A Critical Thinking Workbook: Formal and Informal Reasoning communicates the necessity of organized and structured thinking and writing in students’ lives.
A Critical Thinking Workbook grabs the student’s attention early in the text by assuming his/her informal familiarity with the structure of ordinary language and uses it to expose the logical skeleton lying underneath the camouflaging layers of writing style and rhetorical flourish. The student is then introduced to the semantic method of truth tables and the synaptic method of natural proof theory as distinct methods of proving deductive validity. Finally, students are introduced to natural language fallacies and inductive logic.
A Critical Thinking Workbook:
- is written in a friendly and encouraging style.
- introduces the reader into the world of propositional logic, argument presentation, truth tables, natural proof theory, natural language fallacies, and inductive logic.
Acknowledgments
Chapter One: Logos and Critical Thinking
1-1 Thinking Critically
1-2 What is Critical Thinking?
1-3 Why Critical Thinking Needs to be Studied
1-4 Benefits and Dangers of Critical Thinking
1-5 Arguments and Natural Language
1-6 The Building Blocks of Arguments: Words, Sentences, and Propositions
1-7 Definitions
Chapter Two: Propositional Logic
2-1 Distinguishing Between Kinds of Propositions
2-2 Conjunctions
2-3 Disjunctions
2-4 Making Negation
2-5 Careful Punctuation
2-6 Conditionals
2-7 Bi-conditionals
Chapter Three: Argument Reconstruction and Analysis
3-1 Identifying Premises and Conclusions
3-2 Reconstructing Arguments
3-3 Arrow Diagrams
3-4 Missing Premises
Chapter Four: Inductive Arguments
4-1 Induction and Deduction
4-2 Enumerative Induction
4-3 Polls
4-4 Analogies
4-5 Causal Arguments
Chapter Five: Deductive Arguments
5-1 Validity and Invalidity, Soundness and Unsoundness
5-2 Some Valid Argument Forms: Modus Ponens, Modus Tollens, Hypothetical Syllogism, and Disjunctive Syllogism
5-3 Some Invalid Argument Forms: Affirming the Consequent, Denying the Antecedent, and Affirming The Disjunct
5-4 Proving Invalidity Through Counter-Example
5-5 Natural Language Argument Analysis and Disagreement
Chapter Six: Natural Language Fallacies
6-1 Fallacies of Natural Language
6-2 Fallacies of Relevance
6-3 Fallacies of Structure
Chapter Seven: Categorical Propositions
7-1 Standard Form Categorical Propositions
7-2 Translating Sentences into Standard and Categorical Form
7-3 The Square of Opposition
7-4 Immediate Inference
7-5 Distribution
Chapter Eight: Categorical Syllogisms
8-1 Major, Minor, and Middle Terms
8-2 Syllogistic Moods and Figures
8-3 The Venn Diagram Method
8-4 Diagraming Categorical Syllogisms
8-5 The Rules of Syllogistic Validity
8-6 Enthymemes
Chapter Nine: Truth Tables for Propositions, Consistency, and Equivalency
9-1 Truth Tables for the Logical Connectives
9-2 A Note on Parentheses and Truth Tables for Complex Propositions
9-3 Consistency
9-4 Equivalence
9-5 Some Useful Equivalencies
Chapter Ten: Truth Table Analysis of Argument Validity and Invalidity
10-1 Truth Table Test for Truth-Functional Validity
10-2 Modus Ponens, Modus Tollens, and Hypothetical Syllogisms
10-3 Disjunctive Syllogismss
10-4 Some Tricks of the Trade
Chapter Eleven: Natural Deduction, the Rules of Inference, and the Rules of Replacement
11-1 The Rules of Inference
11-2 Natural Deduction in Action
11-3 The Rules of Replacement
11-4 The Rules of Replacement Identified
11-5 The Rules of Replacement in Action
Appendix A
The Rules of Inference
Appendix B
The Rules of Replacement
GLOSSARY
INDEX
