Download Critical Thinking Skills For Dummies PDF

 

EBOOK DETAILS

• Authors: by Martin Cohen

• Format: PDF

• Paperback: 384 pages

• Publisher: For Dummies; 1st edition (May 4, 2015)

• Language: English

• ISBN-10: 9781118924723

• ISBN-13: 978-1118924723

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About This Book 

In this book you can find both the conventional material on Critical Thinking Skills, which is broadly about avoiding logical fallacies and following the rules of good essay structure, and a lot more besides. Most other books focus on these bits of Critical Thinking because they are easy to talk about, but rather harder to actually get anyone to do. In fact, like philosophy itself (and Critical Thinking is traditionally a branch of philosophy), properly understood the only way to learn the method is to use the skills in practice. So what I try to offer here is a kind of map or guide book that will come in handy as you actively start using Critical Thinking in whatever areas you want to. I include enough of the background to the academic debates for you to see the ‘why’ as well as the ‘what’, plenty of hands‐on tips and advice so that you have the ‘how’, and I certainly include some opportunities to try things out in practical exercises.

Introduction

Critical Thinking! Now that sounds like a good idea. 
Because it’s a kind of souped‐up, laser‐sharp powerful thinking, just waiting to zap rotten arguments and churn out some pretty brilliant insights instead. And don’t worry if 
people tell you that it is a rather high‐level kind of thinking, 
and that only a few can do it, mainly tweedy professors who 
tell jokes in Latin (dimidium facti qui coepit habet — ‘he who 
has begun, has the work half done’), because Critical Thinking 
certainly isn’t like that. Critical Thinking is not just for the 
tweedy few — but for the curious, the imaginative, the creative many. In fact the only thing that is really deeply mysterious about Critical Thinking is why everyone’s not doing it. But 
I’ve got a theory about that, and it is to do with education and 
the kind of ways of working that people are corralled into, like 
so many sheep — supposedly as a preparation for life outside. 
But life outside is rarely just a business of unreflectively following set procedures and instructions — but rather something where you need constantly to reflect on what you are 
doing, and why — and act not as a machine, but as a person. 
So the first skill a Critical Thinker needs to learn is how to 
think ‘the unthinkable’, to think outside the box, to ‘free their 
mind’ no less.