Concise Guide to Critical Thinking

Concise Guide to Critical Thinking, second edition, offers a compact, clear, and economical introduction to critical thinking and argumentative writing. Based on the authors best-selling text, The Power of Critical Thinking, sixth edition, this affordable volume is more manageable than larger textbooks yet more substantial than many of the smaller critical thinking handbooks.NEW TO THIS EDITIONNew chapter on fake news that shows how to identify fake news, distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate reasons for accepting a claim, assess the reliability of online information by reading laterally, use Google and Wikipedia judiciously, identify and use trustworthy fact-checkers, and understand the ethical implications of sharing fake newsNew chapter on commercial and political advertising that explains how online targeted advertising works, how political video ads can present false or misleading messages, and why the most insidious and relentless political ads may be the ones that we see on FacebookCoverage of even more psychological obstacles to critical thinking, including motivated reasoning, the mere exposure effect, the false consensus effect, the illusion-of-truth effect, and the Dunning-Kruger effectA revised discussion of how to judge experts, supplemented with a "hierarchy of reliability" chart-a general ranking of trustworthiness for the sources that we rely on for most of our knowledgeNew section in Chapter 11: Judging Scientific Theories on how to think critically and scientifically about climate changeNew material in Chapter 12: Fallacies and Persuaders discusses of the now-prevalent fallacy of whataboutism and provides a checklist of techniques for dealing with online ad hominem attacks.This title is available as an eBook. Please contact your Learning Resource Consultant for more information.