crıtıcal thınkıng (cid:1) Attempts to persuade us – to believe something, to do something, to buy something – are everywhere. How can we learn to think critically about such attempts and to distinguish those that actually provide us with good reasons for being persuaded? 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. Key features of the book are: • clear, jargon-free discussion of key concepts in argumentation • how to avoid common confusions surrounding words such as ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘opinion’ • how to identify and evaluate the most common types of argument • how to spot fallacies in arguments and tell good reasoning from bad • topical examples from politics, sport, medicine and music; chapter summaries; glossary and exercises throughout. 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. The Routledge Critical Thinking companion website features a wealth of further resources, including examples and case studies, sample questions, practice questions and answers, and student activities. Tracy Bowell is senior lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Gary Kemp is senior lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, UK. Reviews of earlier editions ‘This concise guide offers relevant, rigorous and approachable methods ... The authors focus on analysing and assessing arguments in a thoughtfully structured series of chapters, with clear definitions, a glossary, plenty of examples and some useful exercises.’ Will Ord, Times Educational Supplement ‘In my view this book is the most useful textbook on the market for its stated audience. It provides exceptionally clear explanations, with sufficient technical detail, but without over-complication. It is my first-choice text for teaching critical thinking to first-year undergraduate students.’ Dawn Phillips, University of Southampton ‘...written with actual undergraduates, and the standard mistakes and confusions that they tend to be subject to, clearly borne in mind...’ Helen Beebee, ‘This is the best single text I have seen for addressing the level, presumptions, and interests of the non-specialist.’ Charles Ess, Drury University TRACY BOWELL and GARY KEMP crıtıcal thınkıng A CONCISE GUIDE 3RD EDITION (cid:1) First published 2002 This edition published 2010 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2010 Tracy Bowell and Gary Kemp All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bowell, Tracy, 1965– Critical thinking: a concise guide / Tra cy Bowell and Gary Kemp. – 3rd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Critical thinking. I. Kemp, Gary, 1960 Oct. 14– II. Title. B809.2B69 2009-07-10 16—dc22 2009002265 ISBN 0-203-87413-7 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0–415–47182–6 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–47183–4 (pbk) ISBN10: 0–203–87413–7 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–47182–4 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–47183–1 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–87413–4 (ebk) CONTENTS Preface to the third edition ix (cid:1) INTRODUCTION AND PREVIEW 1 1 INTRODUCING ARGUMENTS 3 BEGINNING TO THINK CRITICALLY: RECOGNISING ARGUMENTS 6 ASPECTS OF MEANING 10 STANDARD FORM 12 IDENTIFYING CONCLUSIONS AND PREMISES 14 ARGUMENTS AND EXPLANATIONS 20 INTERMEDIATE CONCLUSIONS 22 CHAPTER SUMMARY 23 EXERCISES 24 2 LANGUAGE AND RHETORIC 27 LINGUISTIC PHENOMENA 27 RHETORICAL PLOYS 40 CHAPTER SUMMARY 50 EXERCISES 51 vi contents 3 LOGIC: DEDUCTIVE VALIDITY 55 THE PRINCIPLE OF CHARITY 56 TRUTH 60 DEDUCTIVE VALIDITY 62 PRESCRIPTIVE CLAIMS VS DESCRIPTIVE CLAIMS 67 CONDITIONAL PROPOSITIONS 68 THE ANTECEDENT AND CONSEQUENT OF A CONDITIONAL 71 ARGUMENT TREES 73 DEDUCTIVE SOUNDNESS 76 THE CONNECTION TO FORMAL LOGIC 78 CHAPTER SUMMARY 81 EXERCISES 82 4 LOGIC: INDUCTIVE FORCE 89 INDUCTIVE FORCE 90 ‘ALL’, ‘MOST’ AND ‘SOME’ 98 SOFT GENERALISATIONS: A REMINDER 99 INDUCTIVE SOUNDNESS 100 PROBABILITY IN THE PREMISES 100 ARGUMENTS WITH M ULTIPLE PROBABILISTIC PREMISES 101 INDUCTIVE FORCE IN EXTENDED ARGUMENTS 104 CONDITIONAL