SciTech-Logic:逻辑学-Critical Thinking:批判性思维: 专有名词解释

SciTech-Logic:逻辑学-Critical Thinking:批判性思维: 专有名词解释

大学版: Critical Thinking:

A Students Introduction,

7th Edition(ISBN9781264296064)

By Gregory Bassham, William Irwin, Henry Nardone and James Wallace

2023

A Personal Word to Students

Preface

Chapter 1 Introduction to Critical Thinking 1

What Is Critical Thinking?

Critical Thinking Standards

The Benefits of Critical Thinking

Barriers to Critical Thinking

Qualities of a Critical Thinker

Chapter 2 Recognizing Arguments

What Is an Argument?

Identifying Premises and Conclusions

What Is Not an Argument?

Chapter 3 Basic Logical Concepts

Deduction and Induction

How Can We Tell Whether an Argument Is Deductive or Inductive?

Common Patterns of Deductive Reasoning

Common Patterns of Inductive Reasoning

Deductive Validity

Inductive Strength

Chapter 4 Language

Finding the Right Words: The Need for Precision

The Importance of Precise Definitions

Emotive Language: Slanting the Truth

Euphemisms and Political Correctness

Chapter 5 Logical Fallacies—I

The Concept of Relevance

Fallacies of Relevance

Chapter 6 Logical Fallacies—II

Fallacies of Insufficient Evidence

Chapter 7 Analyzing Arguments

Diagramming Short Arguments

Summarizing Longer Arguments

Chapter 8 Evaluating Arguments and Truth Claims

When Is an Argument a Good One?

When Is It Reasonable to Accept a Premise?

Refuting Arguments

Chapter 9 A Little Categorical Logic

Categorical Statements

Translating into Standard Categorical Form

Categorical Syllogisms

Chapter 10 A Little Propositional Logic

Conjunction

Conjunction and Validity

Negation 272

Deeper Analysis of Negation and Conjunction

Disjunction

Conditional Statements

Chapter 11 Inductive Reasoning

Introduction to Induction

Inductive Generalizations

Statistical Arguments

Induction and Analogy

Induction and Causal Arguments

A Few Words about Probability

Chapter 12 Finding, Evaluating, and Using Sources

Finding Sources

Evaluating Informational Sources

Taking Notes

Using Sources

Chapter 13 Writing Argumentative Essays

Writing a Successful Argument

Before You Write

Writing the First Draft

After the First Draft

Chapter 14 Thinking Critically about the Media

Mass Media and Social Media

The News

News Media Bias

Media Literacy

Advertising

Chapter 15 Science and Pseudoscience

The Basic Pattern of Scientific Reasoning

The Limitations of Science

How to Distinguish Science from Pseudoscience

A Case Study in Pseudoscientific Thinking: Astrology

Appendix: The Six Habits of Effective Problem Solvers A-1

Answers to Selected Exercises ANS-1

Index I-1

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL THINKING

This book is about the power of disciplined thinking.

It's about learning to think for yourself and being your own person.

It's about the personal empowerment and enrichment that result from learning to use your mind to its fullest potential.

In short, it's about critical thinking.

Critical thinking is what a college education is all about.

• In many high schools, the emphasis tends to be on "lower-order thinking."
  
  Students are simply expected passively absorb information and then repeat it back on tests.
• In college, by contrast, the emphasis is on fostering "higher-order thinking": the active, intelligent to evaluation of ideas and information.

This doesn't mean that factual information and rote learning are ignored in college.

But it is not the main goal of a college education to teach students what to think.

The main goal is to teach students how to think - that is, how to become independent, self-directed thinkers and learners.

We live in exciting, fast-changing times. With the click of a mouse or the tap of a finger, each of us has instant access to a world of thoughtful, well-reasoned analysis, or to a sewer of bigotry and illogic.

In terms of critical-thinking opportunities and challenges, we live in "the best of times" and "the worst of times."

