Critical thinking: A concise guide van Bowell - English summary

What are basic concepts about arguments? - Chapter 1

Recognizing arguments
Significant aspects
Standard form
Identifying conclusions and premises
Arguments and explanations
Interim conclusions

Every day we are bombarded with written and spoken messages (for example advertising) about what we should (or shouldn’t) do, buy or believe. This forces

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How do you interpret linguistic elements and rhetorical techniques? - Chapter 2

Linguistic phenomena
Rhetorical questions
Rhetoric moves

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Linguistic phenomena

The interpretation of speech or text is often hampered by all sorts of linguistic phenomena in everyday

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Logic: how do you analyse the structure of deductive arguments? - Chapter 3

The charity principle
Truth
Deductive validity
Prescriptive claims versus descriptive claims
Conditional propositions
The antecedent and consistent of a conditional sentence
The connection with formal logic

Frustration often plays a role in discussions with others. This frustration comes from

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Logic: how do you analyse the structure of inductive arguments? - Chapter 4

Inductive power
Inductive accuracy
Arguments with multiple probability assumptions
Inductive power in extensive arguments
Inductive inferences
Induction and deduction

As mentioned in earlier chapters, care must be taken when generalizing claims and combating them. For example, if a doctor says

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Which arguments in the standard form are there? - Chapter 5

Unnecessary material
Remove rhetoric
Logical streamlining
Implicit and explicit
Ambiguity and vagueness
More about generalizations
Practical reasoning

The purpose of argument reconstruction is to produce a clear and explicit version of the original argument of the writer /

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How do you judge arguments? - Chapter 6

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Rational persuasion

In the previous chapters we have seen that an argument is correct if the premises are true and the argument is deductively valid or inductively powerful. However, this does not always apply; often we cannot say for certain whether the premises are true. View the following example:

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