Critical thinking a concise guide

Includes glossary.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preface to the first edition -- Preface to the second edition -- Preface to the third edition -- Introduction and preview -- Introducing arguments -- Linguistic phenomena and rhetorical ploys -- Logic: deductive validity -- Logic: inductive force -- The practice of argument-reconstruction -- Issues in argument assessment -- Pseudo-reasoning -- Truth knowledge and belief.

Critical thinking: a concise guide is a much-needed guide to argument analysis and a clear introduction to thinking clearly and rationally for oneself. Through precise and accessible discussion this book equips students with the essential skills required to tell a good argument from a bad one. This third edition has been revised and updated throughout, with new exercises, and up-to-date topical examples, including: "real-world" arguments; practical reasoning; understanding quantitative data, statistics, and the rhetoric used about them; scientific reasoning; and expanded discussion of conditionals, ambiguity, vagueness, slippery slope arguments, and arguments by analogy.