalisations
Practical Reasoning
Balancing Costs, Benefits and Probabilities
Explanations as Conclusions
Causal Generalisations
A Short Cut
Chapter Summary
Exercises
6 Issues in Argument-Assessment
Rational Persuasiveness
Some Strategies for Logical Assessment
Refutation by Counterexample
Engaging with the Argument I: Avoiding the ‘Who is to Say?’ Criticism
Engaging with the Argument II: Don’t Merely Label the Position
Argument Commentary
Complete Examples
Commentary on the Commentaries
Chapter Summary
Exercises
7 Pseudo-Reasoning
Fallacies
Faulty Argument Techniques
Too much Maths!
Chapter Summary
Exercises
8 Truth, Knowledge and Belief
Truth and Relativity
True for Me, True for You
Truth, Value and Morality
Theories
Belief, Justification and Truth
Justification without Arguments
Knowledge
Justification Failure
Knowledge and Rational Persuasiveness
Philosophical Directions
Chapter Summary
Exercises
Glossary
Answers and hints to selected exercises
Index