Critical Thinking
A Concise Guide, 3rd Edition
By Tracy Bowell, Gary Kemp
Published July 24th 2009 by Routledge – 294 pages
Description
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
- chapter summaries, glossaries and useful exercises.
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.
Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide is essential reading for anyone, student or professional, at work or in the classroom, seeking to improve their reasoning and arguing skills.
Reviews
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, University of Manchester
'This is the best single text I have seen for addressing the level, presumptions, and interests of the non-specialist.'
Charles Ess, Drury University
Contents
Chapter 1: Introducing Arguments
Chapter 2: Language and Rhetoric
Chapter 3: Logic: Deductive Validity
Chapter 4 : Logic: Inductive force
Chapter 5: The practice of argument-reconstruction
Chapter 6: Issues in argument assessment
Chapter 7: Pseudo-Reasoning
Chapter 8 :Truth Knowledge and Belief
Author Bio
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.
Related Subjects
Name: Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide, 3rd Edition (Paperback) – Routledge
Description: By Tracy Bowell, Gary Kemp. 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...
Categories: Introductory Philosophy, Critical Thinking
