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critical-thinkers


Stan Borgenicht

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Not a book, but here is a great video resource. Perhaps it is my personality, but critical thinking comes pretty naturally for me, though putting words to it all is the trickiest part. In a real world context, spotting fallacies and errors is much more difficult because sophists are very good creating a tangled web. Worse, they throw as many fallacies as they can at you so that responding to it is not only annoying, but a waste of time because their response will not address anything you pointed out, and will again contain as many fallacies as they can. What you'll discover is that there are many subtle variations of the same fallacy and most important: when an argument is not a fallacy.

 

The greatest example of this is the ad homeniem where instead of attacking the argument, the personal character is attacked. So many people think that the ad homeniem is always a fallacy, yet it is often valid, particularly in cases where the argument presented can be discredited by the person's character. For instance: if a man is called onto the stand and makes an argument as to why he is not guilty, if this man's character is stained with the propensity to lie, then not responding to the argument and attacking the man's character is completely valid.

 

An example Stefan gives a lot is that is an extremely obese person is selling a weight loss plan, you are completely in the right for disregarding the weight loss plan and pointing out that the person's weight. Many people respond to this argument saying that "you can't do that because you're not addressing the argument the person is making, they may be right regardless of their weight", to which you would respond: "if the person knows that they are overweight, claims that being at a healthy weight is better than being overweight, claims that they have a solution to being at a healthy weight, yet are still overweight, then how can they be taken seriously?". In a similar manner, all these politicians that are climate change activists while supporting war simply have no credibility.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_fallacy

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

 

all the basic rules of logic you need, critical thinking is just using these simple fallacies to determine if something is true or not.  Some are pretty obscure, but there are a few which are essential to understanding if someone is making a rational argument or not.

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