PROBABILITY IN THE CONCLUSION 105 EVIDENCE 105 INDUCTIVE INFERENCES 107 A PROGRAMME FOR ASSESSMENT 112 CHAPTER SUMMARY 113 EXERCISES 114 contents vii 5 THE PRACTICE OF ARGUMENT-RECONSTRUCTION 118 EXTRANEOUS MATERIAL 119 DEFUSING THE RHETORIC 122 LOGICAL STREAMLINING 123 IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT 125 CONNECTING PREMISES 132 COVERING GENERALISATIONS 133 RELEVANCE 135 AMBIGUITY AND VAGUENESS 138 MORE ON GENERALISATIONS 144 PRACTICAL REASONING 147 BALANCING COSTS, BENEFITS AND PROBABILITIES 150 EXPLANATIONS AS CONCLUSIONS 153 CAUSAL GENERALISATIONS 156 A SHORT-CUT 158 CHAPTER SUMMARY 159 EXERCISES 160 6 ISSUES IN ARGUMENT-ASSESSMENT 169 RATIONAL PERSUASIVENESS 169 SOME STRATEGIES FOR LOGICAL ASSESSMENT 177 REFUTATION BY COUNTEREXAMPLE 180 ENGAGING WITH THE ARGUMENT I: AVOIDING THE ‘WHO IS TO SAY?’ CRITICISM 183 ENGAGING WITH THE ARGUMENT II: DON’T MERELY LABEL THE POSITION 184 ARGUMENT COMMENTARY 185 COMPLETE EXAMPLES 188 COMMENTARY ON THE COMMENTARY 195 viii contents CHAPTER SUMMARY 196 EXERCISES 197 7 PSEUDO-REASONING 202 FALLACIES 202 FAULTY ARGUMENT TECHNIQUES 228 TOO MUCH MATHS! 235 CHAPTER SUMMARY 237 EXERCISES 239 8 TRUTH, KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 242 TRUTH AND RELATIVITY 243 TRUE FOR ME, TRUE FOR YOU 248 TRUTH, VALUE AND MORALITY 251 THEORIES 252 BELIEF, JUSTIFICATION AND TRUTH 253 JUSTIFICATION WITHOUT ARGUMENTS 255 KNOWLEDGE 256 JUSTIFICATION FAILURE 257 KNOWLEDGE AND RATIONAL PERSUASIVENESS 259 PHILOSOPHICAL DIRECTIONS 261 CHAPTER SUMMARY 264 EXERCISES 264 Glossary 266 Answers and hints to selected exercises 275 Index 291 PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION Like all authors of texts on critical thinking or critical reasoning, we have tried to write a book that is genuinely useful. But our conception of what is useful differs somewhat from that of most of those authors. On the one hand, we have avoided formal logical methods. Whereas the application of formal methods is justified primarily by its value in coping with complex logical structure, the logical structure of everyday argumentation is very seldom so complex that an argu- ment’s validity, or lack of it, cannot be revealed to ordinary intuition by a clear statement of the argument in English. Yet no formal means short of the first-order predicate calculus is sufficient to represent the logic of the majority of everyday arguments. Rather than compromise by presenting less comprehensive formal methods that are useful only in a narrow range of cases, we have avoided them entirely. On the other hand, we have discussed and employed the concepts of logic more thoroughly than is customary in texts that avoid formal methods. We have defined them as accurately and in as much detail as we could, without superfluous refinement or inappropriate theoretical elaboration. We have done this for three reasons. First, it is only by grasping those concepts clearly that the student can achieve a stable and explicit under- standing of the purposes of presenting and analysing arguments. Second, facility with those concepts enables the student to think and to talk about arguments in a systematically precise way; it provides a common currency in terms of which to generalise about arguments and to compare them. Third, experience, including our teaching experience, suggests that the concepts of logic themselves, when they explicitly appear in argumenta- tive contexts, are amongst the most persistent sources of confusion. A symptom of this is the relativism that is so often encountered and so often lamented. At the root of this, we assume, are certain equivocations over the word ‘truth’. We have tried to clear these up in a common-sense and non-dogmatic way, and thereby to clarify further concepts that depend on the concept of truth, such as validity, probability, inductive force, soundness, justification and knowledge. We hope that clarity about these concepts, and the ability to use them with confidence in analysing arguments, will be among the most valuable accomplishments to be acquired by studying this book.