Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface to Instructors
Introduction To Critical Thinking
1. The Aims and Causes of Belief
2. Reasoning and Dual Systems Theory
3. Reasoning, Evidence, and Arguments
4. Why Reason (Properly)?
5. Plan for the Book
Summary
Part I: Deduction
Chapter 1: Validity: Why it Matters
1. Distinguishing the Good From the Bad
2. Validity and Impossibility
3. More on Logical Impossibility
Logical Terms
Equivocation
4. Logic and the Belief Bias
5. Why it Matters: Missing Premises and Insisting on Validity
Summary
Chapter 2 : Proving Invalidity and Proving Validity
1. Proving Invalidity by Counterexample
2. Proving Validity
3. Negations, Indicative Conditionals, and Two Important Valid Argument Forms
Conditionals and the Wason Test
4. Two Important Fallacies: Denying the Antecedent and Affirming the Consequent
An Important Note about Fallacious Argument Forms
5. More Valid Argument Forms and More About Conditionals
6. Equivalent Sentences and Disguised Conditionals
7. Even More Valid Argument Forms: Aristotelian Syllogisms in One Bite
Using Euler Diagrams:
8. Summation: Evaluating Arguments
Summary
Chapter 3. Reconstructing and Identifying Deductive Arguments
1. Identifying by Evaluating
2. Mapping Complex Arguments
3. Reconstructing by Connecting the Dots
4. Extra Help: Premise and Conclusion Indicators
5. Putting All This Together
Summary
Part II: Induction
Chapter 4: Inductive Arguments
1. Statistical Syllogism
Conditional Support Comes in Degrees
Undermining By Additional Information and the Requirement of Total Evidence
2. Defeaters and Mapping Inductive Arguments
3. Inductive Generalization
Defeaters for Inductive Generalizations
The Availability Heuristic
4. Argument from Analogy
Defeaters for Analogical Inference
Deductive Arguments with Analogical Premises
5. Inference to the Best Explanation
6. Balance of Features
7. Confirmation Bias
Summary
Chapter 5: Causal Inference
1. The Nature of Causation
One More Thing about Causation
2. "The" Cause? Singling out Causes in a Complex World
3. Identifying Causes
4. Causation, Correlation, and Confounds
Some Varieties of Causal Investigations
Better and Worse
5. Causal Narratives
6. Singular Causes Revisited
Summary
Chapter 6: Probability and Frequency
1. Introduction to Probability
Probabilities and System 1
2. Frequencies and Frequency Trees
3. The Probability Calculus
4. Bayes’s Theorem
The Theorem
Frequency Trees and Bayes
5. Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
"Averages"
How to Live
Effect Size and Effect Significance
Summary
Chapter 7: Reconstructing and Identifying Arguments, Revisited
1. Reconstructing and Identifying
2. Mapping More Complex Arguments
Part III: Truth: Evaluating Premises
Chapter 8: Testimony
1. The Need for Testimony
2. How Can you Spot the Experts if You’re Not an Expert?
Sincerity, Competence, Trustworthiness
Mapping Arguments from Authority
Testimony and Ad Hominem
3. Epistemological Perils of the Internet
News, Unreliable News, and Fake News
4. Wikipedia
5. Fair and Balanced?
Summary
Chapter 9: Science
1. Disagreeing with Science: The Earth is Flat and Star Trek is Real
2. Why Trust Science?
3. How Does Science Work?
Provability
Falsifiability
4. Hypotheses, Theories, and Conjectures
5. Extended Example: Evolution and Historical Explanation
6. Science in the Non-Science Press
P-hacking
7. Applying What We’ve Learned: Crowds, Self-selection, and Causal Fallacies
Democracy and Scientific Fact
Summary
Part IV: Argumentation
Chapter 10: Rhetoric
1. Emotion and Belief
2. Influencing and Bypassing Reasoning
Apt Feelings
3. Abuses of Emotive Rhetoric
Ad hominem
Ad Populum and Peer Pressure
Appeals to Force, Pity and Consequences
Other Uses of Emotive Language
4. Rhetorical Tricks with Language
5. Enthymemes, again
6. Rhetoric and Cognitive Illusion
Summary
Chapter 11: Dialectic
1. The Dynamics of Argumentation
The First Golden Rule of Constructive Argumentation: Respond to the Argument
The Second Golden Rule: Track the Burden of Proof
The Third Golden Rule: Demand Overall Consistency
The Fourth Golden Rule: Be Charitable
2. Ultimate Premises
Depriving the Claimant of Premises
3. Analogy, Parity of Reasoning, and Tu Quoque
Summary
Appendix of Fallacies
Index