Critical thinking basically means not accepting ideas presented to us at their face value. The knowledge we get out of being educated will be nothing more than indoctrination if we cannot use it to think for ourselves. We all do have some ability to think critically. If you watched the movie Transformers and wondered where the metal came from when a little passenger car turned into a giant robot, you are thinking critically. Critical thinking is the essential skill we use when we analyze an argument or compose an analytical paper. Our natural capacity to think critically, however, is no match for such a complex task. We could dig with our bare hands, but to dig deep, we need a shovel. Likewise, to think critically deeply, we need conceptual tools. This is why many colleges offer courses entitled Critical Thinking or Scientific Reasoning. These courses tend to be interdisciplinary to encompass various disjoint topics and can be quite technical. This book will help you improve your critical thinking in a fun and easy way.
In this book, you learn three platinum skills for critical thinking: logical reasoning, fallacy detection, and scientific reasoning. Logical reasoning is about the entailment relationship among ideas. That is, what we can infer to be true from what we already know to be true. An entailment relationship can either be truth-preserving or ampliative. An inference is truth-preserving if the truth of the conclusion is already embedded in the truth of its premises, and it is ampliative (or inductive), otherwise. Deductive logic is a paragon of truth-preserving inference, and statistical inference methods, like the Bayesian method that utilizes prior probabilities and the hypothesis testing method that utilizes error probabilities, are exemplary cases of inductive logic. As these are vast fields of their own, in this book, we just focus on the most important concept in deductive logic, validity. Through validity, we know why good reasoning is go
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