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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 | |