The Benefit of asking the right questions
- Critical thinking to the rescue
- Alternative thinking styles
- Asking critical questions
- Thinking and feeling
- The efficiency of asking the question, "Who cares?"
- Weak-sense and strong-sense critical thinking
- Trying out new answers
- Effective communication and critical thinking
What are the issue and the conclusion?
- Kinds of issues
- Searching for the issue
- Searching for the author's or speaker's conclusion
- Clues to discovery: How to find the conclusion
- Critical thinking and your own writing and speaking
What Are the Reasons?
- Reasons + Conclusion = Argument
- Initiating the questioning process
- Words that identify reasons
- Kinds of reasons
- Keeping the reasons and conclusions straight
- Reasons first, then conclusions
- "Fresh" reasons and your growth
- Critical thinking and your own writing and speaking
Critical thinking considerations:
- Value conflicts and assumptions
- Descriptive assumptions
- Fallacies in the reasoning
- Good evidence:
- Intuition, personal experience, testimonials, and appeals to authority
- Personal observation, research studies, case examples, and analogies?
- Rival causes
- Deception in statistics
- Omitting significant information
- Possible reasonable conclusions