Just as The Elements of Style provides a quick and authoritative reference for writers, The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook for Critical Thinking provides a quick and authoritative reference for issues regarding reasoning. The Handbook provides clear and succinct discussions of the following issues: · Issues germane to clarifying sentences: ambiguity, vagueness, and propositional attitudes · General discussions of descriptions, explanations, and arguments · Criteria for evaluating observational statements and testimony · Categorical syllogisms, including issues germane to both the Boolean and Aristotelian interpretations · A complete system of propositional logic and a brief discussion of the use of truth tables · Induction: generalization and particularization arguments, analogies, arguments to the best explanation, Mill's Methods, counterfactual reasoning, and making decisions under risk and uncertainty · A brief discussion of the principle formulas involved in calculating probabilities · An extended discussion of informal fallacies · An essay on the relationship between critical thinking and writing
