This bundle contains the chapters of the book "Critical thinking a concise guide by Tracy Bowell & Gary Kemp, fourth edition". It includes the following chapters:
- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
The reason answers the ‘why’ question to a statement. Asking for a reason is asking for justification. An argument is a set of propositions of which one is a conclusion and the remainder are premises, intended as support for the conclusion. A proposition is the factual content expressed in an argument.
RECOGNISING ARGUMENTS
Not all
There are several problems with linguistic phenomena that makes an argument difficult to understand. The set of things a word is about is called the extension.
Ambiguity occurs if a sentence can be interpreted in more than one way and should be avoided when trying to persuade using an argument. There are two types of ambiguity:
Argument reconstruction clarifies what the arguer actually said and to supplement the arguer, as some statements are implicit. The reconstruction of an argument can be presented as a bad argument or as a good argument, depending on the goal (e.g. political debate). A bad argument does not mean that the proposition is false. The principle of charity states
........Read morePrecise generalisations make it more difficult to divert from the topic. The quantifier ‘some’ does not mean ‘most’ or ‘all’ when making generalizations, although when stating ‘some A are B’ it is possible that all A are B.
An argument is inductively forceful if the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premises but is still ‘probably true’. It
........Read moreA lot of things people write plays no argumentative role. It can serve the function of emphasis, rhetoric or something else. This extraneous material should not be included in the reconstructing of an argument. The word ‘since’ transforms a conditional statement into a statement that asserts both the conditional and the antecedent of that conditional. The first step in
........Read moreAn argument is rationally unpersuasive if there is no good reason to accept a premise, even though the argument is deductively valid and sound. An argument is defeated if a person reasonably believes the premises, but, nevertheless, reasonably rejects the conclusion. An argument is rationally persuasive for a person if the argument is either deductively valid or inductively
........Read moreFallacies are arguments which make use of a mistake in reasoning. They do count as arguments, but are faulty arguments. There is an inappropriate connection between premises an conclusion. Formal fallacies are fallacies where there is an inappropriate logical connection. Substantive (informal) fallacies involve reliance or unjustified assumptions or inferences. Substantive fallacies are different from unsound arguments in
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