Critical Thinking

A Concise Guide

Tracy Bowell, Robert Cowan, Gary Kemp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351243711
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

We are frequently confronted with arguments. Arguments are attempts to persuade us – to influence our beliefs and actions – by giving us reasons to believe this or that. Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide will equip students with the concepts and techniques used in the identification, analysis and assessment of arguments whatever the subject matter or context. Through precise and accessible discussion, this book provides the tools to become a successful critical thinker, one who can act and believe in accordance with good reasons, and who can articulate and make explicit those reasons.

Key topics discussed include:

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• Core concepts in argumentation
• How language can serve to obscure or conceal the real content of arguments
• How to distinguish argumentation from rhetoric
• 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 distinguish good reasoning from bad in terms of deductive validity and induction.

This fifth edition has been revised and extensively updated throughout, including a significantly expanded range of 'complete examples', the introduction of Venn diagrams and the discussion of fake news and related phenomena arising in the contemporary scene.

The dynamic Routledge Critical Thinking companion website provides thoroughly updated resources for both instructors and students, including new examples and case studies, flashcards, sample questions, practice questions and answers, student activities and a testbank of questions for use in the classroom. Visit www.routledge.com/cw/bowell.

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• introducing arguments

• Beginning to think critically: Recognising arguments

• Standard form

• Identifying conclusions and premises

Identifying conclusions • Several points make the identification of conclusions an easier task • Identifying premises • Extraneous material

• Arguments and explanations

• Intermediate conclusions

• Chapter summary

• Exercises

Chapter overview: In this chapter we introduce the basics of critical thinking – what arguments are, why they are important and why you should care about them, how to distinguish them from other uses of language, how to identify their constituent parts, and how to set them out clearly so that they can be best understood and analysed. It is important that you gain a firm grasp of these concepts and techniques before moving further in the book since understanding them properly will lay the groundwork for becoming a successful critical thinker who avoids the pitfalls of believing and doing things without good reason.

The focus of this book is written and spoken ways of persuading us to do things and to believe things. Every day we are bombarded with messages apparently telling us what to do or not to do, what to believe or not to believe: buy this mobile phone; upgrade to this operating system; try this beer; register to vote; eat at least five servings of fruit and vegetables a day; don’t text and drive; drink [alcohol] in moderation; buy fair trade goods; euthanasia is murder; abortion is murder; meat is murder; aliens have visited the earth; climate change threatens our way of life; make sure you reference all of your sources; Build the Wall!! and so on. Some messages we just ignore, some we unreflectively accept and some we unreflectively reject. Others we might think about and question, asking, ‘Why should I do, or refrain from doing, that?’ or ‘Why should I believe that, or not believe it?’

When we ask the question ‘Why?’, we’re asking for a reason for doing what we are being enjoined to do, or for believing what we are being enjoined to believe. Why should I register to vote, or buy this particular mobile phone? Why should I believe that meat is murder, or that climate change threatens our way of life? When we ask for a reason in this way, we are asking for a justification for taking the action recommended or accepting the belief; not just a reason, but a good reason – one that ought to motivate us to act or believe as we are recommended to do. We might be told, for example, that Wheetybites are a nutritious, sugar-free, low-fat, high-fibre breakfast cereal; if this is so, and we want to eat a healthy breakfast, then we’ve been given a good reason to eat Wheetybites. If, on the other hand, we are presented only with marketing techniques – for example, images of some supposedly aspirational lifestyle with happy, healthy-looking people eating Wheetybites with fresh-looking berries out of stylish crockery – then, although an attempt has been made to persuade us to buy Wheetybites, it would not appear that any attempt has been made to provide good reasons for doing so.

To attempt to persuade by giving good reasons is to give an argument. We encounter many different types of attempts to persuade.¹ Not all of these are arguments, and one of the tasks we will concentrate on early in this book is learning how to distinguish attempts to persuade in which the speaker or writer intends to put forward an argument from those in which their intention is to persuade us by some means other than argument. Critical thinkers should primarily be interested in arguments and whether they succeed in providing us with good reasons for acting or believing. But we also need to consider non-argumentative attempts to persuade, as we need to be able to distinguish these from arguments. This is not always straightforward, particularly as many attempts to persuade involve a mixture of various argumentative and non-argumentative techniques to get us to accept a point of view or take a certain course of action. The crucial point of difference for arguments, though, is that when we argue we attempt to give reasons. In non-arguments there is an absence of an attempt to give reasons.

