Vaughn L. The Power of Critical Thinking - Effective Reasoning About Ordinary and Extraordinary Claims

6th Edition. — New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. — XX, 580 p.Classical Textbook on Critical Thinking.The Power of Critical Thinking: Effective Reasoning About Ordinary and Extraordinary Claims, Sixth Edition, provides the broadest range of tools to show students how critical thinking applies in their lives and the world around them. It explores the essentials of critical reasoning, argumentation, logic, and argumentative essay writing while also incorporating important topics that most other texts leave out, such as "inference to the best explanation," scientific reasoning, evidence and authority, visual reasoning, and obstacles to critical thinking.Like all previous versions of this text, the 6th Edition has three aims: Keep what works, add more of the same where needed, and drop what doesn’t. In this case, “what works” means consistency with the insights and needs of teachers of critical thinking. You will find that this new edition of The Power of Critical Thinking tries hard to do all these jobs, and a few others as well. The book’s original goals still guide its content and presentation: to provide comprehensive coverage of basic critical thinking skills, to include important features and topics often ignored by other texts, and to present all this in a plain-spoken, lively style that encourages students to think, reason, and learn.This is an excellent critical thinking book! It is well written, engaging, appropriate for undergraduates, and has a lot of good exercises, including real-world applications. The Power of Critical Thinking is a great textbook. Its strengths are its repetition of key ideas and the many real-world applications, like the connection between ESP and expectation. This text offers a taste of all areas of human reasoning in an accessible and intelligent manner. The fun information boxes will also keep students interested. Vaughn's textbook is one of the most readable critical thinking textbooks. It is written for freshmen college students, even those who are not fully prepared for college-level work. The self-assessment quizzes and integrated exercises are among the best features of this book. The book overall is a great textbook that teaches and guides you with every step preparing you how to apply critical thinking to your everyday life and why critical thinking is important. The text has been written in a very simple and comprehensive way to understand what the author is trying to tell you.Basics
The Power of Critical Thinking
Obstacles to Critical Thinking
Making Sense of ArgumentsReasons
Reasons for Belief and Doubt
Fallacies and PersuadersArguments
Deductive Reasoning: Propositional Logic
Deductive Reasoning: Categorical Logic
Inductive ReasoningExplanations
Inference to the Best Explanation
Judging Scientific Theories
Critical Thinking in Morality and the LawAppendicies
The Truth About Philosophy Majors
Essays for Evaluation
Answers to Exercises
Answers to Self-Assessment Quizzes
Critical Thinking and WritingNotes
Glossary
Credits
Index