Never before, has it been so important, therefore, to study critical thinking and master its vital lessons.

Criticism lies at the very heart of education.

• Robert Paul Wolff

The purpose, which runs through and strengthens all other educational purposes, the common thread of education is the development of the ability to think.

• Educational Commission Policies

WHAT IS CRITICAL THINKING?

• Often when we use the word critical we mean "negative and fault-finding." This is the sense we have in mind, for example, when we complain about a parent or a friend who we think is unfairly critical of what we do or say.
• But critical also means "involving or exercising skilled judgment or observation." In this sense, critical thinking means thinking clearly and intelligently.
• More precisely, critical thinking is the general term given to a wide range of cognitive skills and intellectual dispositions needed to effectively **identify**, **analyze**, and **evaluate** arguments and truth claims;
  • to discover and overcome personal preconceptions and biases;
  • to formulate and present convincing reasons in support of conclusions;
  • to make reasonable, intelligent decisions about what to believe and what to do.

Put somewhat differently, critical thinking is disciplined thinking governed by clear intellectual standards. Among the most important of these intellectual standards are:

clarity, precision, accuracy, relevance, consistency, logical correctness, completeness, and fairness.'

Let's begin our introduction to critical thinking by looking briefly at each of these important critical thinking standards.

CRITICALTHINKING STANDARDS

Clarity

Everything thatcan be said,

can be said clearly.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

Before we can effectively evaluate a person's argument or claim, we need to understand clearly what he or she is saying.

Unfortunately, that can be difficult, because people often fail to express themselves clearly.

• Sometimes this lack of clarity is due to laziness, carelessness, or a lack of skill.
• At other times, it results from a misguided effort to appear clever, learned or profound.

Consider the following passage from philosopher Martin Heidegger's influential but notoriously obscure book 'Being and Time':

Temporality makes possible the unity of existence, facticity, and falling, and in this way constitutes primordially the totality of the structure of care. The items of care have not been pieced together cumulatively any more than temporality itself has been put together "in the course of time"["mit der Zeit"] out of the future, the having been, and the Present. Temporality "is" not an entity at all. It is not, but it temporalizes itself.... Temporality temporalizes, and indeed it temporalizes possible ways of itself. These make possible the multiplicity of Dasein's modes of Being, and especially the basic possibility of authentic or inauthentic existence.

That may be profound, or it may be nqonsense, or it may be both.

Whatever exactly it is, it is quite needlessly obscure.

As William Strunk Jr.and E.B. White remark in their classic 'The Elements of Style',

"[M]uddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also a destroyer of life, of hope: death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heart- break among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter... ."

Only by paying careful attention to language can we avoid such needless miscommunications and disappointments.

Critical thinkers not only strive for clarity of language but also seek maximum clarity of thought.

As self-help books constantly remind us, to achieve our personal goals in life, we need:

• a clear conception of our goals and priorities,
• a realistic grasp of our abilities,
• a clear understanding of the problems and opportunities we face.

Such self-understanding can be achieved only if we value and pursue the clarity of thought.

Precision

Detective stories contain some of the most interesting examples of critical thinking in fiction.

The most famous fictional sleuth is, of course, Sherlock Holmes, the immortal creation of British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In Doyle's stories, Holmes is often able to solve complex mysteries when the bungling detectives from Scotland Yard haven't so much as a clue.

What is the secret of his success? An extraordinary commitment to precision.

• First, by careful and highly trained observation,
  
  Holmes is able to discover clues that others have overlooked.
• Then, by a process of precise logical inference,
  
  he is able to reason from those clues to discover the solution to the mystery.

A constant exercise of the discipline of precise thought makes for more lucid and exact thinking.

• John Hick

Everyone recognizes the importance of precision in specialized fields,

such as medicine, mathematics, architecture, and engineering.

Critical thinkers also understand the importance of precise thinking in daily life.

