Synopses & Reviews
This new and expanded edition explains a distinctive method for analyzing and evaluating arguments. It features many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It will enable students to think critically about sustained, theoretical arguments commonly encountered in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, society, policy, and philosophy. First Edition Pb (1988): 0-521-31341-4
Review
"As an introduction to logic which prepares students to use the discipline in future studies, Real Arguments has no serious competitors." Informal Logic
Synopsis
Aims to help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies.
Synopsis
'This book aims to help college students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies: arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, about philosophy, and so on. It employs what is called the \'Assertibility Question\', a key question in extracting and evaluating arguments, and it deals fully with the technique of \'suppositional reasoning\', an important method of reasoning which is commonly ignored by writers in this field. The author applies the method to examples from a wide variety of sources.\n
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Synopsis
This new and expanded edition explains a distinctive method for analyzing and evaluating arguments. It features many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It will enable students to think critically about sustained, theoretical arguments commonly encountered in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, society, policy, and philosophy. First Edition Pb (1988): 0-521-31341-4
Synopsis
This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments.
About the Author
Alec Fisher was Director of the Centre for Research in Critical Thinking at the University of East Anglia, until his retirement in 1999. He is the author of Critical Thinking: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2001), which has already been translated into several languages. He continues to lecture and conduct workshops on reasoning and critical thinking skills all over the world.
Table of Contents
Preface to first edition; Preface to second edition; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; 2. A general method of argument analysis; 3. A first example - from Thomas Malthus; 4. Reasoning about nuclear deterrence; 5. An example from John Stuart Mill; 6. Arguments about God's existence; 7. How do your mind and body interact?; 8. Suppose for the sake of argument that ...; 9. An example from Karl Marx; 10. Evaluating scientific arguments: some initial examples; 11. Philosophical assumptions; Appendix: Elementary formal logic; Exercises.