Clear Thinking in A Blurry World PDF
Preview Clear Thinking in A Blurry World
PREFACE In recent years no single theme has been more emphasized in education and professional training than critical thinking. The increased need for highly specialized education in many fields, and especially in scientific and technical disciplines, has left both educators and students sensitive to the need for general reasoning skills that apply to specialized and commonplace domains alike. A nearly universal hope is that these general critical thinking skills can be taught as a secondary aim of courses in various other disciplines. One would be hard- pressed nowadays to discover a public school course curriculum at any level, in any academic area, that did not list critical thinking as one of the educational aims of the course. Even if this hope is reasonable, though, there remains an important role for the study of critical reasoning through books and courses dedicated to it. General reasoning issues cut across topics in ways that one cannot easily follow up when one is primarily focused on teaching or learning any one of those topics. When critical thinking itself is the subject of study, one is free to follow the issues across disciplines as necessary. This book is intended to address the need for such a wide-ranging approach. This need may not seem very obvious, of course, given how many critical thinking books are already in print! Some of these books are excellent, but none, to my mind, takes the particular sort of multidisciplinary approach I describe in the Introduction: a synthesis of topics including arguments, fallacies, evidential reasoning, numeracy, probability, the psychology of biases, science, and media analysis. One simple reason for the novelty of this combination of topics is that almost all critical thinking books devote considerable resources to topics I do not raise: formal logic, categorical logic, and Venn diagrams in particular. These topics and techniques are popular because they are useful and worthwhile. Given the choice, however, I believe there is more to be gained for true critical thinking purposes—as opposed, say, to formal reasoning purposes—by emphasizing some higher-order or metacognitive aspects of critical thinking. In particular, I aim to emphasize reasoning about our own reasoning processes, and reasoning about the wider social and commercial factors that can affect the information we receive. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have benefited from the assistance and generosity of many people in writing this book and in teaching the course upon which it was based. Several authors kindly allowed me to reprint portions of their work; I deeply appreciate their permission. My colleague Chris Eliasmith has taught the same critical thinking course from a similar perspective and has shared many examples and much insight over the years. My colleagues Rolf George, Dave DeVidi, Jim van Evra, and Bill Abbott also contributed many interesting examples and did much to show me how to find critical and philosophical issues in every aspect of the workaday world. I received inspiration and very useful feedback on the idea of this book from Elena Lester. The whole project received a huge boost from Chris Viger’s support at the early stages. I also got crucial feedback from the reviewers of the proposal and portions of the manuscript: my thanks to Leslie Burkholder, Don Dedrick, Wayne Henry, Catherine Hundleby, Murray Littlejohn, and Chris MacDonald for their thoughtful input. Thanks also to the fine people at Nelson Education Ltd.—Cara Yarzab, Katherine Goodes, Bram Sepers, and especially Heather Parker and Wendy Thomas—for their assistance and patience. Jim van Evra, Roger Davidson, and Jeff Shallit proofed sections of the text helpfully, while Adam Jensen read over half of the text with a brilliantly keen eye. Most of all I owe my thanks to Colleen Kenyon, who read the whole thing and worked hard to make it better. Table of Contents Preface Introduction: Roadmap to This Book Critical Thinking Begins at Home Some Principles of Critical Thinking Summary 1 The Parts of Public Thinking: Deductive Argument Having Reasons Assertions and Arguments What Makes an Argument (Good)? Some Basic Vocabulary of Communication and Argumentation Is Good Argumentation a Matter of Being Logical? What Isn’t an Argument? Explanation versus Argument Understanding Valid Argument Forms Checking an Argument’s Validity: The Method of Counter-Example Valid Argument Forms Other Structural Properties of Arguments Truth Conditions Truth and Reasonableness Necessary Truths and Definitional Truths Truth Conditions of Compound Sentences Complex Statements Factual and Non-Factual Statements Conclusion Review Questions Notes 2 Evidence Adds Up Cogency and Ampliativity Valid, Invalid, and Ampliative Arguments Varieties of Ampliativity Inductive Reasoning Deduction and Induction Work Together Abductive Reasoning Context of Discovery and Context of Justification Analogical Arguments Causal Reasoning States of Information Defeasibility Neutrality: Ignorance and Evenly Balanced Evidence Proving a Negative Conclusion Review Questions Notes 3 Language, Non-Language, and Argument Sentences, Utterances, and Communicative Devices Saying One Thing and (Thereby) Doing Another Rhetorical Effects The Use and Abuse of Quotation Recognizing Arguments on the Hoof Special Styles of Reasoning and Argumentation Interpreting and Analyzing Arguments: Detailed Examples Conclusion Review Questions Notes 4 Fallacies:When Arguments Turn Bad Logical Fallacies Conditional Fallacies Scope Fallacies Equivocation Evidential Fallacies Argument from Ignorance Overgeneralizations Conspiracy Theories Vicarious Authority Appeal to Popular Opinion Fallacies of Causal Reasoning Multiple Endpoints Procedural and Pragmatic Fallacies Distractors Confusions Outliers Fallacy of False Enchotomy (False Dilemma, False Dichotomy) Fallacies of Composition and Division Reasoning from Simplifications or Clichés Conclusion Review Questions Notes 5 Critical Thinking about Numbers Percentages Combining and Comparing Percentages Non-Literal Uses of Percentage Figures Rates and Percentages Ratings and Rankings Percentage versus Percentile The Significance of Numerical Rankings and Ratings Meaningless or Confused Quantitative Rankings or Comparisons Fallacies of Numerical Reasoning Pseudo-Precision Graphical Fallacies—The Misrepresentation of Quantities/Rates by Misleading Graphs or Charts Averages and Representativeness From Averages in a Sample to Averages in a Population Conclusion Review Questions Notes 6 Probability and Statistics: Reasoning from Incomplete Information Basic Statistical Concepts Representative Sampling Properties of a Normal Distribution Correlations and the Null Hypothesis Significance and Margins of Error Errors in Rejecting the Null Hypothesis Basic Probabilistic Concepts Probability, Risk, and Intuition The Monty Hall Problem Basics of Probability Probability of Complex Events Conditional Probability The Probabilistic and Statistical Fallacies and Pitfalls The Gambler’s Fallacy Comparing Probabilities Regression Fallacy Conclusion Review Questions Notes 7 Biases Within Reason From Fallacies to Biases Perceptual Biases Low-Level Biases Top-Down Effects on Perception Cognitive Biases Confirmation Biases and Evidence Self-Fulfilling Prophecies as Confirmation Biases Egocentric Biases Biases of Language and Communication Biases of Memory Conclusion Review Questions Notes 8 The More We Get Together: Social Cognition and the Flow of Information The Effects of Social Contexts on Cognition Reasoning about Other People Social Stereotypes The Fundamental Attribution Error False Polarization Effects Reasoning Affected by Other People Jumping on the Bandwagon The False Consensus Effect Seeing Ourselves Through the Eyes of Others Biases in Aggregate Fractures in the Body of Social Information Social Information Transmission: Unfiltered Anecdotal Evidence The Mutation of Information: Mechanisms and Examples Conclusion Review Questions Notes 9 Critical Reasoning about Science: Cases and Lessons Science and Non-Science Just the Facts The Scientific Method Naturalism Verifiability and Falsifiability
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