Critical Thinking Textbooks

Secondly, and more importantly, I assess the textbooks against a couple of key beliefs, which I shall state upfront: Argument analysis makes explicit the informal judgments involved in natural language reasoning and argumentation.In particular, a good reconstruction uncovers all the hidden assumptions an argument relies on (to make them amenable to critique) and shows, in the same time, which premisses are actually unneeded.

Secondly, and more importantly, I assess the textbooks against a couple of key beliefs, which I shall state upfront: Argument analysis makes explicit the informal judgments involved in natural language reasoning and argumentation.In particular, a good reconstruction uncovers all the hidden assumptions an argument relies on (to make them amenable to critique) and shows, in the same time, which premisses are actually unneeded.

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One of the main challenges in argument reconstruction consists in handling argumentatively opaque and logically confused texts.

Simplistic cases of natural language reasoning may have a role to play in formal logic instructions, but they’re clearly insufficient if you want to learn how to deal with real argumentation.

[5] unpacks and visualizes the structure of arguments as inference diagrams, e.g. Accordingly, the argument is not reconstructed in a way such that its inferences are deductively valid (or inductively strong).

As a result, tacit assumptions of the reasoning are not systematically uncovered.

[1], [2] and [6], in particular, contain sections or chapters devoted to extra-long examples (entire pieces rather than single paragraphs).

[5], however, contains somewhat fewer examples than the other books and doesn’t illustrate analysis techniques equally comprehensively. In terms of didactic concept, [4] differs significantly from all the other textbooks: It starts with a brief introduction of basic methods and then unfolds, in eight chapters, detailed illustrative analyses of complex arguments.So it’s pivotal that a textbook makes use of realistic, sufficiently complex examples.Concerning realistic examples, all books reviewed do fairly well: they discuss many and sufficiently long reasonings.Note, however, that I review the books from a particular perspective and that I don’t necessarily consider each book in its entirety.So, first of all, I focus on those parts that pertain to argument reconstruction only.65): : The premisses and the conclusion are direct quotes from the reconstructed letter. And it’s straightforward to translate the argument map into the standard form used in Argunet, which is also introduced in [5]. 28-29): : there are guards posted at each entrance do not entitle us to conclude that the burglar must have left by the fire escape unless we assume that Reason 3 supports an intermediary conclusion to the effect that no one could leave undetected except by the fire escape.: [6] doesn’t present reconstructed arguments in a standard form at all.Also, the reconstructed argument is neither deductively valid nor inductively strong, and major assumptions (e.g., a principle of practical reasoning or a statement about the side-effects of having a capability for a survivable response) remain implicit. The reasons stated above are direct quotes from the original text (e.g., no logical streamlining, no substantial reformulations so as to repair the inferences).All books devote a chapter or section to the question how to determine whether a text contains an argument at all and, if so, what the argument is supposed to show.They explain the basic technique of using conclusion- and premiss-indicators.While [2] discusses the concept of logical validity and provides a list of inference schemes, arguments are not systematically reconstructed in a deductively valid (or inductively strong) way.[3] reconstructs an argument against genetic engineering as (p.