They understand that to cut through the confusions and uncertainties that surround many everyday problems and issues, it is often necessary to insist on precise answers to precise questions:

• What exactly is the problem we're facing?
• What exactly are the alternatives?
• What exactly are the advantages and disadvantages of each alternative?

Only when we habitually seek such precision are we truly critical thinkers.

Accuracy

No one can navigate well through life without an accurate map by which to steer.

Knowledge is the possession of such a map,

and truth is what the map gives us, linking us to reality.

-Tom Morris

There is a well-known saying about computers: "Garbage in, garbage out." Simply put,

this means that if you put bad information into a computer, bad information is exactly what you will get out of it. Much the same is true of human thinking.

No matter how brilliant you may be, you're almost guaranteed to make bad decisions if your decisions are based on false information. A good example of this is provided by America's long and costly involvement in Vietnam.

The policymakers who embroiled us in that conflict were not stupid.

On the contrary, they were, in journalist David Halberstam's oft-quoted phrase, "the best and the brightest" of their generation.

Of course, the reasons for their repeated failures of judgment are complex and controversial; but much of the blame, historians agree, must be placed on false and inadequate information: ignorance of Vietnamese history and culture, an exaggerated estimate of the strategic importance of Vietnam and Southeast Asia, false assumptions about the degree of popular support in South Vietnam, unduly optimistic assessments of the "progress" of the war, and so forth.

Had American policymakers taken greater pains to learn the truth about such matters, it is likely they would not have made the poor decisions they did.

Critical thinkers don't merely value the truth; they have a passion for accurate, timely information.

As citizens, consumers, workers, and parents, they strive to make decisions that are as informed as possible.

In the spirit of Socrates' famous statement that the unexamined life is not worth living,

they never stop learning, growing, and inquiring.

Relevance

No tedious and irrelevant discussion can be allowed;

what is said should be pertinent.

• Plato

Anyone who has ever sat through a boring school assembly or watched a mud-slinging political debate can appreciate the importance of staying focused on relevant ideas and information.

A favorite debaters' trick is to try to distract an audience's attention by raising an irrelevant issue.

Even Abraham Lincoln wasn't above such tricks, as the following story told by his law partner illustrates:

In a case where Judge [Stephen T.] Logan-always earnest and grave-opposed him, Lincoln created no little merriment by his reference to Logan's style of dress. He carried the surprise in store for the latter, till he reached his turn before the jury. Addressing them, he said: "Gentlemen, you must be careful and not permit yourselves to be overcome by the eloquence of counsel for the defense. Judge Logan, I know, is an effective lawyer. I have met him too often to doubt that; but shrewd and careful though he be, still he is sometimes wrong. Since this trial has begun I have discovered that, with all his caution and fastidiousness, he hasn't knowledge enough to put his shirt on right." Logan turned red as crimson, but sure enough, Lincoln was correct, for the former had donned a new shirt, and by mistake had drawn it over his head with the pleated bosom behind. The general laugh which followed destroyed the effect of Logan's eloquence over the jury-the very point at which Lincoln aimed.

Lincoln's ploy was entertaining and succeeded in distracting the jury,

Had the jurors been thinking critically, however, they would have realized that carelessness about one's clothing has no logical relevance to the strength of one's arguments.

Consistency

The guiding principle of rational behavior is consistency.

-Deborah J. Bennett

It is easy to see why consistency is essential to critical thinking.

Logic tells us that if a person holds inconsistent beliefs, at least one of those beliefs must be false.

Critical thinkers prize truth and so are constantly on the lookout for inconsistencies,

both in their own thinking and in the arguments and assertions of others.

• There are two kinds of inconsistency that we should avoid.

  • One is logical inconsistency, which involves saying or believing inconsistent things.(i.e., things that cannot both or all be true) about a particular matter.
  • The other is practical inconsistency, which involves saying one thing and doing another.

• Sometimes people are fully aware that their words conflict with their deeds.
  