You may find it surprising to think of an ‘argument’ as a term for giving someone a reason to do or believe something – telling them why they should buy certain products or avoid illicit drugs, for instance. Perhaps in your experience the word ‘argument’ means a disagreement – raised voices, slamming doors, insults, sulking, etc. In fact, in some of those situations the participants might actually be advancing what we mean by an argument, putting forward a well-argued case for loading one’s own dishes into the dishwasher, for example, but in many cases they will not be arguing in the sense that we have in mind here; rather they will just be disagreeing with each other. In public debate and discussion reasoned argument is increasingly replaced by disagreement and a refusal to engage in proper argument, and often those disagreements are expressed in highly emotive and divisive language that is unlikely to lead to reasoned agreement.

That said, the sort of argument we have in mind does still occur frequently in ordinary, everyday situations. It is by no means restricted to the works of Plato, Descartes and other scholars famous for the arguments they put forward. You and your friends, family and colleagues give each other reasons for believing something or doing something all the time – why we should expect our friend to be late for dinner, why we should walk rather than wait for the bus, and so on. In television and radio broadcasts (especially current affairs shows), on Twitter and in online forums and blogs you’ll find people arguing their case (though they may well also resort to other persuasive techniques as well). Open a newspaper or magazine (on almost any topic) and you’ll find arguments in the letters section, editorials and various other discussion pieces. The same thing occurs in a more academic form at universities and colleges. Throughout your time as a student you will hear lecturers and other students arguing for a point of view, and in readings and videos you will encounter attempts to persuade you of various claims about all manner of issues. In the workplace you may find yourself having to argue for a particular course of action or solution to a problem, or arguing on behalf of a client or associate.

If you develop your ability to analyse people’s attempts to persuade so that you can accurately interpret what they are saying or writing and evaluate whether or not they are giving a good argument – whether, for example, they are providing you with a good reason to reduce your consumption of single-use plastic – then you can begin to liberate yourself from accepting what others try to persuade you of without knowing whether you actually have a good reason to be persuaded, and this can prevent you from doing or believing the wrong thing.² What’s more, you can apply these techniques of analysis to your own attempts to persuade and avoid giving bad arguments yourself.

But then, you may ask, why is it liberating to demand reasons before you are persuaded to adopt new beliefs or to do something? Isn’t it less trouble to go through life unreflectively, doing more or less as you please, and not worry too much about whether you have good reason to do or believe something, beyond whether or not you want to? Well, it may often be easier in the short run, but it might lead to a life dominated by bad decisions and discontentment. Socrates, the ancient Athenian philosopher, famously argued that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’.³ While this may or may not be true, the only way to find out is to approach the issue in a critical and rational manner. Even though you may not always be able to tell definitively whether you have been presented with a good argument, paying due attention to arguments gets you closer to the truth of a matter, thereby making the world and the people in it easier to comprehend and to deal with.

Even if a desire to discover the truth does not seem a sufficiently strong reason for being concerned about having good reasons to justify your actions and beliefs, there are various life situations in which the ability to interpret and evaluate a person’s reasons properly may be crucial to that person’s well-being, or even to their remaining alive. For example, in a court trial the jury is instructed to convict an alleged murderer if the prosecution has proved their guilt beyond reasonable doubt. The jury is being asked to consider the prosecution’s case (which, ideally, is an argumentative attempt to persuade them of the guilt of the accused) and the evidence they offer at each step of making that case. It has to consider whether there is good reason to accept the argument or whether some faults in it mean that there must be some doubt about whether its members should be persuaded by it. Conversely, they must also attend to the case of the defence, asking whether that argument has demonstrated that there is sufficient doubt as to whether the defendant is guilty of the alleged crime. The skills of evaluation and interpretation involved in argument analysis are what we use (or ought to use) in determining the strength of the prosecution and defence cases in such situations. In fact, in any situation in which we have to make decisions, be they about our lives or the lives of others, there is no substitute for the ability to think logically and to detect errors in our own thinking and that of others.

Now that so much of our communication, both public and private, takes place via social media, we are probably exposed to even more such messages than we were when our main sources of public communication were (terrestrial) TV, radio and print media and our main means of communicating with each other were in person or via landline and letter writing. While social media offers us so many more ways to communicate and to share ideas and influence opinions, the sheer scale and scope of content and the fact that much of its networks are only lightly regulated (if at all) means th...