Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide

Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide is a much-needed guide to argument analysis and a clear introduction to thinking clearly and rationally for oneself. Through precise and accessible discussion this book equips students with the essential skills required to tell a good argument from a bad one.

Key features of the book are:

• clear, jargon-free discussion of key concepts in argumentation
• how to avoid common confusions surrounding words such as ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘opinion’
• how to identify and evaluate the most common types of argument
• how to spot fallacies in arguments and tell good reasoning from bad
• chapter summaries, glossaries and useful exercises.

This third edition has been revised and updated throughout, with new exercises, and up-to-date topical examples, including: ‘real-world’ arguments; practical reasoning; understanding quantitative data, statistics, and the rhetoric used about them; scientific reasoning; and expanded discussion of conditionals, ambiguity, vagueness, slippery slope arguments, and arguments by analogy.

The Routledge Critical Thinking companion website, features a wealth of further resources, including examples and case studies, sample questions, practice questions and answers, and student activities.

Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide is essential reading for anyone, student or professional, at work or in the classroom, seeking to improve their reasoning and arguing skills.

Tracy Bowell is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Waikato, New Zealand.  Gary Kemp is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, UK.