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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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| The Attitude of the Critical Reasoner | |
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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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| Taking Notice of Disagreements and Reasoning | |
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| The Main Techniques of Critical Reasoning | |
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| A Beginning Step: Identifying Main Points and Supporting Points | |
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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 Parts: Indicator Words | |
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| Techniques for Marking the Parts of Arguments | |
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| What to Do When There Are No Indicator Words: The Principle of Charitable Interpretation | |
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| Using the Principle of Charitable Interpretation to Pick Out Premises and Conclusions in Arguments Without Explicit Indicator Words | |
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| Patterns of Argument | |
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| Using Argument Patterns to Pick Out Premises and Conclusions in Arguments Without Explicit Indicator Words | |
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| Identifying Premises and Conclusions in Longer Passages | |
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| Reconstructing Explicit Arguments 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 in Adding Implicit Premises and Conclusions | |
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| Recognizing Argument Patterns and Adding Implicit Premises, Conclusions, or Both | |
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| Moving to Real-World Discourse | |
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| Simplification and Paraphrasing: Making a First Approximation | |
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| Finding an Argument in a Sea of Words | |
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| Putting All This into Practice | |
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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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| Showing Invalidity | |
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| When Should the Premises Be Accepted As True? | |
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| Casting Doubt on Premises | |
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| Sample Appraisals: Examples of Techniques of Criticism | |
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| Distinguishing the Validity of an Argument (That Is, Whether the Conclusion Follows) from the Truth of Its Premises | |
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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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| Criticizing Arguments | |
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| When Does the Conclusion Follow? A More Formal Approach to Validity | |
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| Formalizing | |
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| Statements Containing Logical Connectives: When Are They True? When Are They False? | |
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| Evaluating Statements | |
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| Truth Tables As a Test for Validity | |
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| Truth Tables | |
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| Representing Structures Within Statements: Predicates and Quantifiers | |
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| (Optional) A More Formal Way of Representing Statements with Quantifiers | |
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| Venn Diagrams | |
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| A Glimpse at Natural Deduction | |
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| Fallacies: Bad Arguments That Tend to Persuade | |
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| Persuasiveness | |
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| What Is a Fallacy? | |
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| Distraction Fallacies: False Dilemma, Slippery Slope, Straw Man | |
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| Identifying Distraction Fallacies | |
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| Resemblance Fallacies: Affirming the Consequent, Denying the Antecedent, Equivocation, Begging the Question | |
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| Review | |
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| Identifying Distraction and Resemblance Fallacies | |
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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, Appeal to Pity, Prejudicial Language | |
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| Identifying Emotion Fallacies | |
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| Emotion and Resemblance Combined: Appeal to Authority, Attacking the Person | |
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| Note on Terminology | |
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| Review | |
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| A Comprehensive Review of Fallacies | |
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| Fallacious or Not? | |
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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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| Criticizing Arguments That Contain Unclear Words or Expressions | |
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| Argument and Definition | |
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| Evaluating Definition-like Premises | |
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| Conceptual Theories | |
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| A Model for Conceptual Theories | |
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| Reconstructing Fragmentary Theories | |
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| Reconstructing Conceptual Theories | |
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| The Criticism of Conceptual Theories | |
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| Criticism of Conceptual Theories | |
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| Conceptual Clarification and Argument | |
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| Reconstructing and Criticizing Conceptual Theories and Arguments Based on Them | |
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| Arguments That Are Not Deductive: Induction and Statistical Reasoning | |
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| Two Types of Inductive Arguments | |
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| Inductive Versus Deductive Arguments | |
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| Generalizations, Descriptions of Particulars, and Inductive Arguments | |
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| Criticizing Arguments That Generalize: Sampling Arguments | |
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| Criticizing Sampling Arguments | |
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| Arguments with Statistical Premises | |
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| Criticizing Arguments with Statistical Premises | |
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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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| The Controlled Experiment: Handling the X-Factor | |
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| What Happens If Control Is Limited? | |
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| The Faulty Move from Correlation to Cause | |
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| Arguments from Analogy | |
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| Criticizing Arguments from Analogy | |
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| Convergent Arguments | |
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| Reconstructing and Criticizing Convergent Arguments | |
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| Review: Types of Nondeductive Arguments | |
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| Explanation and the Criticism of Theories | |
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| "That's Just a Theory" | |
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| Picking Out Theories | |
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| Identifying Theories and Regularities | |
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| Criticism of Theories | |
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| First-Stage Criticisms-Plausible Alternative; Doubtful Predictions | |
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| Applying First-Stage Criticisms to Theories | |
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| Second-Stage Criticisms-ad Hoc Defense; Untestability | |
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| Applying Second-Stage Criticisms to Theories | |
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| Review of Techniques for Criticizing Theories | |
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| Criticizing Empirical Theories in Longer Passages | |
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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 Application: A Convergent Argument Contained in a Linked Argument | |
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| Applying the Six-Step Procedure | |
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| Putting It All Together in the Classroom: "Fishbowl" Discussions and Critical Exchanges | |
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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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| Case Study for Individual Writing Exercise of Group Discussion | |
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| Glossary | |
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| Answers to Selected Exercises | |