Critical thinking: A concise guide by Bowell & Kemp (4th edition) - a summary

This is a summary of the book 'Critical thinking: A concise guide' by Bowell and Kemp. The topics in this summary are about constructing arguments and recognizing good from bad arguments. In this summary, everything second year psychology students at the uva need in the first block of WSRt is present.

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Introducing Arguments - summary of chapter 1 of Critical thinking: A concise guide by Bowell & Kemp (4th edition)

Critical thinkingChapter 1 Introducing Arguments To attempt to persuade by giving good reasons is to give an argument. Not all attempts to persuade (using language) are attempts to persuade by argument. some are attempts to persuade by means of rhetorical devices Rhetoric: any verbal or written attempt to persuade someone to believe, desire or do something that does not attempt to give good reasons for the belief, desire or action, but attempts to motivate that belief, desire or action solely through the power of the words used. An attempt to persuade by argument is an attempt to provide you with reasons for believing a claim, desiring something or doing something.Arguments appeal to your critical faculties, your reason. Rhetoric tends to rely on the persuasive power of certain words and verbal techniques to influence your beliefs, desires and actions by appeal to your desires, fears and other feelings. threats and bribes are arguments (not rhetorics), for they give a reason to do something Rhetorical techniques can be manipulative and coercive. Their use should generally be avoided by those who aspire to think critically and to persuade by reason. When analysing attempts to persuade, we have to perform three tasks:Identify the issue being discussed, and determine whether or not the writer or speaker is attempting to persuade by means of argument. Is an argument being presented?Reconstructing the argument so as to express it clearly, and so as to demonstrate clearly the steps and form of the...

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Language and rhetoric - summary of chapter 2 of Critical thinking: A concise guide by Bowell & Kemp (4th edition)

Critical thinkingChapter 2Language and rhetoric Once we’ve determined that a text or a speech contains an attempt to persuade by argument, the remainder of argument-reconstruction is largely a matter of interpreting the speech or text as accurately as possible. Ambiguity Ambiguity can be used, often deliberately, to obfuscate the content of an argument or rhetorically to obscure the persuaders true point.A sentence is ambiguous in a given context when there is more than one possible way of interpreting it in that context. There are two types of ambiguity:Lexical ambiguity Syntactic ambiguityLexical ambiguity Lexical ambiguity: a property of individual words and phrases that occurs when the word or phrase has more than one meaning. Extension: the set or group of things to which an expression applies.(for example, the extension of the word ‘cow’ are all the cows in the world).An ambiguous word or phrase has two or more separate and different extensions. Ambiguous words and phrases can bring their ambiguity into sentences, making those sentences capable of having more than one possible interpretation. Words that are potentially lexically ambiguous are not necessarily ambiguous in every context. When interpreting sentences that are lexically ambiguous, we have to focus on the context in which they are written or said and the consequent probability of each of the possible interpretations being the correct one. Syntactic ambiguity Syntactic ambiguity: when the arrangement of words in a sentence is such that the sentence could be understood in more than one way. Vagueness The meaning of a word or expression is vague if it is...

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Logic: deductive validity - summary of chapter 3 of Critical thinking: A concise guide by Bowell & Kemp (4th edition)

Wst-rChapter 3Logic: deductive validityArgument reconstruction: the representation of arguments in standard form, so as to give us a clear and comprehensive view of them.Argument assessment: the determination of whether or not arguments provide good reasons for accepting their conclusions. An argument is a system of propositions.Propositions: a set of premises advanced in support of a conclusion.People succeed in expressing the propositions they have in mind in varying degrees of clarity. An argument may depend upon premises that the arguer does not state at all, but which he or she is implicitly assuming.Since the purpose of argument-reconstruction is to determine exactly what argument has been given, part of the task is to clarify what the arguer actually said, and to supplement what the arguer actually said (to make explicit what was merely implicit in the arguer’s statements).The sentences we use in a reconstruction of the argument need not to be the very same sentences as used by the arguer in giving their argument. We may employ sentences that more clearly or precisely express the propositions that constitute the argument.Our reconstructed version of the argument may contain premises that are not expressed by any of the sentences actually used by the arguer.Argument-reconstruction is essentially a task of interpretation.The principle of charity.In such facts pertaining to the context in which the argument is given, together with the specific words used by...

