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| Preface | |
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| Deciding What to Believe | |
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| Critical Reasoning Versus Passive Reading or Listening | |
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| Critical Reasoning Versus Mere Disagreement | |
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| Critical Reasoning as a Cooperative Enterprise | |
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| Some Common Misconceptions About Critical Reasoning | |
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| Benefits of Critical Reasoning | |
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| The Main Techniques of Critical Reasoning | |
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| The Anatomy of Arguments: Identifying Premises and Conclusions | |
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| The Key to Identification: Seeing What Is Supported by What | |
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| Clues to Identifying Argument Part s: Indicator Words | |
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| Marking the Part s of Arguments | |
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| What to Do When There Are No Indicator Words | |
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| The Principle of Charitable Interpretation | |
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| Patterns of Argument | |
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| Identifying Premises and Conclusions in Longer Passages | |
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| Understanding Arguments Through Reconstruction | |
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| Understanding Arguments by Identifying Implicit Conclusions | |
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| Understanding Arguments by Identifying Implicit Premises | |
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| Adding Both Conclusion and Premises | |
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| Guidelines and Warnings about Adding Implicit Premises and Conclusions | |
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| Moving to Real World Discourse | |
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| Simplifying and Paraphrasing | |
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| Finding an Argument in a Sea of Words | |
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| Reconstructing Arguments with Subordinate Conclusions | |
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| Evaluating Arguments: Some Basic Questions | |
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| When Does the Conclusion Follow from the Premises? | |
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| The Counterexample Method of Showing that an Argument's Conclusion Does Not Follow | |
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| When Should the Premises Be Accepted as True? | |
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| Sample Appraisals: Examples of Techniques of Criticism | |
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| Some Special Cases: Arguments That We Should or Should Not Do Something | |
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| The Rationale for Using These Critical Techniques | |
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| When Does the Conclusion Follow? | |
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| A More Formal Approach to Validity (Optional) | |
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| Statements Containing Logical Connectives: When are They True | |
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| When are They False? | |
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| Truth Tables as a Test for Validity | |
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| Testing Validity of Arguments Containing Quantifiers | |
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| A More Formal Way of Representing Statements with Quantifiers | |
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| A Glimpses at Natural Deduction | |
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| Fallacies: Bad Arguments that Tend to Persuade | |
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| Persuasiveness: Legitimate and Illegitimate | |
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| Types of Persuasive Fallacies | |
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| Distraction Fallacies: False Dilemma, Slippery Slope, Straw Man | |
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| Resemblance Fallacies: Affirming the Consequent Denying the Antecedent, Equivocation, and Begging the Question | |
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| Review | |
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| Emotion and Reason in Argument | |
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| When Is an Emotional Appeal Illegitimate? | |
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| Emotion Fallacies: Appeal to Force and Appeal to Pity, Prejudicial Language | |
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| Emotion and Resemblance Combined: Appeal to Authority and Attacking the Person | |
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| Note on Terminology | |
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| Review | |
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| "That Depends On What You Mean BY..." | |
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| Unclear Expressions in the Premises: Looking for Shifts in Meaning | |
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| The Possibility of Misleading Definition | |
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| Kinds of Unclarity: Vagueness and Ambiguity | |
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| Interpreting and Evaluating: A Dialogue Process | |
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| Argument and Definition | |
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| Evaluating Definition-like Premises | |
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| Reconstructing Conceptual Theories | |
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| A Model for Conceptual Theories | |
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| Reconstructing Fragmentary Theories | |
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| The Criticism of Conceptual Theories | |
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| Conceptual Clarification and Argument | |
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| Review | |
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| Arguments That Are Not Deductive | |
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| Induction And Statistical Reasoning | |
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| Two Types of Inductive Arguments | |
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| Deductive versus Nondeductive Arguments | |
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| Criticizing Arguments that Generalize: Sampling Arguments | |
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| Attacking the Premises (Disputing the Data) | |
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| Questioning the Representativeness of the Sample | |
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| Pointing to a Shift in the Unit of Analysis | |
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| Challenging the Truth of the Conclusion | |
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| Summary of Criticisms | |
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| Arguments with Statistical Premises | |
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| Criticism of Arguments with Statistical Premises | |
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| Identifying Inductive and Deductive Arguments in Natural Prose Passages | |
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| Review: Types of Inductive Arguments | |
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| Causal, Analogical, And Convergent Arguments: Three More Kinds Of Nondeductive Reasoning | |
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| Causal Generalization | |
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| Five Ways in which Causal Reasoning Might Fail | |
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| Supporting Causal Arguments | |
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| Problems with Generalizing Causal Claims | |
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| Arguments from Analogy | |
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| Convergent Arguments | |
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| Evaluation of Convergent versus Deductive Arguments | |
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| Representing Convergent Arguments and Counter-considerations | |
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| Applying Criticism to Convergent Arguments with Counter-Considerations: A Four-Step Process | |
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| Explanation and the Criticism of Theories | |
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| "That's Just a Theory." Picking Out Theories | |
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| Criticism of Theories | |
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| First-Stage Criticisms--Plausible Alternative | |
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| Doubtful Predictions | |
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| Review of Techniques for Criticizing Theories | |
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| Putting it all Together: Six Steps to Understanding and Evaluating Arguments | |
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| A Sample Application of the Six-Step Procedure | |
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| A Second Sample Application of the Six-Step Procedure | |
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| Making Reasonable Decisions as An Amateur In A World Of Specialists | |
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| Leaving It to the Experts | |
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| The Dilemma | |
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| Coping with the Dilemma | |
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| Creating Arguments and Theories in a World of Experts | |
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| The Strategy and Its Prospects | |
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| Can Information Technology Dissolve the Dilemma? | |
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| The Contemporary Problem of Knowledge | |
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| Glossary | |
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| Answers to Selected Exercises | |
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| Index | |