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CRITICAL THINKING - Coggle Diagram
CRITICAL THINKING
Pseudo-reasoning
Formal fallacies – mistaken inferences often affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent: the fallacy of deriving´ought´ from ´is´.
Substantive fallacies – arguments that tacitly assume some very general principle that it may be tempting tpo rely upon, but which is false.
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The gambler´s fallacy that an event´s occuring frequently makes it less likely to happen on the next occasion.
. The ad hominem and the tu quoque fallacy** – use fact about the person(s) as ground for rejecting it.
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The fallacy of conflating morality with legality – mistakenly assuem that anyting that is legal must alo be moral or that anyting illegal must be immoral.
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Causal fallacies – when we make mistaken inferences about the cause of a phenomenon or an event; a) post hoc ergo propter hoc – that the temporal priority of X over Y makes X the cause of Y; b) mistaking correlation for cause; c) causal inversion – if X csauses Y, an absence of X will prevent Y.
Epistemic fallacies and the fallacy of appeal to ignorance – unwarranted inferences from what is known, believed or proven to additional knowledge, beliefs or proof of which the arguer has no independent evidence.
Argument reconstruction
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Logical streamlining – clarifying logical connections by using logically clear expressions such as ´if-then´ for conditional relatoinships
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Generalisations, whether hard or soft, should have explicit quantifiers. Where a premise is a generalisation, the scope of the generalisation should be as narrow as i needed to maximise its probability of being true, but not so narrow that the inference to the conclusion is no longer valid.
Practical reasoning – arguments that specify an outcome as being desirable or undesirable, along with an action said to be either necessary or sufficient to bring about that outcome. Sometimes the outcome of actions are only probable. This may require us to calculate the expected value of an actions, that may be overridden by moral rules.
Explanations as conclusions: It is common to see causal genralisations fallaciously inferred from mere correlations.
Language and Rhetoric
Obscure speakers´ and writers´ intended meanings: ambiguity, vagueness, metaphor, rhetorical questions and irony
Failure to convey speakers´ and writers´ intended meanings in their entirety: implicitly relative sentences, sentences that use quantifiers inappropriately
Hard generalizations: true only if they are true without exception (”all”, ”every”, ”no”, ”none”, ”always”, ”never”)
Soft generalizations: only true if the majority of the class are true (”most”, ”almost all”, ”in most cases”, ”generally”, ”typically”).
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Definitions: tells us what it takes for somethng to qualify as a particualr type of thing (a) necessary condition; (b) sufficient condition
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Truth, knowledge, and belief
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In the case of moral beliefs, or beliefs about value, relativism may not be readily refutable, but (1) the consequences of denying that htere is truth in this realm appear to be extremely pernicious and (2) relativism does not completely close the door to rational persuasion, because we may still demand consistency of the relativist.
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We require sufficient evidence for the truth or falsity of a proposition in order to justify believing or rejecting it. If such evidence is unavailable, we should suspend our judgement. It is perfectly possible to be justified in holding a false belief. Merely having a true belief in a proposition is not sufficient to count as knowing the proposition. An account of knowledge; Tripartite account – to know that is to have a justified true belief that P.
Deductive validity
Probability ( the degree to which it would be rational to expect it to be true) and inductive ( the conclusion more likely to be true than not) reasoning
Inductively sound arguments: forceful arguments with true premises. Unlike dedutively sound arguments, they may have false conclusions.
Inductive inferences: a dedutively invalid inference whose premise is a generalisation about some sample of a given population. The force of an inductive inference depends on the degree to which the sample is representative of the population.
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