Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide

Description

Critical thinking: a concise guide is a much-needed guide to argument analysis and a clear introduction to thinking clearly and rationally for oneself. Through precise and accessible discussion this book equips students with the essential skills required to tell a good argument from a bad one. This third edition has been revised and updated throughout, with new exercises, and up-to-date topical examples, including: "real-world" arguments; practical reasoning; understanding quantitative data, statistics, and the rhetoric used about them; scientific reasoning; and expanded discussion of conditionals, ambiguity, vagueness, slippery slope arguments, and arguments by analogy.  Read more... Abstract: A guide to argument analysis. It presents an introduction to thinking clearly and rationally for oneself. It tells how to avoid common confusions surrounding words such as 'truth', 'knowledge' and 'opinion'; how to identify and evaluate the most common types of argument; and, how to spot fallacies in arguments and tell good reasoning from bad.  Read more... Content: Preface to the first edition -- Preface to the second edition -- Preface to the third edition -- Introduction and preview -- Introducing arguments -- Linguistic phenomena and rhetorical ploys -- Logic: deductive validity -- Logic: inductive force -- The practice of argument-reconstruction -- Issues in argument assessment -- Pseudo-reasoning -- Truth knowledge and belief.