A Formal Introduction To Critical Thinking, Second Edition

This is a Critical Thinking text designed for a one-semester course. It takes a formal , as opposed to an informal, approach. Approximately 80% of the text is devoted to deductive logic. I focus on formal logic because it teaches and develops the fundamental rules of human reason, of which Informal Logic is an application. At the same time, the deductive or formal instruction here has been simplified for students without any previous logic training. In Categorical Logic, I discuss only Venn Diagrams, since they are a fast and efficient tool for analyzing arguments. In Sentential Logic, I have limited the operations to negation, conjunction, disjunction and conditional. In Natural Deduction, I have pared down the set of derivation rules to a small set sufficient to illustrate and teach the basic rules of deduction. This text, then, strikes a useful balance between overly informal and overly formal approaches to critical thinking.