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This book aims to improve real-world critical thinking.Traditional critical thinking texts neglect two crucial facts. First, as psychologists have shown, many of our mistakes are caused not by faulty formal reasoning but because we bypass it in favor of intuitive, often unreliable heuristics. Second, good critical thinking requires not only the proper assessment of inference but also of our premises: the evaluation of information sources is of fundamental importance, especially in this internet 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 circumnavigate, their natural intellectual blind spots. It also incorporates insights from epistemology and philosophy of science to formulate best practices for assessing information sources on the internet and other media. The result is a practical, hands-on primer for real-world critical thinking.The authors bring more than five combined decades of classroom experience to the subject, covering the usual core topics of deductive, inductive, causal, and probabilistic inference, argument identification, reconstruction, and diagramming, while also extending the text's scope to include testimony, the nature and credibility of science, rhetoric, and dialectical argumentation.The Second Edition further develops and refines these innovations, combining in-depth discussion of “fake news” and conspiracy theories with exercises and projects designed to teach broadly applicable source assessment skills. There is also a more nuanced positive account of science that emphasizes its continuity with commonsense causal reasoning. For instructors, there are additional online resources, notably banks of exam questions with solutions and various class projects.Key Features: Uses contemporary psychological explanations and remedies for pervasive errors in belief formation. No other critical thinking text generally applies this psychological approach Rigorously addresses the evaluation of premises based on testimony, in particular the testimony of internet sources Carefully explains the concept of validity, paying particular attention to distinguishing logical possibility from other species of possibility Uses frequency trees as a simple and reliable alternative to more complicated Bayesian methods Uses arguments maps, which improve students'reasoning and argument evaluation Key Updates to the Second Edition: Expanded discussion of the psychology of reasoning and belief, including treatment of motivated reasoning Uses a conventional truth-table–based approach to propositional logic while incorporating a more intuitive, psychologically informed approach to the logic of conditionals New Summary Boxes Enhanced treatment of testimony, with an expanded discussion of fake news, conspiracy theories, and the application of general epistemic principles to navigate the extremes of gullibility and unmotivated skepticism. New exercises that emphasize practical, hands-on source assessment skills An improved discussion of the nature of science emphasizing the central role of causal inference and the multi-generational, cumulative character of scientific knowledge A new Index of Arguments, summarizing the most common argument forms and associated defeaters for the inductive forms New online content, including exams and additional questions (plus solutions), suitable for upload to course management software (e.g., Blackboard, etc.) For online resources suitable for students and instructors, please see the appropriate link on the book's Routledge web page: www.routledge.com/9781032317281

Why 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: Uses contemporary psychological explanations of, and remedies for, pervasive errors in belief formation. There is no other critical thinking text that generally applies this psychological approach. Assesses premises, notably premises based on the testimony of others, and evaluation of news and other information sources. No other critical thinking textbook gives detailed treatment of this crucial topic. Typically, they only provide a few remarks about when to accept expert opinion / argument from authority. Carefully explains the concept of validity, paying particular attention in distinguishing logical possibility from other species of possibility, and demonstrates how we may mistakenly judge invalid arguments as valid because of belief bias. Instead of assessing an argument's validity using formal/mathematical methods (i.e., truth tables for propositional logic and Venn diagrams for categorical logic), provides one technique that is generally applicable: explicitly showing that it is impossible to make the conclusion false and the premises true together. For instructors who like the more formal approach, the text also includes standard treatments using truth tables and Venn diagrams. Uses frequency trees and the frequency approach to probability more generally, a simple method for understanding and evaluating quite complex probabilistic information Uses arguments maps, which have been shown to significantly improve students'reasoning and argument evaluation