Efnisyfirlit

• Thanks and acknowledgements
• Preface to the second edition
• Welcome to the book!
• What this book will help you to do
• Thinking critically for yourself
• Thinking critically online
• What is critical thinking (and why does it matter)?
• The opposite of uncritical thinking
• Scepticism and objectivity
• The battle against bias
• Fast and slow thinking
• Allocating your attention
• Your toolkit for critical thinking
• What is critical thinking for?
• Summary
• PART I THE ART AND SCIENCE OF BEING REASONABLE
• 1 Understanding the reasons behind things
• What is an argument? Persuasion through reasoning
• Spotting arguments by searching for a conclusion
• What isn’t an argument? Information without reasoning
• Explanations: the business of reasoning backwards
• What isn’t an argument? Persuasion without reasoning
• Summary
• 2 Spelling out arguments and assumptions
• Premises and conclusions: the standard form
• Reconstructing extended arguments
• A step-by-step guide to reconstructing arguments
• A few further words about assumptions
• Putting it all together
• Summary
• 3 Reasoning with logic and certainty
• Introducing deductive reasoning
• Valid and invalid arguments
• Necessary and sufficient conditions
• Two types of valid and invalid reasoning
• Sound and unsound arguments
• Summary
• 4 Reasoning with observation and uncertainty
• Argument by induction
• Introducing inductive force
• Induction and everyday language
• Addressing uncertainty through probability
• Making use of samples
• The problem of induction
• Induction and falsification
• Summary
• 5 Developing explanations and theories
• Introducing abduction
• Explanations, theories and hypotheses
• Moving towards better explanations
• Moving from evidence to proof
• Correlation and causation
• Conducting meaningful research
• Summary
• 6 Assessing evidence and planning your reading strategy
• Engaging critically with primary and secondary sources
• Creating a strategy for critical reading
• Note-taking and critical engagement
• Summary
• PART II BEING REASONABLE IN AN UNREASONABLE WORLD
• 7 Getting to grips with rhetoric
• The power of language and rhetoric
• Putting persuasion in context
• Analysing a message in detail: emotion and human stories
• Aiming for impartiality
• Rhetorical devices
• Summary
• 8 Seeing through faulty reasoning
• Fallacious arguments and faulty reasoning
• Formal and informal fallacies
• Informal fallacies of relevance (red herrings)
• Informal fallacies of ambiguity (linguistic fallacies)
• Informal fallacies of presumption (material fallacies)
• Two formal fallacies: affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent
• The undistributed middle: a formal fallacy
• Base rate neglect: another formal fallacy
• From base rate neglect to Bayes’s theorem
• Summary
• 9 Understanding cognitive bias
• Four types of heuristic
• When to trust heuristics and when to distrust them
• Biases based on how things are presented
• Biases born from over-simplification
• Biases born from a lack of insight
• Behavioural economics and the research context
• Summary
• 10 Overcoming bias in yourself and others
• Attaching excessive significance to random events
• Failing to consider things that didn’t happen
• Over-estimating regularity and predictability
• Humans: good at social situations, bad with numbers
• Summary
• 11 Thinking critically about technology
• From data to knowledge via fake news
• Social proof and system bias
• Time, attention and other people
• Search, discovery and categories of knowledge
• Practical tips for search, discovery and beyond
• Summary
• 12 Putting it all together: critical thinking in study, work and life
• Good writing in general
• Good academic writing in particular
• Writing and rewriting in practice
• Getting the work done: what is holding you back?
• Critical thinking and you
• Ten commandments for critical thinking
• Summary
• And finally…
• Reading guide
• Glossary
• Appendix: A synopsis of five valid forms of argument
• Endnotes
• Index