Introducing Logic and Critical Thinking

The Skills of Reasoning and the Virtues of Inquiry

Byerly, T. Ryan

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781493410804
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

This robust, clear, and well-researched textbook for classes in logic introduces students to both formal logic and to the virtues of intellectual inquiry. Part 1 challenges students to develop the analytical skills of deductive and inductive reasoning, showing them how to identify and evaluate arguments. Part 2 helps students develop the intellectual virtues of the wise inquirer. The book includes helpful pedagogical features such as practice exercises and a concluding summary with definitions of key concepts for each chapter. Resources for professors and students are available through Baker Academic's Textbook eSources.

Part 1: The Skills of Reasoning

The first part of this two-part book introduces some important skills that will help you to reason better. These are the skills taught in the discipline of logic as practiced within English-speaking institutions of higher education where this discipline focuses on identifying and evaluating arguments. Thus the chapters that compose the first part of this text explain certain widely used techniques that will assist you in identifying and evaluating arguments.

It is important that we do not confuse the skills of reasoning explained here with the virtues of inquiry that will be the focus of the second part of the text. There are various ways to distinguish between skills on the one hand and virtues on the other.1 But perhaps the most important difference between the two is the following: a person is not deficient as a person for lacking any particular skills, but a person is deficient as a person for lacking virtues, including intellectual ones. By way of illustration, we would not say that a person was worse as a person for failing to have the basketball skills of LeBron James. Likewise, we would not say that LeBron James is better as a person for having the particular basketball skills he has. Of course, someone who doesn’t have James’s skills is worse as a basketball player than James. But the point here is that she is not worse as a person than James. However, a person who lacks virtues does lack something as a person. A person who is not courageous but is instead cowardly is worse off as a person than someone who is courageous. And the same goes for intellectual virtues and vices. A person who is intellectually arrogant is worse off as a person than a person who is not intellectually arrogant.

The particular skills introduced in this first part of the book, then, are not necessary for making you better as a person. Learning to draw Venn diagrams and to construct formal proofs of arguments using the Proof Method does not make one a better human being. But this is not to say that acquiring these skills is not valuable at all. While having one particular skill does not make a person better as a person than other persons with different skills, it is nonetheless true that having some skill or other is of great value to us as persons. It would be bad for James if he had no skills at all—even bad for him as a person. To live excellent lives, we need some skills. And to lead intellectually excellent lives, we need some skills in reasoning. The skills in reasoning introduced here could be replaced by other skills—skills that don’t require drawing overlapping circles to represent arguments or using arrows and wedges to symbolize premises in arguments. But without some skill set or other to aid one in reasoning, one does lack something as a person. It is important for our personal flourishing that we reason well, and having some skill set or other to help us with this makes a contribution to our flourishing.

While the particular skills of reasoning proposed here may be replaceable, they are nonetheless valuable for human flourishing. Moreover, they are skills that are widely (though not widely enough!) studied and acquired in English-speaking institutions of higher learning. By acquiring the skills of reasoning proposed in the first part of this text, you will have acquired a set of skills that makes a valuable contribution to living an excellent life as a person and that you can uniquely share with many other good reasoners educated in English-speaking institutions.

1
Introduction to Arguments

Reflect for a moment on all the many things that you believe. Perhaps you believe some things about yourself: something about who you are, where you are, what you are up to, what constitutes your calling in life. Perhaps you believe some things about the community in which you find yourself: the community of your classmates, the community of your educational institution more widely, or your church, city, county, state, or national community. You might believe some things about the past: whether you ate a bagel for breakfast, whether your decision to pick up this book was a good idea, whether certain events recorded in the Bible are historical, or whether the American Revolution inspired the French Revolution. You might believe some things about the future: who will be the next president, what the housing market will be like next spring, what you will need in your life to make you truly happy, or whether you will one day have a glorified body in heaven.

You may very well believe some of these things in a kind of direct way based on your experiences. You believe that you are reading this book because of the visual and tactile experiences you are currently having, for example. Your belief that you are reading the book is not, perhaps, based on some other beliefs you have. Your belief that you are reading this book isn’t based on your belief that this book says you are reading it, for instance. Rather, the experiences you are having are directly producing this belief in you. Maybe the same goes for some other beliefs you have. You believe you ate a bagel for breakfast because you seem to remember having eaten one. You hold this belief about the bagel not because of some other belief you hold. Some of your beliefs, then, may be held directly on the basis of your experiences and not on the basis of any other beliefs you hold.

Yet it remains the case that many of the beliefs you hold are held on the basis of other beliefs. You believe these things for certain reasons, we might say. Take, for instance, what you believe about who will be the next president. If you hold a belief about this matter, it will no doubt be one that is held on the basis of quite a number of reasons—reasons having to do with who you believe will be on the ballot, how you believe the country will fare between now and the next election, your views about what the American public believes about a wide range of important issues, and so on. You believe that so-and-so will be president because of, or on the basis of, these other beliefs you hold. And the same may go for many of the other beliefs you hold, such as your beliefs about what constitutes your calling in life, whose fault it was that your team lost, what the housing market will be like in the spring, and what will make for personal happiness.

An important feature of human life, then, is that many of the things we believe are things we believe on the basis of reasons.1 Many Christian theologians have thought that our ability to hold beliefs on the basis of reasons—and to critically reflect on our reasons for belief—is an aspect of the image or likeness of God in us.2 Certainly these rational capacities are part of what sets us apart from much of the rest of creation. Part of what it is to be a fully functioning human is to believe for reasons and to evaluate the reasons we have for belief.

An important additional observation about this key feature of human life—this fact that we believe many things on the basis of reasons—is that reasons are often shareable. If I believe something on the basis of a reason, and I am able to identify that reason, then I can share that reason with you. I can recommend it to you as a reason for you to believe what I believe. And you can do the same for me...