Critical Reasoning: A User's Manual (Southworth and Swoyer)
- Page ID
- 94990
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Teaching critical reasoning is difficult. So is learning to reason more carefully and accurately. The greatest challenge is teaching (and learning) skills in such a way that students can spontaneously apply them outside the classroom once the course is over (teaching people to apply skills in the classroom can be hard enough, but clearly isn’t a worthwhile goal in itself).
Front Matter
1: Basic Concepts of Critical Thinking
2: Arguments
3: Conditionals and Conditional Arguments
4: Perception- Expectation and Inference
5: Evaluating Sources of Information
6: The Internet - Finding and Evaluating Information Online
7: Memory and Reasoning
8: Memory II- Pitfalls and Remedies
9: Emotions and Reasoning
10: Relevance, Irrelevance, and Fallacies
11: Fallacies- Common Ways of Reasoning Badly
12: Induction in the Real World
13: Rules for Calculating Probabilities
14: Conditional Probabilities
15: Samples and Correlations
16: Applications and Pitfalls
17: Heuristics and Biases
18: More Biases, Pitfalls, and Traps
19: Cognitive Dissonance- Psychological Inconsistency
20: Critical Reasoning and the Scientific Method
21: Risk
22: Social Influences on Thinking
23: The Power of the Situation
24: Reasoning in Groups
25: Stereotypes and Prejudices
26: Social Dilemmas
27: Diagrammatic Reasoning- Using Pictures to Think
28: Recognizing Where Cognitive Tools Apply- Cues, Transfer, and Habits
29: Application to Metaphysics
30: Application to Epistemology
31: Application to Ethics
32: Formal Logic, Symbolization and Negation Manipulation
33: Truth Tables
34: Appendix
Back Matter
Thumbnail: Logic is the art of combining smaller arguments (premises) into a bigger argument, not unlike a jigsaw puzzle. (Pixabay license; PIRO via Pixabay)