Critical Thinking: The Secret Technique Professors Don’t Want You to Know!

IntroductionCritical thinking sounds fancy but it’s something most of us do everyday.  In fact, most of us are quite good at it…so long as we are properly motivated.   Unfortunately, we absolutely suck when the motivation is wrong–and I’m not talking about money. What do I mean by all this talk of correct and incorrect […]

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Critical Thinking: Relevance Relevance-Related Logical Fallacies, and Sufficiency

IntroductionLast week we revisited premise acceptability and looked at rules of thumb for acceptance, rejection, or “questionable” status.   This week we’re going to continue our happy reinvestigation of foundational principles by reexamining premise relevance and sufficiency.  Recall from previous discussions that relevance and sufficiency are measures of logical force; that is, the degree to which a conclusion follows from premises.  In […]

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