  The politician who cynically breaks her campaign promises once she takes office, the TV evangelist caught in an extramarital affair, the drug counselor arrested for peddling drugs -- such people are hypocrites pure and simple. From a critical thinking point of view, such examples are not especially interesting. As a rule, they involve failures of character to a greater degree than they do failures of critical reasoning.

• More interesting from a critical thinking standpoint are cases in which people are not fully aware that their words conflict with their deeds.

  Such cases highlight an important lesson of critical thinking:
  
  that human beings often display a remarkable capacity for self-deception.

Author Harold Kushner cites an all-too-typical example:

Ask the average person which is more important to him, making money or being devoted to his family, and virtually everyone will answer family without hesitation.

But watch how the average person actually lives out his life. See where he really invests his time and energy, and he will give away the fact that, he really does not live by what he says he believes.

He has let himself be persuaded that if he leaves for work earlier in the morning and comes home more tired at night, he is proving how devoted he is to his family by expending himself to provide them with all the things they have seen advertised.

Critical thinking helps us become aware of such unconscious practical inconsistencies, allowing us to deal with them on a conscious and rational basis.

beliefs about a particular subject. In fact, as Socrates pointed out long ago, such It is also common, of course, for people to unknowingly hold inconsistent

holding a variety of views that imply that it is not relative. Critical thinking helps unconscious logical inconsistency is far more common than most people suspect. As we shall see, for example, many today claim that “morality is relative,” while us recognize such logical inconsistencies or, still better, avoid them altogether.

Speaking of Inconsistency

Philosophy professor Kenneth R. Merrill offers the following tongue-in-cheek advice for writers.

What kind of inconsistency does Merrill commit?

1. Watch your spelling. Writters who mispele a lott of words are propperly reguarded as iliterate.
   
   2.Don't forget the apostrophe where its needed, but don't stick it in where theres no need for it.
   
   A writers reputation hangs on such trifle's
2. Don't exaggerate. Overstatement always causes infinite harm.
3. Beware of the dangling participle.
   
   Forgetting this admonition, infelicitous phrases creep into our writing.
4. Clichs should be avoided like the plague.
   
   However, hackneyed language is not likely to be a problem for the writer who,
   
   since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, has built a better mousetrap and has kept his shoulder to the wheel.
5. Keep your language simple. Eschew sesquipedalian locutions and fustian rhetoric.
   
   Stay clear of the crepuscularnay, tenebrific and fuliginous-regions of orotund sonorities.
6. Avoid vogue words. Hopefully, the writer will remember that her words basically impact the reader at the dynamic interface of creative thought and action. To be viable, the writer's parameters must enable her to engage the knowledgeable reader in a meaningful dialogue - especially at this point in time, when people tend to prioritize their priorities optimally.
7. Avoid profane or abusive language. It is a damned outrage how many knuckle-dragging slobs vilify people they disagree with.

There is a difference between knowing the path and path. walking the

-Morpheus, in The Matrix

Intelligence means a person who can see implications and arrive at conclusions.

-Talmud

高级版: Critical Thinking

ISBN:9781266555732

By Brooke Noel Moore and Richard Parker

1. Driving Blindfolded
2. Reasoning and Arguments
3. Vagueness, Generality, Ambiguity, and Definition
4. Believability of Claims and Credibility of Sources

Application and Notice

1. Linguistic Persuasion Devices
2. Bogus Logos Part I: Relevance Fallacies
3. Bogus Logos Part II: Induction Fallacies
4. Bogus Logos III: Formal Fallacies, Fallacies of Ambiguity, and Fallacies Involving Miscalculating Probabilities

Deductive(演绎)Arguments(论证) + Inductive(归纳)Reasoning(推理)

1. Deductive Arguments I (Natural Deduction): Categorical Logic
2. Deductive Arguments II: Truth-Functional (Sentential) Logic
3. Inductive Reasoning

Reasoning: Moral(道德), Legal(法律), and Aesthetic(审美)

1. Moral, Legal, and Aesthetic Reasoning