Critical Thinking: 5th Edition / Edition 5

by Richard L Epstein, Michael Rooney, Alex Raffi

Overview

This fifth edition of Critical Thinking by the noted logician Richard L. Epstein is practical, engaging, and easy to teach. Students enjoy and understand it because it is clear and has hundreds of examples using a cast of characters who reason as we do every day. More than 1,000 exercises lead students to be able to reason well in their courses and their lives. Essay writing lessons and visual writing lessons, using the cast of characters, teach students that first comes clear thinking and then comes clear writing. A complete and comprehensive Instructor's Manual makes the text easy to teach and grade. New to this edition: chapters on explanations and reasoning in the sciences.
Also from the Advanced Reasoning Forum: An Introduction to Formal Logic and The Pocket Guide to Critical Thinking.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938421327
Publisher:	Advanced Reasoning Forum
Publication date:	02/08/2017
Edition description:	5th Now with Reasoning in the Sciences ed.
Pages:	524
Product dimensions:	6.69(w) x 9.61(h) x 1.05(d)

Table of Contents

1 Critical Thinking
2 What Are We Arguing About?
3 What Is a Good Argument?
4 Is That True?
5 Repairing Arguments
6 Counterarguments
7 Compound Claims
8 General Claims
9 Concealed Claims
10 Too Much Emotion
11 Fallacies
Arguments for Analysis
12 Reasoning by Analogy
13 Numbers?
14 Generalizing
15 Cause and Effect
16 Explanations
17 Risk
18 Making Decisions
Composing Good Arguments
Reasoning in the Sciences
A Science Journal Article
1S Getting Started in Science
2S Definitions in Science
3S Experiments
4S What Can Go Wrong with Experiments?
Science Arguments for Analysis
5S Models and Theories
6S Explanations in Science
7S Ways of Knowing
Evaluating Reasoning
Glossary
Answers to Selected Exercises
Index

Editorial Reviews

"An inviting and readable introduction ... Professor Epstein has raised the treatment of the subject to a new level, and I expect the book to be as much a stimulus to instructors as a boon to their students." -Benson Mates "A fabulous critical thinking text ... I can't tell you how easy and fun your text is for me and my students. Your pedagogy is top-notch. You are one in a million." -Laura Canis, Baldwin-Wallace College "(The text) is extremely well written and shows in a way I have not seen before how the business of argumentation-strength, validity, fallacies, and so on-constitutes a seamless whole, with discussion of one feature very naturally leading to discussion of other features." -Fred Kroon, University of Auckland, New Zealand "Epstein's treatment of (analogies, induction, and cause and effect) is the best I've seen in texts of this type. Detailed, clear, accessible, yet rigorous and not oversimplified." -Robert Hollinger, Iowa State University "I love-love-your critical thinking text and workbook [...] Being able to get your text and workbook for fall has truly made my day. Thank you so much for keeping this text on the market. It is the perfect lead in to logic for students who can't think critically." -Carole Drew, Johnson C. Smith University "I got my student evaluations back from last semester's Critical Thinking course, and my students *loved* the Epstein book. I even had a couple of majors in the course who expressed that they felt better able to handle philosophical argumentation as a consequence of the course. The evaluations were the best I've ever gotten, and I'm just sure that a lot of that has to do with the text. I'll definitely be using it again in the fall." -Thomas Riley, Department of Philosophy, Clarke College "[Epstein's] textbook minimizes technical language and jargon and addresses its readers in a friendly conversational tone. . . . Apprehensive students will find this textbook "user friendly" and will appreciate the writer's effort to make the text fun to read. . . . On the whole, I give this textbook a strong A grade and . . . will recommend it to others" -G. A. Spangler, California State University, Long Beach

From the Publisher