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.

Table of Contents

Part One BASICS

CHAPTER 1 The Power of Critical Thinking

CHAPTER 2 Obstacles to Critical Thinking

CHAPTER 3 Making Sense of Arguments

Part Two REASONS

CHAPTER 4 Reasons for Belief and Doubt

CHAPTER 5 Fallacies and Persuaders

Part Three ARGUMENTS

CHAPTER 6 Deductive Reasoning: Propositional Logic

CHAPTER 7 Deductive Reasoning: Categorical Logic

CHAPTER 8 Inductive Reasoning

Part Four EXPLANATIONS

CHAPTER 9 Inference to the Best Explanation

CHAPTER 10 Judging Scientific Theories

CHAPTER 11 Critical Thinking in Morality and the Law

APPENDIX A The Truth About Philosophy Majors

APPENDIX B Essays for Evaluation

APPENDIX C Answers to Exercises

APPENDIX D Answers to Self-Assessment Quizzes

APPENDIX E Critical Thinking and Writing

Review

"This is an excellent critical thinking book! I will likely adopt it for future classes. It is well written, engaging, appropriate for undergraduates, and has a lot of good exercises, including real-world applications. In addition, the cost is much more affordable than competing texts, without compromising the content."--Ken Hochstetter, College of Southern Nevada"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."--June Yang, Grossmont College"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."--Tobyn DeMarco, Bergen Community College

Book Description

Provides the broadest range of tools to show students how critical thinking applies in their lives and the world around them

About the Author

Lewis Vaughn is the author or coauthor of several textbooks, including Philosophy Here and Now, Third Edition (2018), Writing Philosophy, Second Edition (2018), Living Philosophy, Second Edition (2017), and Concise Guide to Critical Thinking (2017), all published by Oxford University Press.