ABSTRACT

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.

Key features of the book are:

  • clear, jargon-free discussion of key concepts in argumentation
  • how to avoid common confusions surrounding words such as ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘opinion’
  • how to identify and evaluate the most common types of argument
  • how to spot fallacies in arguments and tell good reasoning from bad
  • chapter summaries, glossaries and useful exercises.

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.

The Routledge Critical Thinking companion website, features a wealth of further resources, including examples and case studies, sample questions, practice questions and answers, and student activities.

Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide is essential reading for anyone, student or professional, at work or in the classroom, seeking to improve their reasoning and arguing skills.

chapter |2 pages

introduction and preview

chapter 1|24 pages

introducing arguments

chapter 2|28 pages

language and rhetoric

chapter 3|34 pages

logic: deductive validity

chapter 4|29 pages

logic: inductive force

chapter 5|51 pages

the practice of argument-reconstruction

chapter 6|33 pages

issues in argument-assessment

chapter 7|40 pages

pseudo-reasoning

chapter 8|24 pages

truth, knowledge and belief