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The practice of argument-reconstruction - summary of chapter 5 of Critical thinking: A concise guide by Bowell & Kemp (4th edition)

Critical thinkingChapter 5The practice of argument-reconstruction The first step in reconstructing an argument is to make a list of the argument’s premises and conclusion as concisely and clearly as possible.Making such a list is only the first step towards a complete reconstruction. Expressive epithet: terms used to refer to some person, group or other entity but that characterize the entity referred to for rhetorical purposes. When reconstructing arguments we should strive to display the logical relationships in an argument in the simplest, clearest and most familiar ways possible.Where appropriate, rewrite sentences as either conditional or disjunctive sentences of one of the following forms:If A then BIf not-A then BA or BNot-A, or B.If not-A then not-BIf A then not-BA or not-BNot-A, or not-BRewrite generalizations in one of the following forms, where the blank ‘’ is filled by a quantifier such as ‘all’, ‘some’, ‘most’, ‘not’, ‘almost all’, ect_F are G are not-GThis is not always possible, and doing it will sometimes distract us from other points we are trying to make....

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Issues in argument assessment - summary of chapter 6 of Critical thinking: A concise guide by Bowell & Kemp (4th edition)

Critical thinkingChapter 6Issues in argument assessment The role of an argument is to give us reasons for accepting its conclusion as true.The aim is to give an argument by which the intended audience is ought to be persuaded.We cannot always tell whether or not the argument is sound.Sound arguments must have true premises.An deductively sound argument is one that has true premises and which is deductively valid.An inductively sound argument is one with true premises that is inductively forceful.Since we do not always know which propositions are true and which false, we cannot always tell whether an argument is sound or not.To say that an inductively forceful argument is defeated for a person: the person reasonably believes the premises, but, nevertheless, reasonably rejects the conclusion.(They have, for example, extra information).An inductively forceful argument whose premises you have reason to accept is rationally persuasive only if your total evidence does not defeat the argument for you.To say that an argument is rationally persuasive for a person:the argument is either deductively or inductively forcefulthe person reasonably believes the argument’s premises (at the time)it is not an inductively forceful argument that is defeated for that person (at that time).Rationally unpersuasive argument: an argument that is deductively sound and valid, but gets you no closer to knowing the truth-value of the conclusion.Rational persuasiveness is doubly relative.An argument is or is not rationally...

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Pseudo-reasoning - summary of chapter 7 of Critical thinking: A concise guide by Bowell & Kemp (4th edition)

Critical thinkingChapter 7Pseudo-reasoning Fallacies count as arguments in the sense that they fit our definition of an argument. They consist of a set of propositions, some of which premises, one of which is a conclusion. But, one way or another, they are bad arguments.A fallacy: a mistake in reasoning.One commits a fallacy when the reasons advanced or accepted in support of a claim fail to justify its acceptance.A fallacy can be committed either when one is deciding whether to accept a claim on the basis of a fallacious argument with which one has been presented or when one is presented the fallacious argument oneself.A fallacious argument or inference: one in which there is an inappropriate connection between premises and conclusion.Almost all fallacies fall under one of the following two types:Formal fallacies: the inappropriate connections are failures of logical connection. The argument of inference is neither deductively valid nor inductively forceful, even where all implicit premises have been made explicit.Substantive (or informal) fallacies: the inappropriate connections involve reliance on some very general unjustified assumptions or inferences. We need only make these premises explicit in order to see that they are false and unjustified. The implicit, false or dubious premise will be of a general nature, having nothing specifically to do with the subject matter of the argument.The majority of fallacies that we encounter in everyday texts and speech are substantive fallacies.A fallacious argument can have true or false premises.Simply having false premises does not make an argument fallacious.Nor does having true premises guarantee that...