- Welcome to the book![rtoc]
- What this book will help you to do
- Thinking critically for yourself
- Thinking critically online[/rtoc]
- What is critical thinking (and why does it matter)?[rtoc]
- The opposite of uncritical thinking
- Scepticism and objectivity
- The battle against bias
- Fast and slow thinking
- Allocating your attention
- Your toolkit for critical thinking
- What is critical thinking for?[/rtoc]
Part I: The Art and Science of Being Reasonable
- Understanding the reasons behind things[rtoc]
- What is an argument? Persuasion through reasoning
- Spotting arguments by searching for a conclusion
- What isn’t an argument Information without reasoning
- Explanations: the business of reasoning backwards
- What isn’t an argument? Persuasion without reasoning[/rtoc]
- Spelling out arguments and assumptions[rtoc]
- Premises and conclusions: the standard form
- Reconstructing extended arguments
- A step-by-step guide to reconstructing arguments
- A few further words about assumptions
- Putting it all together[/rtoc]
- Reasoning with logic and certainty[rtoc]
- Introducing deductive reasoning
- Valid and invalid arguments
- Necessary and sufficient conditions
- Two types of valid and invalid reasoning
- Sound and unsound arguments[/rtoc]
- Reasoning with observation and uncertainty[rtoc]
- Argument by induction
- Introducing inductive force
- Induction and everyday language
- Addressing uncertainty through probability
- Making use of samples
- The problem of induction
- Induction and falsification[/rtoc]
- Developing explanations and theories[rtoc]
- Introducing abduction
- Explanations, theories and hypotheses
- Moving towards better explanations
- Moving from evidence to proof
- Correlation and causation
- Conducting meaningful research[/rtoc]
- Assuming evidence and planning your reading strategy[/rtoc]
- Engaging critically with primary and secondary sources
- Creating a strategy for critical reading
- Note-taking and critical engagement[/rtoc]
- Intermission
Part II: Being Reasonable In An Unreasonable World
- Getting to grips with rhetoric[rtoc]
- The power of language and rhetoric
- Putting persuasion in context
- Analysing a message in detail: emotion and human stories
- Aiming for impartiality
- Rhetorical devices[/rtoc]
- Seeing through faulty reasoning[rtoc]
- Fallacious arguments and faulty reasoning
- Fallacies, truths and hidden assumptions
- Informal fallacies of relevance (red herrings)
- Informal fallacies of ambiguity (linguistic fallacies)
- Informal fallacies of presumption (material fallacies)
- Two formal fallacies: affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent
- The undistributed middle: a formal fallacy
- From base rate neglect to Bayes’s theorem[/rtoc]
- Understanding cognitive bias[rtoc]
- Four types of heuristic
- When to trust heuristics and when to distrust them
- Biases based on how things are presented
- Biases born from over-simplification
- Biases born from a lack of insight
- Behavioural Economics and the research context[/rtoc]
- Overcoming bias in yourself and others[rtoc]
- Attaching excessive significance to random events
- Failing to consider things that didn’t happen
- Over-estimating regularity and predictability
- Humans: good at social situations, bad with numbers[/rtoc]
- Thinking critically about technology[rtoc]
- From data to knowledge via fake news
- Social proof and system biases
- Time, attention and other people
- Search, discovery and categories of knowledge
- Practical tips for search, discovery and beyond[/rtoc]
- Putting it all together: critical thinking in study, work and life[rtoc]
- Good writing in general
- Good academic writing in particular
- Writing and rewriting in practice
- Getting the work done: what is holding you back?
- Critical thinking and you
- Ten commandments for critical thinking[/rtoc]
- And finally …
- Reading guide
- Glossary
- A synopsis of five valid forms of argument
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