Customer Reviews

Critical Thinking

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Shamefully, most critical thinking textbooks are not particularly logical. They present mostly grab-bags of rules and fallacies linked together more by scholastic repetition than by reasoning. By contrast, Epstein's text is backed up by a rigorous, coherent theory of inference. The book is nonetheless utterly clear and non-technical, more so than any other informal logic or critical thinking text I have ever read. No time is wasted with pedantic verbiage or time-honored but useless distinctions (the reader is hard-pressed to even find the words "inductive" or "deductive").

All the basic elements of informal reasoning are covered: recognizing and reconstructing arguments, making claims precise, distinguishing validity and strength, recognizing valid forms, evaluating the plausibility of premises, recognizing fallacies, evaluating specialized types of arguments (analogies, generalizations, and cause-effect reasoning), and writing good arguments. It effectively incorporates teaching logic in writing through multiple short assignments, including ingenious cartoon exercises that force us to think carefully about how we reason about non-verbal data. Examples are mostly drawn from everyday life (diet, health, money, careers, and relationships) rather than specialized subjects. The supporting material for instructors is substantial, including dozens of quizzes and exams (however, this supporting material is unhelpfully organized, crammed into Word files that run over a hundred pages each).

Over the last decade, I have read dozens of textbooks that try to teach critical thinking or informal logic. None of them come close to being as good as Epstein's Critical Thinking.

Great book/tool to have. It's been helping me sort out what I perceive to be true or not. It has helped me de-clutter my mind. Excellent book; highly recommended.

This booked helped me a lot in critical thinking. I read this book and was very useful. Good illustrations to help you understand this books. Well written book and price is reasonable.

This book is helpful for terminology that follows thinking critically but I wouldn't recommend it to just anyone. If you don't know what critical thinking is this book would be for you. But for the average person who knows what it is and how to do so; unless you want to learn the terms and figure out how to write your arguments; then I wouldn't recommend the book.

The book smells like cigarets but for the price I paid the book was good enough.
Gets the job done.

I'm not too pleased with the book by itself. I have, however had much worse books, so it's alright. Thankfully the teacher of the class that I need this book for is absolutely excellent, so together it makes the class good. The author is good at explaining some of the stuff in the book and really bad at explanations for other things in the book. This is Philosophy though, so there never really is a right answer, but there are always wrong answers.