The New Critical Thinking: An Empirically Informed IntroductionWhy is it so hard to learn critical thinking skills? Traditional textbooks focus almost exclusively on logic and fallacious reasoning, ignoring two crucial problems. As psychologists have demonstrated recently, many of our mistakes are not caused by formal reasoning gone awry, but by our bypassing it completely. We instead favor more comfortable, but often unreliable, intuitive methods. Second, the evaluation of premises is of fundamental importance, especially in this era of fake news and politicized science. This highly innovative text is psychologically informed, both in its diagnosis of inferential errors, and in teaching students how to watch out for and work around their natural intellectual blind spots. It also incorporates insights from epistemology and philosophy of science that are indispensable for learning how to evaluate premises. The result is a hands-on primer for real world critical thinking. The authors bring over four combined decades of classroom experience and a fresh approach to the traditional challenges of a critical thinking course: effectively explaining the nature of validity, assessing deductive arguments, reconstructing, identifying and diagramming arguments, and causal and probabilistic inference. Additionally, they discuss in detail, important, frequently neglected topics, including testimony, the nature and credibility of science, rhetoric, and dialectical argumentation. Key Features and Benefits:
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Contents
Reasoning Evidence and Arguments | |
Proving Invalidity and Proving Validity | |
Using Euler Diagrams | |
Reconstructing and Identifying Deductive Arguments | |
Inductive Arguments | |
Argument From Analogy | |
Causal Inference | |
Testimony | |
Science | |
Causal Fallacies | |
Summary | |
Dialectic | |
Track the Burden of Proof | |
Ultimate Premises | |
Summary | |
Other editions - View all
The New Critical Thinking: An Empirically Informed Introduction Jack Lyons,Barry Ward Limited preview - 2017 |
The New Critical Thinking: An Empirically Informed Introduction Jack C. Lyons,Barry Ward No preview available - 2017 |
The New Critical Thinking: An Empirically Informed Introduction Jack C. Lyons,Barry Ward No preview available - 2018 |